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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

quinta-feira, 19 de abril de 2018

The End of Arms Control - Eugene Rumer

A Farewell to Arms . . . Control

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2018

For more than half a century, nuclear arms control has been a key element of the bilateral relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, now Russia.1Throughout most of the Cold War, it played an especially important role as a tool for managing the arms race, as a platform for communications between the two superpowers, and as a barometer of not only their bilateral relations but also the overall global stability and security environment due to their outsize presence on the world stage. When U.S.-Soviet relations underwent particularly severe strains, arms control could even act as a surrogate for the entire relationship.
However, the end of the Cold War has had a dual and contradictory effect on arms control: On the one hand, it made possible a number of truly breakthrough arms control agreements that exceeded even the most ambitious proposals of the previous era. On the other hand, the end of the political and ideological standoff between the United States and Russia resulted in a much more benign relationship, thereby diminishing fears of nuclear confrontation and the need for arms control to regulate the arms race.
The benign phase ended after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its unleashing of an undeclared war in eastern Ukraine—yet there is no new momentum in the arms control process. To the contrary, the breakdown in U.S.-Russian relations, aggravated by Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has effectively ruled out the possibility of new agreements and dimmed prospects for saving the existing arms control structure, which is already experiencing severe strains following Russia’s suspension of its participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and reported violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Aside from political factors, the perilous state of U.S.-Russian arms control is a consequence of changing strategic factors, which include the development of new technologies and geopolitical transitions that raise doubts about the relevance of the existing arms control structure and whether both sides should maintain it.
The consequences of the end of arms control—should it come to that—are not easy to predict. In addition to the loss of a critical tool to regulate the strategic nuclear balance between Washington and Moscow, it could lead to a return to a situation not unlike that in which the Soviet Union and the United States were during the 1950s, with each side pursuing its own programs with little regard to considerations of strategic stability.
But that would be only one potential consequence. There could be others. For example, the end of U.S.-Russian arms control could impact the nuclear relationship between the United States and China, as well as between Russia and China. The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control, whether as a result of the current breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington or under the weight of new strategic circumstances, is likely to reverberate well beyond the U.S.-Russian context.

Arms Control Is a Continuation of Politics

The history of U.S.-Russian arms control closely follows the trajectory of the political relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. Improvements in the political relationship were invariably accompanied by accomplishments in arms control. When the relationship between Moscow and Washington deteriorated, progress in arms control stalled and existing agreements came under increasing pressure from critics.

From More Is More to Less Is More

The development of nuclear weapons, the acquisition by the Soviet Union and the United States of nuclear arsenals, and the means of their delivery had a profound, revolutionary impact on both superpowers’ thinking about war. The development of airplanes early in the twentieth century, and in particular long-range aircraft in the 1940s and 1950s, transformed warfare by making almost the entire homeland, not just the immediate battlefield, vulnerable to enemy strikes. The creation of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles magnified that threat immeasurably by placing the entire homeland in danger of near-instant annihilation, against which there would be no defense. In these circumstances, deterring an adversary’s attack by means of a guaranteed and equally devastating response became the only feasible recourse.
As the United States and the Soviet Union expanded and improved their nuclear arsenals and refined their understanding of nuclear weapons, both came to realize the imperative of being able to retaliate against an adversary’s nuclear strike. That in turn meant that keeping up with the other side’s arsenal and improving one’s arsenal’s survivability were matters of the highest national priority. To do otherwise would result in a critical vulnerability. The arms race was on.
While some attempts to manage, if not limit, the arms race were made in the 1950s, they produced few meaningful results. The wake-up call for both Washington and Moscow was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis and newfound awareness of the dangers of an unrestrained nuclear arms race moved Washington and Moscow to consider the bilateral relationship and arms control in a new light.2 Both sides gained firsthand experience with the danger of nuclear escalation in a crisis and realized the need for dialogue. The so-called Hotline Agreement was signed in 1963 and established a direct, reliable communication link between the Kremlin and the White House.
The June 1967 summit between then U.S. president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin took place in Glassboro, New Jersey, in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War between U.S.-backed Israel and the Soviet-backed Arab states. While the immediate reason for the meeting was the crisis in the Middle East, the U.S.-Soviet arms race was the new item on the agenda. The U.S. proposal that eventually led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which was signed five years later, was initially rejected by the Soviets at the summit, but it marked a step toward arms control talks just as the summit itself was a step toward a modest relaxation of tensions between the two superpowers.3
The talks did not begin until 1969—the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had resulted in a temporary halt to their preparations. It took until 1972 and then president Richard Nixon’s overture to the Soviet leadership to reduce the political confrontation to conclude those talks and sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I agreement that capped the size of each country’s arsenal of strategic delivery systems. The United States and the Soviet Union also signed the ABM Treaty in 1972, which limited each side’s defenses against ballistic missiles so as to prevent the development of nationwide defenses. This was an important affirmation on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union of their recognition of mutually assured destruction (MAD) as the underlying logic of their strategic nuclear relationship, and the notion that there can be no victor in a nuclear exchange.
The combination of these two agreements was a key milestone. The cap on the two superpowers’ strategic offensive systems was their acknowledgment that an open-ended pursuit of a bigger offensive arsenal made little sense. The agreement not to pursue nationwide missile defenses was equally significant as their recognition that such systems would be of little use. Together, the two agreements officially ushered in the era of MAD between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In 1974, still riding the détente momentum, then president Gerald Ford reached the Vladivostok agreement with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, setting out the framework for the follow-on SALT II treaty that would impose further limits on Soviet and U.S. arsenals. However, the political relationship between Washington and Moscow gradually deteriorated, and concerns grew in the United States about Soviet capabilities and intentions, which the arms control agreements did not capture. Prospects for arms control were fading.
Despite that, the SALT II treaty was signed in June 1979 by then president Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979 destroyed the last remnants of détente, and the Carter administration withdrew the treaty from consideration. Arms control came to a halt, although both sides agreed to abide by SALT II limits and did so for most of the 1980s.
The arms control process came to a halt in the early 1980s. The Soviet decision to deploy SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and the decision by NATO allies to counter with Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles triggered the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States and the Soviet Union began negotiating in 1981 about reducing intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles, but talks collapsed when the Soviet delegation walked out. They did not resume until 1985, along with talks about reducing strategic systems and preventing an arms race in space.
Not only did the talks about new agreements break down in the early 1980s, but the existing arms control framework appeared threatened when, in 1983, then president Ronald Reagan announced U.S. plans to develop a nationwide ballistic missile defense system—the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—popularly dubbed “Star Wars.” The purpose of such a program—to “eliminate the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles”—would be in direct contradiction of the ABM Treaty and, if built, it would violate it. The proposal also rejected the logic of MAD and held out the possibility—or at least Washington’s intent—to redefine the strategic relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States and make it rely not on the threat of MAD, but on the promise of missile defense. This, in the eyes of the Soviet leaders, opened a new chapter in the arms race that threatened to disrupt the established strategic balance by introducing superior U.S. technology. Despite Reagan’s assurance about sharing the missile defense technology with the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders weren’t convinced and viewed this move as yet another affirmation of hostile U.S. intentions.

Times, They Are Changing

By 1985, the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Moscow prompted the two superpowers to return to the negotiating table with arms control serving as a surrogate for the bilateral relationship. However, those talks really took off following the rise of a new and reform-minded leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Soviet Union and the prospect of a new détente. That was the milestone event that paved the way for a new era in arms control.
A major step toward the resumption of U.S.-Soviet arms control was the summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan in October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two leaders went so far in their talks as to discuss the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. Even though they failed to accomplish that lofty goal,4the meeting paved the way for the 1987 INF Treaty, which was a milestone in its own right—an agreement not just to limit but to abolish an entire class of missiles.
The winding down of the Cold War led to more arms control breakthroughs. In 1990, the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective NATO and Warsaw Pact allies signed the CFE Treaty, which reduced conventional arsenals across Europe and thus the prospects of offensive military operations on the continent that had been the scene of a tense military standoff for over four decades. In 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was signed, committing the United States and the Soviet Union to cutting back their strategic arsenals. It was followed by the START II agreement, which imposed further limits on U.S. and now Russian arsenals.
START II, however, fell prey to a combination of domestic politics in Russia and the United States, as well as evolving strategic priorities in both countries after the end of the Cold War. Although signed by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, the treaty ran into opposition from his domestic political adversaries in the Russian Duma, and its ratification stalled. Meanwhile, the relationship between Moscow and Washington gradually deteriorated as a result of Russian opposition to NATO enlargement and U.S.-led military campaigns in the Balkans.

The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996, but the political momentum for arms control was slowing.5 Attitudes in the United States toward Russia were hardening: its sputtering reforms, its war in Chechnya, its opposition to NATO enlargement, and its vocal support for the regime of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia translated into a strong and widespread critique of then U.S. president Bill Clinton’s Russia policy.
One of the most pronounced themes in this critique was the charge that the Clinton administration was acting on the basis of misguided strategic priorities, including its commitment to preserve the obsolete arms control structure with Russia. Condoleezza Rice, then one of the leading Republican voices on foreign policy, wrote about the ABM Treaty in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 presidential campaign that “the Russian deterrent is more than adequate against the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and vice versa. But that fact need no longer be enshrined in a treaty that is almost 30 years old and is a relic of a profoundly adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.” The real threats the United States faced, Rice noted, had far less to do with Russia than with nuclear proliferators—Iraq and North Korea. The real imperative was to develop ballistic missile defenses against them, prohibited at the time by the ABM Treaty, which therefore had to go. This theme was reflected—implicitly—in the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful efforts to clarify certain aspects of the ABM Treaty in order enable the United States to develop defenses against new threats.
For the Kremlin, then in the throes of successive political and economic crises, the importance of strategic arms control with the United States was also changing. The specter of a nuclear confrontation with the United States had receded. The United States was funding Russian programs to dismantle and secure parts of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. For the country’s political leadership, the major challenge was to get out of the crisis spiral and to maintain U.S. support for the financial lifeline provided by the international community.
The challenge for Russia was not to limit, let alone reduce, its strategic arsenal but to maintain the existing force. For the Russian military, U.S. emphasis on renegotiating the ABM Treaty raised the possibility of a future in which the United States would gain undisputed strategic superiority due to its superior defensive and offensive systems that Russia was then struggling to maintain. That left START II ratificationin the Russian Duma hostage to the U.S. commitment to leave the ABM Treaty intact.

Toward U.S.-Russian Strategic Decoupling

The election of president George W. Bush and the arrival of a Republican administration in Washington was a catalytic event that altered the dynamics of U.S.-Russian arms control. The new administration’s frustration with the constraints imposed on U.S. strategic policy by Cold War–era agreements manifested itself in the radical step of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty on the grounds of its obsolescence.
Moreover, the Bush administration maintained, in the conditions where the United States and Russia were no longer adversaries in an arms race, the rationale for bilateral arms control did not exist. By this logic, the two countries should be free to develop and structure their forces without arms-control-imposed constraints and concerns about the other side since they weren’t adversaries anymore. Undoubtedly, such arguments were reinforced—if only implicitly—by the idea that Russia was in a state of irreversible decline and would be increasingly marginalized on the world stage.
The United States officially withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002. Russia responded by withdrawing from START II, which it had finally ratified in 2000, at the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president. START II never entered into force because Russia had attached conditions to its ratification, which were designed to force the United States to remain in the ABM Treaty and thus unacceptable for the United States. This was an important step toward strategic disengagement, or decoupling between Russia and the United States, which the Bush administration apparently did not find alarming.
To smooth over disagreements with Russia, in 2002, Bush signed a new arms control agreement—the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), or the Moscow Treaty, which accomplished two goals. Russia, still not recovered from its dramatic decline in the 1990s, was interested in a binding agreement with the United States to limit the latter’s strategic capabilities. For the United States, it provided much greater flexibility (than previous arms control agreements) that the Bush administration desired for the U.S. strategic nuclear posture.
Throughout the remainder of Bush’s term in office, U.S. priorities did not include a robust arms control agenda with Russia. The key priorities were the War on Terror, the threat of nuclear proliferation, the merging of these two in the threat of nuclear terrorism, as well as the development of a missile defense system to counter these threats. The deteriorating political relationship with Russia—which was reflected among other things in Moscow’s announcement of its suspension of participation in the CFE Treaty (amounting to an effective withdrawal) and threats to withdraw from the INF Treaty—reached its nadir in 2008 following the Russian-Georgian war. All these developments posed a formidable obstacle to any effort to pursue an arms control deal with Russia, even if the Bush administration had attempted it.

Arms Control’s Last Hurrah?

The change of administrations and a new set of political and strategic priorities in the United States as a result of the 2008 election of president Barack Obama breathed new life into arms control with Russia. By the time of Obama’s inauguration, the relationship with Russia had reached yet another post–Cold War low and was badly in need of a reset. It was dictated by a number of Obama administration priorities, including the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the president’s embrace of the nuclear disarmament agenda, and the requirement for a broad international consensus to halt Iran’s nuclear program. In a situation somewhat reminiscent of the breakthrough during Gorbachev’s ascent to power, a reset with Russia looked promising in 2009 because, the year before, Russians had elected Dmitry Medvedev as president—a younger and seemingly more progressive leader than Putin. Arms control was the perfect venue for rekindling the overall relationship.
Reflecting the change toward the better, the New START agreement was negotiated quickly and signed in 2010. The name of the treaty suggested a new beginning, as well as continuity with past arms control agreements. It replaced the 2002 Moscow Treaty, reduced the overall number of strategic delivery systems, and nominally reduced the legal limit for deployed strategic warheads. It did not, however, reduce the actual number of warheads, and even made it possible for the two sides to deploy more warheads than allowed by the Moscow Treaty, due to a peculiar counting rule for warheads agreed by both sides.6 The treaty also carried over significant elements of the verification regime from START I. It provided important benefits to both sides: it marked a step toward Obama’s goal of nuclear disarmament and a degree of flexibility to U.S. planners without imposing rigid constraints on their ability to design the optimal force; to Russian planners, it offered a cap not only on U.S. strategic nuclear capabilities but also on U.S. strategic capabilities overall, including some conventional systems, which were not deployed yet but were viewed by Russian leaders with increasing concern.
However, the reset proved short lived. The bilateral relationship deteriorated as a result of several irritants, among which Putin’s return to the Kremlin as president in 2012 and U.S. officials’ public criticism of his authoritarian tendencies topped the list. Obama’s 2013 offer to Putin to engage in new rounds of arms control was rejected. Some of the logic of the Russian position was reminiscent of earlier Russian reservations about strategic nuclear arms reductions: with the United States pursuing missile defenses and being no longer bound by the ABM Treaty, further cuts in the strategic nuclear arsenal could over time disrupt the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and Russia and enable Washington to achieve a position of strategic superiority vis-à-vis Moscow.7 Moreover, Russian spokesmennoted that the lower levels of U.S. and Russian arsenals meant that the nuclear capabilities of other nations, such as China, France, and the United Kingdom, would have to be factored into the strategic balance.
Russia’s rejection of further nuclear cuts and linkage to missile defense reflected Russian nuclear planners’ commitment to the MAD concept. Whereas the United States had, on a few occasions since the end of the Cold War, attempted to move beyond MAD and loosen the linkage to Russia in its own strategic planning, Russian planners remained firmly committed to MAD. U.S. exploration of concepts such as mutually assured stability—where neither side has the intent or the means of gaining superiority over the other—gained little, if any, traction in Russia.8
Prospects for new arms control agreements were further damaged by the deteriorating political context of the bilateral relationship in both Washington and Moscow, especially after the 2014 crisis in Ukraine erupted into what many have described as a new Cold War. The atmosphere of mistrust and mutual hostility was aggravated further by the discovery of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Prospects for arms control were dealt another major setback with the discovery by the United States of Russian testing and subsequent deployment of a ground-launched cruise missile, violating the INF Treaty. U.S. charges of Russian violations were countered by Russian denials and accusations that the United States was deploying its anti-missile defense missiles in launchers that violated the INF Treaty.9
The significance of this development for arms control overall is hard to overestimate. The prospect of withdrawing from the treaty has been raised in both Washingtonand Moscow. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act provided funds to the U.S. Department of Defense for research and development of an INF missile, which in itself would not constitute a violation of the treaty, but if necessary would enable the United States to field a missile to counter the alleged Russian deployment.
The toxic political climate that surrounds bilateral ties in both Washington and Moscow shows no sign of abating. The consensus view is that this situation will persist as long as Vladimir Putin remains in charge in the Kremlin—until 2024, and possibly longer. No arms control agreement can be ratified in these circumstances by the U.S. Senate, even if it is possible to negotiate it, which appears highly unrealistic. Thus New START, negotiated in 2010 and ratified in 2011, is likely to be the last arms control treaty between Russia and the United States for a long time to come. Far from accomplishing new arms control agreements, the two countries face an uphill struggle if they are to preserve the INF Treaty and New START, which is due to expire in 2021.

Conclusions, Implications, and What Is to Be Done

Arms control is in trouble. Throughout most of the post–World War II period, arms control has been a continuation of politics. When relations between Washington and Moscow were improving, arms control agreements progressed. When they were deteriorating, arms control suffered. At times, when the relationship was at a particularly dangerous point, arms control talks served as an instrument of reducing tensions.
The present standoff between Moscow and Washington promises to be long-lasting, and the atmosphere in both capitals looks as hostile to new arms control proposals as it did during some of the coldest periods of the Cold War, if not more so. There is little on the political horizon in either capital to suggest that arms control talks can once again pave the way to a better overall relationship. If the logic of past such episodes—the Cuban Missile Crisis and the INF deployment crisis of the 1980s—is to be followed, the current U.S.-Russian relationship has to get worse before the situation compels the two sides to return to the arms control negotiating table as a means of stepping back from a confrontation. There is no guarantee, however, that the logic of the past will apply in the future.

Old Arms Control Treaties Fade Away

The political context of arms control is only one part of the problem. The strategic rationales of both Russia and the United States have changed since the framework of bilateral arms control emerged during the era of bipolar superpower competition. A resumption of U.S.-Russian negotiations about nuclear arms control in the bilateral context within that same framework would begin to address only one part of the strategic challenges facing Washington and Moscow. To address arguably the more relevant, contemporary set of challenges, they would need to agree to expand the conversation to include missile defense, new capabilities and activities in the cyber domain, and an array of new and emerging nuclear and conventional systems. Some of these weapons, which are still only being developed, would not necessarily violate existing treaties but, by virtue of their capabilities, could significantly erode the treaties’ relevance if not render them altogether obsolete, while some are being developed by China, not a party to these treaties.10
For example, the existing treaties do little to capture the consequences of the combination of changes in European geopolitics due to NATO enlargement, improving accuracy of conventional systems, and efforts aimed at miniaturization of nuclear weapons. This combination of geopolitical changes and technological progress could put at risk targets on both sides of the NATO-Russia divide that previously were vulnerable to longer-range and more destructive nuclear weapons, which are captured by the existing arms control framework. The Soviet Union’s outer and inner empires are gone, and the Russian heartland and NATO are within each other’s striking distance to a degree not imagined during the Cold War, which in a crisis situation could prove highly destabilizing. It is most unlikely that a dialogue about the emerging and future systems—whose mere presence in the theater could be destabilizing—can be launched between Washington and Moscow.
Thus, arms control is at risk of becoming a casualty of more than just the prevailing political currents in Russia and the United States that determine U.S.-Russian relations. It could be losing its relevance to both countries as other, more pressing issues arise from new geopolitical challenges and technological developments.
The types of qualitative improvements in U.S. and Russian nuclear capabilities—such as better accuracy and development of low-yield options, which, according to the Nuclear Posture Review, are being pursued by both countries—are not captured by the existing arms control framework that places emphasis on limiting the quantitative aspects of nuclear arsenals. The likelihood that a new framework can be developed to capture the qualitative aspects of Russian and U.S. weapons programs appears to be extremely low in the current political atmosphere.
The perceived obsolescence of arms control may be one of the reasons behind the Kremlin’s decision to move ahead with a missile in violation of the INF Treaty. Russia has been voicing complaints for over a decade that continuing adherence to the treaty is outdated and that it hurts Russian interests. If, from the perspective of Russian national security planners, the treaty does not constrain new U.S. systems that could in the future target critical Russian assets, then the risk associated with violating the treaty is unlikely to be prohibitive. A formal withdrawal from the treaty would carry with it much unfavorable international publicity, whereas a simple violation can always be denied. Russian national security leaders may have simply decided that the risk associated with violating the treaty was not significant enough compared with the benefits of reacquiring a whole class of weapons that Russia would need to counter multiple emerging threats in Europe as well as in Asia.11
Senior Russian military representatives have long complained about the INF Treaty denying them the necessary capabilities to counter those and other threats. The enhanced status of the Russian military in Russian society and politics after the very public and continuously publicized successes in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Syria may have similarly enhanced its stature in national security decisionmaking. In that case, the military’s arguments may have finally prevailed over other considerations resulting in the deployment of the INF missile.
If this analysis is correct, it cuts into the rationale for the United States to sustain the arms control regime with Russia. It raises questions about the utility of arms control in light of Russia’s à la carte approach to agreements, including not only the INF Treaty but also the CFE Treaty and, as reportedly revealed in the March 2018 nerve agent attack on a former Russian military intelligence officer and his daughter in Salisbury, England, the Chemical Weapons Convention. Moreover, these violations emerge in the context of Russian authorities’ disregard for other international obligations. Russia is clearly in violation of the 1994 Budapest memorandumregarding Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity, as well as the Commonwealth of Independent States Treaty and the Paris Charter for a New Europe, which committed Russia to respect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of its neighbors.
The erosion of the post–Cold War framework of political and military agreements as a result of Russian actions prompts some fundamental questions about Russian rejection of not only the arms control framework inherited from the Cold War and survived through the post–Cold War era but the entire post–Cold War security arrangements with the West and revisionist plans for alternative arrangements that go well beyond arms control. Arms control does have a long history of serving as the backbone of the East-West relationship and providing a measure of stability for it. However, that was in the context of the overall adversarial relationship, in which Washington’s and Moscow’s expectations of each other were very low. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of cooperation between the two erstwhile adversaries and much greater expectations for each other that persist—albeit in a highly diminished form—even to the present day, despite the downturn in East-West relations since 2014. It is unrealistic to expect arms control to perform the same function—stabilizing the relationship—in the present circumstances. A more realistic course of action is not to expect the arms control process to “carry” or “save” the relationship, but to seek to define the new relationship with Russia and the place of arms control with it.

Back to the Future?

Contrary to the preference of U.S. policymakers during the George W. Bush administration, the United States and Russia are not decoupling their strategic postures. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review is sharply focused on Russia, which provides the leading rationale for the posture outlined in the review.
The release of the review shortly after the publication of the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy was a major and unambiguous signal that the United States was refocusing its attention on competition among major powers—China, Russia, and the United States; that it was intent on maintaining its “competitive edge,” which is likely to be interpreted in Moscow and Beijing as a thinly veiled reference to military superiority; and that nuclear weapons would once again be at the center of that competition.
On the one hand, the Donald Trump administration’s renewed focus on great power competition means that the Bush administration’s ideas about decoupling are history. Russia is viewed as an adversary and therefore has to be part of the strategic calculus driving the U.S. posture. But on the other hand, the Trump administration’s “America First” approach to dealing with the world, if applied to the strategic nuclear realm, could mean that the United States is now intent on pursuing unilateral enhancements to its strategic capabilities, including missile defenses, rather than being guided by considerations of strategic stability. This could mean that at least in conceptual terms, the United States will be moving beyond MAD in pursuit of strategic superiority.
Taken together with the decline and possible demise of U.S.-Russian arms control, this would result in a situation similar to the one Moscow and Washington were in during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, prior to the initiation of active, sustained efforts to limit the arms race. With both Russia and the United States seeking qualitative improvements to their arsenals and pursuing technological innovations, in both offensive and defensive systems, the task of sustaining strategic competition is likely to become more complicated and more costly than in the relatively simple era of mostly quantitative competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Imperfect knowledge about each other’s capabilities and the inherent propensity toward worst-case assumptions will carry with them the risk of an increasingly unstable strategic relationship.

What Can Be Done

There appear to be few, if any, solutions to this challenge, at least in the near term. The combination of political and geopolitical differences between Washington and Moscow and the increasing likelihood that traditional bilateral arms control measures will do little to limit the two sides’ pursuit of a qualitative edge in developing their strategic arsenals, increases the prospect of a destabilizing U.S.-Russian arms race.
The outlook for the current arms control regime surviving, let alone new agreements being signed, is clouded by the impasse over U.S. charges of Russian INF violations and Russian countercharges. A number of proposals intended to get Russia to comply with the INF Treaty have been raised, including by senior Trump administration officials. Some have argued for withdrawing from the treaty. None of these proposals appears likely to achieve the stated goal of forcing or enticing Russia to return to compliance with the INF Treaty.
The outlook for New START’s extension beyond its 2021 expiration, which could be done by executive agreement, is also dim. Some proposals link the extension of New START to the fate of the INF Treaty and condition its extension on Russia’s return to INF compliance. The New START’s expiration would remove the numerical cap on U.S. and Russian arsenals. Russian attitudes toward arms control are colored by long-standing concerns about U.S. missile defense and technological superiority. Taken together, these two perspectives leave little room for action by either side.
Some actions proposed by U.S. experts intended to counter Russian INF violations are not only unlikely to get Russia to comply but could make the situation even worse. Any attempt by the United States to return INF missiles to Europe is guaranteed to trigger a powerful wave of protests across the continent and cause a major, possibly fatal, rift in the transatlantic alliance.
Similarly, the proposal for the United States to withdraw from the INF Treaty in retaliation for Russian violations is likely to be counterproductive and play into the Kremlin’s hands. The latter has repeatedly denied U.S. charges of violating the treaty and would certainly use U.S. withdrawal for propaganda purposes, to drive a wedge between the United States and its European allies, and to justify its own actions as a response to the U.S. move.
Beyond these propaganda matters, U.S. withdrawal from the treaty would leave Russia free to deploy its INF missiles without any pretense at restraint. The United States would face an uphill struggle to counter Russian deployments with its own due to strong public opposition throughout Europe no doubt whipped up even more by Russian information operations. It would result in a situation similar to the INF crisis of the early 1980s, when NATO came under severe strain. This time, however, the odds of the alliance surviving the crisis would be considerably slimmer.
Linking the fate of New START’s extension to Russian INF compliance also carries with it certain risks. Should New START be allowed to expire, the United States and Russia would lose the only remaining bilateral arms control agreement that both sides have complied with and have not accused each other of violating. The loss of New START would also remove a major foundational element of their discussions about strategic stability and significant verification provisions, as well as a platform from which discussions about future arms control treaties could be launched at such time as the two countries decide to do so. Preserving and extending the treaty seems like a small price to pay for this, especially at a time when there are few other channels for dialogue between Moscow and Washington, even if this dialogue produces few results and fails to arrest the decline of their bilateral relationship. Moreover, even though the arms race between Russia and the United States appears to be shifting from quantity to quality, removing the limits on the size of their arsenals can only complicate matters further.
A robust diplomatic and media campaign in Europe, as well as in Asia, designed to highlight Russian INF violations and to mobilize U.S. allies and partners to pressure Russia, along with a restatement of U.S. commitment to the INF Treaty, appears to be the best course of action to get Russia to return to compliance. The public campaign should be accompanied by quiet diplomatic engagement with Russia offering a clear path back to compliance with the treaty. This is likely to be a long shot, but it could generate enough international pressure on Russia to at least engage seriously on this issue.
With their political relationship likely to remain in a deep freeze, Moscow and Washington could agree to at least begin some exploratory conversations about sketching out a new framework for managing their strategic competition.12 The risk and the cost associated with starting such a dialogue are likely to be minimal, but it could pay off in the long run. Such official discussions could and should be supplemented by track 2 engagement between Russian and U.S. experts whose unofficial status could enable them to reach beyond their official counterparts’ boundaries for exploration.
While creative ideas for resolving the contentious issues of Russian arms control violations and Russian countercharges of U.S. violations would be a welcome outcome of such discussions, they should go beyond the subject of existing treaties and tackle a broader agenda. That agenda should include, but not be limited to, such issues as new approaches to arms control, new definitions of strategic stability, challenges to strategic stability, missile defense, the role of other nuclear powers, as well as an exploration of the likely consequences for the strategic relationship between Russia and the United States should the remaining arms control structure collapse and both countries engage in an all-out arms race.
Existing proposals for resolving the current impasse over the INF Treaty, as well as for managing the unfolding arms race, suggest that technical solutions can be found if Washington and Moscow can find the political will to do so. But the political climate in both capitals leaves no doubt that there is no political will for finding the solution to the impasse or for better relations. And far from saving the relationship, arms control could become one of its victims.
However, instead of focusing on arms control, the Kremlin and the White House need to focus on the overall U.S.-Russian dynamics. This dialogue between them—however unlikely it appears at present—is urgently needed precisely because of the deteriorating relations. It must address not just arms control but the larger context of the relationship, each side’s goals and expectations, as well as mutual irritants and grievances. Only after such clearing of the air between the two capitals can they develop a way forward—even if they remain adversaries—to establish some rules of the road, to manage their relationship, and to define the place of arms control in it.

This dialogue too is best undertaken at first as a track 2 conversation, considering the level of mistrust and animosity between the two governments. Even though conducted by nongovernmental actors, it can produce useful insights to inform official conversations in both capitals. If sustained, it can prepare the ground for future strategic engagement and could help preserve elements of the old framework as both a useful temporary measure and potentially a foundation for a new framework. In a reversal of old Cold War roles, engagement on arms control will no longer save the bilateral relationship, but engagement on the overall relationship can save arms control.
The author is grateful to James Acton, Franklin Miller, Robert Nurick, Richard Sokolsky, Dmitri Trenin, and Andrew Weiss for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The author is solely responsible for its contents.

Notes

1 This essay deals primarily with U.S.-Soviet and -Russian bilateral nuclear arms control rather than efforts to deal with tactical nuclear weapons, conventional weapons in Europe, or global proliferation challenges.
2 Anatoliy Dobrynin, In Confidence (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1995), 93.
3 Ibid., 162–7.
4 One of Gorbachev’s major conditions for agreeing to abolish nuclear weapons was that the United States would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. This was unacceptable for Reagan in light of his commitment to pursue the SDI. Gorbachev’s insistence on the United States abandoning the SDI was indicative of long-standing Soviet concerns about U.S. missile defense development, which continues to the present day.
5 The uncertainty about Russia’s direction was also reflected in the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, which predicted that the United States on the one hand was “at the threshold of a decade of planned reductions” but on the other hand would retain the ability to hedge against “unanticipated challenges as time goes on” with “the needed flexibility.” The Defense Department’s official statement on the review continued that “START I has not yet entered into force, nor has START II be[en] ratified. For this reason, and because of the uncertain future of the rapid political and economic change still underway in the former Soviet Union, we made two judgments in the NPR. First, we concluded that deeper reductions beyond those we made in the NPR would be imprudent at this time; and second, we took several actions to ensure that we could reconstitute our forces as the decade went along if we needed to. . . . The results of the NPR strike and appropriate balance between showing U.S. leadership in responding to the changed international environment and hedging against an uncertain future.” Office of Assistant Secretarty of Defense (Public Affairs), “DoD Review Recommends Reduction in Nuclear Force,” press release, September 22, 1994, Nukestrat, http://www.nukestrat.com/us/reviews/dodpr092294.pdf.
6 For more on this and the peculiar counting rule applied to the New START see: Hans M. Kristensen, “New START Treaty Has New Counting,” Federation of American Scientists, March 29, 2010, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2010/03/newstart/; and Amy F. Woolf, “The New START Treaty: Central Limits and Key Provisions,” Congressional Research Service, February 5, 2018, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R41219.pdf.
7 Russian concerns about the United States developing strategic conventional capabilities also played a role.
8 The idea of moving beyond MAD could be open to more than one interpretation—not only as a step toward mutually assured stability but also as a step toward strategic superiority.
9 A very useful overview of INF charges and countercharges by Brigadier General Kevin Ryan (U.S. Army, retired), former U.S. defense attaché in Russia, presently at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, can be found here: Kevin Ryan, “After the INF Treaty: An Objective Look at US and Russian Compliance, Plus a New Arms Control Regime,” Russia Matters, December 7, 2017, https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/after-inf-treaty-objective-look-us-and-russian-compliance-plus-new-arms-control-regime; as well as by Ambassador Steven Pifer and Oliver Meier of the Brookings Institution and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, respectively, here: Steve Pifer and Oliver Meier, “Are We Nearing the End of the INF Treaty?,” Arms Control Today 48 (January/February 2018): https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-01/features/we-nearing-end-inf-treaty.
10 Guy Norris, “China Takes Wraps Off National Hypersonic Plan,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, April 10, 2017; Guy Norris, “Classified Report on Hypersonics Says U.S. Lacking Urgency,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, February 20, 2017; and Guy Norris, “U.S. Air Force Plans Road Map to Operational Hypersonics,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, July 27, 2017.
11 This, incidentally, echoes some of the statements expressed by U.S. officials concerned with China rather than Russia, who view the INF Treaty as a constraint on U.S. actions in the Pacific theater. https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-01/features/we-nearing-end-inf-treaty
12 The first such dialogue was held in September 2017. Another round was planned for March 2018, but was postponed with no new date announced. The overall U.S.-Russian relationship has deteriorated even further since the first round and shows no prospect of improving, thus raising doubts about the dialogue’s quality, scope, and potential impact. Privately, some participants have referred to it as unproductive.

The New Cold War is Boiling Over Syria - Dimitri Trenin

The New Cold War is Boiling Over Syria
Dmitri Trenin
Director
Moscow Center
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, recently said the Cold War was back with a vengeance but also with a difference. This is correct but belatedly so. The new confrontation between Russia and the United States started already in 2014 and has been intensifying ever since, culminating in Friday evening’s U.S.-led strikes on Syria, which the Trump administration blamed on the Syrian government and its Russian allies and vowed to sustain indefinitely, if it deemed necessary. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded, in turn, that the attacks were an “act of aggression” that would “have a destructive effect on the entire system of international relations.”
The new confrontation between Russia and the United States has thus reached its first “missile crisis” moment. The way it is handled — whether it produces a direct military collision between the armed forces of the United States and Russia — will matter gravely for the entire world.
The original Cold War was very different from today’s confrontation between Washington and Moscow. There is no longer symmetry, balance, or respect between the parties. There is also no heightened fear of a nuclear Armageddon, which has the paradoxical effect of making it far easier to slide beyond the point of no return.
Taking on Russia, for many in the West, has become a continuation of the war on terror, with Putin cast in the role of Saddam Hussein. Thus, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is dealt with as a rogue state. In this very unequal contest, the United States has essentially excluded the possibility of a strategic compromise with its unworthy adversary: For U.S. leaders, to compromise with Russia means to compromise oneself. This raises the stakes for the Kremlin to the absolute maximum.
Professional military and national security officials in the United States probably realize the dangers of the situation far better than politicians and public opinion leaders. In Syria, deconfliction between U.S. and Russian military forces has worked rather successfully. The chief of the Russian General Staff has had regular contacts, including face-to-face meetings, with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and is about to meet with NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe. At the beginning of the year, the heads of Russia’s principal intelligence agencies — the Federal Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Main Intelligence Directorate — made an unprecedented joint visit to the United States.
In the atmosphere of rampant hysteria and bluster, these channels of communication look much more solid than the famous back channel in Washington between Robert Kennedy and a Russian intelligence operative that served to relay messages between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Yet, unlike in the original Cold War, which was mostly a war by proxy, the new confrontation is a more direct engagement. In the fields of information, economics and finance, politics, and the cyberdomain, the U.S.-Russian fight is already direct. In the military sphere, Russia and the United States are for the first time since World War II fighting in the same country, but now their goals and strategies are vastly different, if not opposed to each other. The military leaders on both sides can do much to avoid incidents, but making policy is above their pay grade.
What has just played out is the least bad scenario: a series of U.S. and allied strikes that are largely symbolic, targeting some Syrian military facilities but sparing the main command and control centers and avoiding any potential Russian targets — not just Russian bases or forces but the Russian personnel and civilians who are widely spread throughout the Syrian military and government infrastructure. Such an attack would send the Russian-Western relationship to a new low point and lead to even more recrimination, sanctions, and countersanctions, but it would not endanger peace.
The worst scenario, by contrast, would do precisely that. Many people may have missed the warning by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, who, a few weeks before the alleged chemical attack in Douma, painted exactly the scenario of a staged chemical attack in the then-rebel-held enclave, which in his scenario would have served as a pretext for massive U.S. strikes against the Syrian leadership in Damascus. Should Russians be targeted in such an attack, Gerasimov said, the Russian military in the region would respond by intercepting the incoming missiles and firing at the platforms from which they were launched.
Some commentators have since dismissed these warnings as bluff. They point to Russia’s clear inferiority in advanced conventional weapons in comparison with the United States. Should the Russians try to implement what Gerasimov has outlined, the argument goes, their entire military contingent in Syria would be wiped out in minutes, and Moscow would have to accept a humiliating defeat, which might as well be the end of its ill-conceived challenge to America’s dominant might. Perhaps. But there is a chance that the regional conflict may not stop there and instead escalate to a wholly different level.
Even if the current standoff in Syria does not lead to the worst-case scenario becoming a reality, the U.S.-Russian situation will remain not only dire but essentially hopeless for the indefinite future. America’s approach toward Russia will likely consist of a methodical mounting of pressure on it in multiple domains — in anticipation that, at some point, the pressure will become unbearable for Moscow. The Kremlin, for its part, is adamant that it will not surrender, knowing that the adversary will be merciless even after its victory.
The outcome, for now, is wide open. What’s clear is that periodic tests of will and resolve will continue to lead to international crises, whether in Syria, Ukraine, or elsewhere. Policymakers need to learn from their military subordinates: They should keep their heads cool and think of the consequences of their actions, both intended and unintended. Allowing the new U.S.-Russian global confrontation to run its course is much preferable to a sudden head-on crash.
More from this author... 

George Kennan and China containment

La Nación, Buenos Aires -19.4.2018
The National Interest, Washington DC – 18.4.2018
Containment and China: What Would Kennan Do?
Paul Heer

George F. Kennan did not consider his original concept of containment to be applicable to China. But if the legendary Soviet expert were alive today, he might well endorse a strategy aimed at limiting Chinese influence in East Asia relative to that of the United States—which is what Chinese leaders today call “containment.”
In Kennan’s formulation of his doctrine, containment was aimed exclusively at preventing the expansion of Soviet communist influence or control over areas that were strategically vital to the United States. During the period that he had official responsibility for implementing that strategy—as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 until 1950—he explicitly excluded China from it because he doubted that the Chinese communists would fall under Soviet control and, even if they did, China in his view was neither strategically important nor a potential threat to the United States. Indeed, Kennan excluded the entire mainland of East Asia—including the Korean Peninsula and Indochina (later Vietnam)—on the same grounds. In the early years of the Cold War he was prepared to accept Soviet domination of continental East Asia—if it came—as something that would be unfortunate but tolerable. Accordingly, he played a key role in justifying U.S. disengagement from the Chinese civil war, favored withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from South Korea, and warned against supporting or inheriting the French role in Indochina.
The only place in the Far East where Kennan deemed containment applicable was Japan, which he considered both vital to U.S. interests and vulnerable to Soviet influence—in effect, the East Asian counterpart to Germany in Europe. He consequently played a pivotal role in redirecting U.S. occupation policy in Japan away from a punitive approach and toward reconstruction, akin to the Marshall Plan in Europe and for the same purpose: to insulate it against any Soviet designs. As Kennan wrote in 1948, Washington needed to “devise policies with respect to Japan which assure the security of those islands from Communist penetration and domination as well as from Soviet military attack, and which will permit the economic potential of that country to become again an important force in the Far East, responsive to the interests of peace and stability in the Pacific area.”
Kennan, in fact, was arguably the first proponent of the “defensive perimeter” concept, which became the de facto basis for U.S. strategy in the western Pacific before the Korean War.
The outbreak of the Korean War, however, subsequently undermined Kennan’s strategic vision for a peripheral application of containment in East Asia. It led to a long-term U.S. military commitment on the Korean Peninsula, provided the rationale for both the retention of U.S. military bases in Japan (which he had advised against) and U.S. aid to the French in Indochina, and essentially reinserted the United States into the Chinese civil war through a defense commitment to Taiwan. All of this eclipsed Kennan’s plan for only an offshore and non-military version of containment in the region.
The Sino-Soviet split that developed over the next decade validated both his prediction that the Soviets would not control the mainland of East Asia, and his rationale for not applying his doctrine of containment there. He wrote in 1967 that the Sino-Soviet rift was “the greatest single measure of containment that could be conceived. It not only invalidated the original concept of containment, it disposed in large measure of the very problem to which it was addressed”—that of counterbalancing the international influence of Soviet communism.
But what of the threat of Chinese communism itself? Kennan originally dismissed it on the grounds that under any government Beijing would never have the capacity to project power in ways seriously inimical to U.S. interests. In a speech in 1966, he noted that he had originally identified five strategic power centers in the world where containment applied: the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Japan and Russia itself. “Please note,” he observed, “that China did not enter into this category. I personally do not consider that it enters into it today.” Containment was about keeping the other power centers outside Soviet control. China was beyond that scope, even though it was under communist control, because it was not under Soviet communist control, and in any event was not in Kennan’s view a strategic power center. Consequently, although he deemed a communist China undesirable and regrettable, it was “not an intolerable threat, in itself, to world peace, and does not represent anything we cannot live with for a good long time.” Kennan acknowledged the implicit threat of Chinese communist expansion elsewhere in Asia, but he concluded that this appeared to be possible only in areas that were neither strategically important to the United States nor capable of posing a substantial military threat if they fell under Chinese communist control. These circumstances, in Kennan’s view, further negated the applicability of his containment doctrine to Chinese communism. And he never accepted its applicability to Vietnam. Indeed, he became an eloquent and influential critic of the American war there.
Kennan reaffirmed this view in the 1970s, reiterating that containment did not have “any great relevance” to China because it was not a “highly expansive power” except with regard to its prior territorial claims (especially Taiwan) and did not appear to be trying to impose “direct Chinese domination” over neighboring countries. Again, he specifically excluded Southeast Asia on the grounds that Chinese communist control there would do “no irreparable damage, from the standpoint of our interests,” and because he calculated that any Southeast Asian communist regime would more likely play Moscow and Beijing off against each other than be a puppet of either.
IN MY view, Kennan’s dismissal of China’s strategic potential, not to mention the strategic relevance of both Southeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula, was uncharacteristically shortsighted. It also belied his own judgment about the implications of the Sino-Soviet split, which greatly enhanced China’s strategic value to the United States in ways he recognized and acknowledged.
But more fundamentally, Kennan also recognized that communist China did not—and does not—represent the kind of threat the Soviet Union posed during most of the Cold War, and which had provided the basis for his containment doctrine. In the July 1947 “X” article in Foreign Affairs (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct”) in which he introduced his doctrine, Kennan specified that Soviet ideology was founded on the “basic antagonism between the capitalist and socialist worlds” and had taught Soviet leaders “that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders” and that there could “never be on Moscow’s side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalism.” Chinese communist leaders never fully subscribed to this outlook, to such a zero-sum goal, or to the need to impose “direct Chinese domination” beyond China’s borders. Moreover, they have moved beyond any belief in a fundamental antagonism between capitalism and socialism: their “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is essentially a merger with capitalism. And Xi Jinping’s promotion of that developmental model at the Chinese Communist Party’s Nineteenth Congress in October 2017—contrary to prevailing misinterpretations—is not aimed at supplanting capitalism with world socialism. Instead, Beijing is genuinely pursuing a “community of aims” with Western powers—also contrary to conventional wisdom. Kennan did not wholly anticipate this, but he no doubt would appreciate the differences between China today and the Soviet Union—and especially acknowledge that China does not meet his description of the Soviet Union in the “X” article as lacking “real evidences of material power and prosperity” to back up its external ambitions. For these reasons, he would recognize that China does not merit a containment strategy as he originally conceived it, nor could any such strategy succeed against China.
Paradoxically, however, Kennan came to advocate elements of an approach to China which arguably were not substantially different from many of the policies he formulated toward the Soviet Union. In a speech in 1960, after a decade of Chinese animosity toward the United States in the wake of the Korean War, Kennan asserted that it was a vital U.S. interest to erect “firm barriers” to what he characterized as “contemporary Chinese imperialism,” and specifically to “see to it that the major archipelagos and islands lying off the coast of East Asia do not become susceptible of exploitation by mainland forces hostile to the peace and freedom of the Pacific community.” In another speech four years later, he observed that Beijing’s communist leaders hated the United States because of its “temerity to stand in their path and to obstruct the expansion of their power.” Kennan said the United States had “no choice but to place ourselves in that path” in order to preserve the post–World War II regional balance of power and to prevent the emergence of “an Asia dominated by people so prejudiced against us, ideologically, as the Chinese Communists.” He insisted, however, that Washington was only seeking to prevent the extension of Chinese communist power to “those insular and peninsular appendages of the Asiatic continent”—this time including South Korea—and emphasized that the U.S. approach was wholly defensive, not “purely, or even primarily, a military” strategy, and not aimed at overthrowing the Chinese communist regime.
This clearly implied a desire to prevent the spread of Chinese influence within the region that sounded much like the original containment goal of preventing the extension of Soviet influence. More importantly, Kennan’s idea of erecting “firm barriers” against Chinese influence and “standing in the path” of an expansion of Chinese power seemed to echo his prescription in the “X” article for containing Soviet communism: through the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
This, arguably, is what the United States is pursuing today through various policies and strategies that seek to counterbalance—and thus limit the spread of—Chinese influence within East Asia relative to that of the United States. Many observers, both Asian and American, saw that as a central goal of the Obama administration’s “rebalance” to East Asia, and wanted it to be. And the U.S. diplomatic and economic engagement, security cooperation, and military deployments that the Trump administration has sustained in the region—now within the framework of pursuing “a free and open Indo-Pacific”—are all widely perceived as being aimed at the same goal. Kennan would have approved of this approach, having essentially endorsed it as early as 1960.
But this is precisely the goal and the set of U.S. policies which Chinese leaders today routinely characterize as “containment.” Many other East Asian observers, including among close U.S. allies, probably think of it the same way and support it as such. Washington may define the word differently, recognize that China represents a different kind of challenge than the Soviet Union, and thus frame U.S. strategy toward China in other terms. But denying that Washington has a containment policy on the grounds that it is not applying the same strategy it applied to the Soviet Union is only talking past Beijing, because what the Chinese (and some of their neighbors) describe as “containment” is simply this perceived U.S. effort to limit China’s influence in the region relative to Washington’s. The disagreement is only semantic. The bottom line is that Kennan today would essentially be advocating what the Chinese have chosen to call “containment.” A version of his doctrine is thus operative in East Asia even though it has renounced or changed its name.
There is another core element of Kennan’s original containment doctrine that applies in East Asia today: the requirements on the U.S. side. In the “X” article, he observed that “the issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations.” American success ultimately depended, he wrote, upon “the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country that knows what it wants” and “is coping successfully with the problem of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power.” The same conditions apply equally if not more so today, and not only with respect to U.S. relations with East Asia. Seventy years after Kennan wrote those words to describe the fundamental prerequisite to American “containment” of external challenges, the country is again facing a self-imposed test of the United States as a nation among nations.

Paul Heer is an adjunct professor at George Washington University and former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia (2007–15). This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press).

Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas de Historia Economica - manifesto

Manifesto Fundacional
Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas Eulália & Bárbara 
Rio de Janeiro, 16 de abril de 2018.

Há muito tardava a necessidade de um grupo de estudos para os discentes que se identificam com a História Econômica, quando, em agosto de 2016, um pequeno contingente de estudantes resolveram ler e debater em conjunto o livroEscravidão e Capitalismo Histórico, na esteira de sua repercussão durante o V Congresso Latino-Americano de História Econômica. Desde então, reunindo-se na sala do SEO e do POLIS, na UFF (Campus do Gragoatá), as despretensiosas reuniões evoluíram para um espaço de formação conjunta e o grupo de estudos cresceu. Também se tornou mais complexo, constituindo-se em ponto de encontro para pesquisas afins, bem como se tornando um instrumento de organização discente para atividades acadêmicas.
Nesse curto tempo, muito projetamos e realizamos alguns de nossos anseios, sendo o nosso grupo de estudos extremamente útil para nossos intentos. Entretanto, ainda tomados por nossas trajetórias individuais, encontramos a necessidade de dar regularidade e formalizar nossos esforços em conjunto.
A decisão pela fundação desse grupo está assentada na convicção de que a História Econômica jamais deixou de ser um campo fundamental para uma perspectiva historiográfica estruturalista. Não negamos os avanços conquistados na historiografia oriundos da introdução da multiplicidade e do subjetivismo como fatores a serem reconhecidos pelo historiador, os quais possibilitaram a emergência de novas abordagens na prática de pesquisa e incentivaram a integração da história com diferentes áreas do conhecimento. Partimos do entendimento, contudo, que as relações econômicas envolvendo instituições e indivíduos - compreendendo as esferas da produção, das trocas, do financiamento e do consumo - atuam como condicionante no desenvolvimento das múltiplas experiências e significações próprias do espírito humano. Defendemos assim, dentro da melhor tradição dialética, a conciliação entre essa pluralidade de enfoques e o reconhecimento das bases socioeconômicas da vivência social, caminho indispensável para a construção da história dentro de horizontes totalizantes, mas que deem conta de abarcar dentro de si a heterogeneidade da prática historiográfica sem sufocá-la.
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Nos definimos como um grupo de estudos e pesquisas composto exclusivamente por discentes/pesquisadores em formação (dos graduandos até os recém doutores), e que se inserem na historiografia pelo diálogo com a História Econômico-Social. De outra forma, queremos dizer que reunimos estudantes com diversos graus de relação com a História Econômica, preservando grande pluralidade de enfoques de pesquisas, recortes temáticos e cronológicos em nossa coletividade.
Os nossos objetivos fundacionais são: 1- estudo e debate da historiografia para formação dos membros, no geral, mas também para participações em cursos, eventos, concursos ou qualquer atividade acadêmica específica; 2- debate e articulação das nossas pesquisas e trabalhos científicos e/ou institucionais; 3- inserção acadêmica conjunta em eventos, periódicos, associações, programas, cursos, etc.
Nosso caráter interinstitucional e a riqueza de nossas relações com outras coletividades devem preservar nossa atuação em grupos de pesquisa, laboratórios e associações outras, em conjunto com nossos professores e orientadores. Essa sinergia não só é possível, quanto parece necessária para o nosso estabelecimento e inserção como grupo em ambientes institucionais e atividades científicas que demandem apoio de nossos mestres. Entre nós, a inexistência de uma hierarquia estratificada (seja titulada e/ou através da experiência) pode garantir uma outra qualidade de formação, além de permitir outras vias de organização acadêmica e realização de pesquisas.
No momento de sua fundação o grupo contém graduandos e pós-graduandos em formação na UFF, UFRJ, UNIRIO, FIOCRUZ, USP e UNL. Alguns de seus integrantes são associados à ABPHE, ANPUH e SEO. Os grupos de pesquisa e laboratórios que já integram são: Laboratório Polis - História Econômico- Social/UFF, Laboratório HEQUS – História Econômica Quantitativa e Social/UFF,LEHI - Laboratório de Economia e História/UFRRJ, LAPEDHE - Laboratório de Pesquisa e Documentação em História Econômica e Social/UFF, Grupo de Pesquisa Portos e Cidades no Mundo Atlântico/CNPq e Grupo de Pesquisa O Vale do Paraíba, o Império do Brasil e a Segunda Escravidão/UNIRIO.
Após todos os esforços para articularmos um contingente apreciável de estudantes pesquisadores, sobrou-nos a difícil tarefa de nomear esse agrupamento. No momento em que muitos decidem por caminhar sozinhos,
optamos pela força do conjunto. Pensando nessa premissa, decidimos homenagear não uma, mas duas mulheres de especial importância para a historiografia: Eulália Maria Lahmeyer Lobo e Maria Bárbara Levy. Eulália e Bárbara trabalharam juntas desde a década de 1970, escreveram na mesma época e lançaram, quase que simultaneamente, dois clássicos da historiografia do Rio de Janeiro. Fundaram a Conferência Internacional de História de Empresas, idealizaram a Associação Brasileira de Pesquisadores em História Econômica e o seu Congresso Brasileiro de História Econômica. Bárbara faleceu mais cedo, Eulália deu sequência aos projetos que as duas formularam em conjunto. Em 2011, a professora Eulália também faleceu.
As duas continuam tendo seus legados intelectuais individualmente vivos, sendo lidas e extremamente úteis à formação de gerações de historiadores. Entretanto, especialmente para os estudantes que não as conheceram, ouvir falar de Eulália e Bárbara em conjunto não é incomum. Nossos professores e orientadores muitas vezes falam das duas como uma dupla de forma absolutamente naturalizada, as suas trajetórias justificam como são lembradas. E é dessa forma que o nosso grupo gostaria de ser identificado, com essa característica de soma de esforços, de associação intelectual, de articulação acadêmica, de apoio mútuo na formação e no trabalho científico.
Dessa forma, temos orgulho de nos apresentar sob o nome Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas Eulália e Bárbara.

Subscrevem este Manifesto Fundacional:
Alan Ribeiro (UFF)
Amanda Marinho (USP)
Bruna Dourado (UFF)
Bruno Linhares (USP)
Daniel Schneider (UFF) 

Demétrio Santos (UFF)
Giselle Machado (FIOCRUZ) 

Guilherme Barreto (UFF) 
Guilherme Giesta (UFF) 
Guilherme Villela (UNL)
João Marcos Mesquita (UNIRIO) 

Juliana Valpasso (UFF)
Luana Bonacchi (UFF)
Marcio Cardoso (UFF)
Marcos Marinho (UFF)
Matheus Santana (FIOCRUZ) 

Mylena Porto (UFRJ)
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The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 - Margaret MacMillan

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 

https://www.amazon.com.br/War-That-Ended-Peace-Road/dp/0812980662

Chapter 1

Europe in 1900

On April 14, 1900, Emile Loubet, the President of France, talked approvingly about justice and human kindness as he opened the Paris Universal Exposition. There was little kindness to be found in the press comments at the time. The exhibitions were not ready; the site was a dusty mess of building works; and almost everyone hated the giant statue over the entrance of a woman modeled on the actress Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a fashionable evening dress. Yet the Exposition went on to be a triumph, with over 50 million visitors.

In style and content the Exposition partly celebrated the glories of the past and each nation displayed its national treasures—whether paintings, sculptures, rare books or scrolls—and its national activities. So where the Canadian pavilion had piles of furs, the Finnish showed lots of wood, and the Portuguese decorated their pavilion with ornamental fish. Many of the European pavilions mimicked great Gothic or Renaissance buildings, although little Switzerland built a chalet. The Chinese copied a part of the Forbidden City in Beijing and Siam (today Thailand) put up a pagoda. The Ottoman Empire, that dwindling but still great state which stretched from the Balkans in southern Europe through Turkey to the Arab Middle East, chose a pavilion which was a jumble of styles, much like its own peoples who included Christians, Muslims and Jews and many different ethnicities. With colored tiles and bricks, arches, towers, Gothic windows, elements of mosques, of the Grand Bazaar from Constantinople (now Istanbul), it was fitting that the overall result still somehow resembled the Hagia Sophia, once a great Christian church that became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest.

Germany’s pavilion was surmounted by a statue of a herald blowing a trumpet, suitable, perhaps, for the newest of the great European powers. Inside was an exact reproduction of Frederick the Great’s library; tactfully the Germans did not focus on his military victories, many of them over France. The western facade hinted, though, at a new rivalry, the one which was developing between Germany and the world’s greatest naval power, Great Britain: a panel showed a stormy sea with sirens calling and had a motto rumored to be written by Germany’s ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself: “Fortune’s star invites the courageous man to pull up the anchor and throw himself into the conquest of the waves.” Elsewhere at the Exposition were reminders of the rapidly burgeoning power of a country that had only come into existence in 1871; the Palace of Electricity contained a giant crane from Germany which could lift 25,000 kilos.

Austria-Hungary, Germany’s closest friend in Europe, had two separate pavilions, one for each half of what had come to be known as the Dual Monarchy. The Austrian one was a triumph of Art Nouveau, the new style which had been catching on in Europe. Marble cherubs and dolphins played around its fountains, giant statues held up its staircases and every inch of its walls appeared to be covered by gold leaf, precious stones, happy or sad masks, or garlands. A grand reception room was set aside for members of the Habsburg family which had presided for centuries over the great empire stretching from the center of Europe down to the Alps and Adriatic, and the exhibits showed off the work of Poles, Czechs, and South Slavs from the Dalmatian coast, only some of the Dual Monarchy’s many peoples. Next to the Austrian pavilion and separating it from that of Hungary stood a smaller one, representing the little province of Bosnia, still technically part of the Ottoman Empire but administered since 1878 from Vienna. The Bosnian pavilion, with its lovely decorations by craftsmen from its capital of Sarajevo, looked, said the guide published by Hachette, like a young girl being brought out into the world for the first time by her parents.1 (And they were not particularly happy ones at that.)

The mood of the Hungarian pavilion was strongly nationalistic. (Austrian critics said sourly that the folk art on display was vulgar and its colors too bright.) The exhibits also included a reconstruction of the great citadel of Comorn (Komáron) in the north which stood in the way of the Ottomans in the sixteenth century as they stretched northwards into Europe. Much more recently, in 1848, it had been held by Hungarian nationalists in the revolt against the Habsburgs but had fallen to Austrian forces in 1849. Another room was dedicated to the Hussars, famous for their bravery in the wars against the Ottomans. The exhibits paid less attention though to the millions of non-Hungarian peoples, Croatians or Rumanians, for example, who lived within Hungary’s borders.

Italy, like Germany a new country and a great power more by courtesy than in reality, had built what looked like a vast, richly decorated cathedral. On its golden dome stood a giant eagle, its wings outstretched in triumph. Inside it was filled with art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but the glories of the past could weigh heavily on a poor young country. Britain, by contrast, chose to be low key even though it still dominated much of the world’s trade and manufacturing and had the world’s biggest navy and largest empire. Its exhibit was housed in a cozy country house designed by rising young architect Edwin Lutyens in the half-timbered Tudor style and consisted mainly of English paintings from the eighteenth century. Some private British owners had refused to lend their works because Britain’s relations with France, traditionally difficult, were particularly strained in 1900.2

Russia had pride of place at the Exposition as France’s favored ally. The Russian exhibits were huge and scattered in several different locations, ranging from a massive palace in the style of the Kremlin dedicated to Siberia to a richly decorated pavilion named in honor of the Tsar’s mother, Empress Marie. Visitors could admire, among much else, a map of France made in precious stones which the Tsar, Nicholas II, had sent as a present to the French and marvel at the sheer extent of the Romanovs’ possessions. The French themselves did not have their own pavilion; the whole Exposition was after all designed to be a monument to French civilization, French power, French industry and agriculture, and French colonies, and room after room in the different special exhibits was devoted to French achievements. The French section of the Palais des Beaux-Arts was, said the guide, naturally a model of good taste and luxury. The Exposition marked the reassertion by France that it was still a great power, even though only thirty years previously it had been utterly defeated as it had tried to prevent Germany coming into existence.

The Universal Exposition was nevertheless, the French declared, a “symbol of harmony and peace” for all of humanity. Although the more than forty countries exhibiting in Paris were mainly European, the United States, China, and several Latin American countries also had pavilions. As a reminder though of where power still lay, a large part of the Exposition was given over to colonies where the European powers showed off their possessions. The crowds could marvel at exotic plants and beasts, walk by replicas of African villages, watch craftsmen from French Indochina at their work, or shop in North African souks. “Supple dancing girls,” said an American observer severely, “perform the worst forms of bodily contortions known to the followers of Terpsichore.”3 Visitors came away with a comfortable assurance that their civilization was superior and that its benefits were being spread around the globe.

The Exposition seemed a suitable way to mark the end of a century which had started with revolutions and wars but which now stood for progress, peace and prosperity. Europe had not been entirely free of wars in the nineteenth century but they had been nothing to compare with the long struggles of the eighteenth century or the wars of the French Revolution and later those of Napoleon which had drawn in almost every European power. The wars of the nineteenth century had generally been short—like the one between Prussia and the Austrian Empire which had lasted for seven weeks—or colonial wars fought far from European soil. (The Europeans should have paid more attention to the American Civil War which not only lasted for four years but which gave an early warning that modern technology and the humble barbed wire and spades were shifting the advantage in war to the defense.) While the Crimean War in the middle of the century had involved four European powers, it was the exception. In the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian, or the Russo-Turkish the other powers had wisely stayed out of the conflict and had done what they could to build peace again.

In certain circumstances war was still seen as a reasonable choice for nations if they could see no other way to obtain their goals. Prussia was not prepared to share control of the German states with Austria and Austria was determined not to concede. The war that followed settled the issue in Prussia’s favor. Resorting to war was costly but not excessively so. Wars were limited both in time and in their scope. Professional armies fought each other and damage to civilians and to property was minimal, certainly in light of what was to come. It was still possible to attack and win decisive victories. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, though, like the American Civil War, hinted that armed conflict was changing: with conscription, armies were bigger, and better and more accurate weapons and increased firepower meant that the forces of the Prussians and their German allies suffered large casualties in the opening attacks on the French. And the surrender of the French army at Sedan did not end the fighting. Instead the French people, or large sections of it, chose to fight on in a people’s war. Yet even that had finally ended. France and the new Germany had made peace and their relations had gradually mended. In 1900 the Berlin business community sent a message for the opening of the Exposition to the Paris Chamber of Commerce, wishing success to “this great undertaking, which is destined to bring the civilized nations of the world nearer to one another in the labours common to them all.”4 The large numbers of German visitors who were expected to go to Paris would, so many in Germany hoped, help to build better relations between the peoples of their two countries.

All the peoples of the earth have worked on the Exposition, said the special Hachette guide: “they have accumulated their marvels and their treasures for us to reveal unknown arts, overlooked discoveries and to compete with us in a peaceful way where Progress will not slacken in her conquests.” The themes of progress and the future ran throughout the Exposition, from the new moving pavements to the cinema in the round. At one of the pavilions, the Château d’Eau, with its cascading waterfalls, shooting fountains, and colored lights playing on the waters, the centerpiece in a giant basin was an allegorical group which represented Humanity led by Progress advancing towards the Future and overthrowing the rather odd couple of Routine and Hatred.

The Exposition was a showcase for individual countries but it was also a monument to the most recent extraordinary achievements of Western civilization, in industry, commerce, science, technology, and the arts. You could see the new X-ray machines or be overwhelmed, as Henry James was, by the Hall of Dynamos, but the most exciting discovery of all was electricity. The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.) Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a special cantata in praise of electricity for the Exposition: Le Feu céleste with orchestra, soloists and choir was performed at a free concert. The Palace of Electricity was ablaze with 5,000 light bulbs and high on the summit of its roof stood the Fairy of Electricity in her chariot drawn by a horse and dragon. And there were dozens more palaces and pavilions devoted to the important activities of modern society, among them machinery, mining and metallurgy, chemical industries, public transportation, hygiene, and agriculture.

There was still more, much more. The second modern Olympic Games took place nearby in the Bois de Boulogne as part of the Exposition. Sports included fencing (where the French did very well), tennis (a British triumph), athletics (American dominated), cycling and croquet. At the Exposition Annexe in Vincennes you could examine the new motorcars and watch balloon races. Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, one of the earliest film directors, went up in his own balloon to film the Exposition from above. As the Hachette guide said, the Exposition was “the magnificent result, the extraordinary culmination of the whole century—the most fertile in discoveries, the most prodigious in sciences, which has revolutionized the economic order of the Universe.”

In light of what was to come in the twentieth century such boasting and such complacency seem pitiful to us, but in 1900 Europeans had good reason to feel pleased with the recent past and confident about the future. The thirty years since 1870 had brought an explosion in production and wealth and a transformation in society and the way people lived. Thanks to better and cheaper food, improvements in hygiene, and dramatic advances in medicine, Europeans were living longer and healthier lives. Although Europe’s population went up by perhaps as much as 100 million to a total of 400 million, it was able to absorb the growth thanks to increased output in its own industry and agriculture and imports from around the world. (And emigration acted as a safety valve to avoid an even more dramatic increase—some 25 million Europeans left in the last two decades of the century for new opportunities in the United States alone and millions more went to Australia or Canada or Argentina.)

Europe’s cities and towns grew as people moved from the countryside in increasing numbers in search of better opportunities in factories, shops and offices. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, Paris had some 600,000 inhabitants; by the time of the Exposition, 4 million. Budapest, the capital of Hungary, showed the most dramatic increase: in 1867 it had 280,000 inhabitants and by the time of the Great War, 933,000. As the numbers of Europeans making a living from agriculture went down, the industrial working classes and the middle classes grew. Workers organized themselves into unions, which were legal in most countries by the end of the century; in France the number of workers in unions went up fivefold in the fifteen years before 1900 and was to reach 1 million just before the Great War. In recognition of the increasing importance of the class, the Exposition had exhibits of model houses for workers and organizations for their moral and intellectual development.

Margaret MacMillan received her PhD from Oxford University and is now a professor of international history at Oxford, where she is also the warden of St. Antony’s College. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; a senior fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto; and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto, and of St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. She sits on the boards of the Mosaic Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and on the editorial boards of The International History Review and First World War Studies. She also sits on the advisory board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and is a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust. Her previous books include Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India, and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

A review: 

"Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war..."
17 de outubro de 2013 - Publicada na Amazon.com
As a Brit, studying the First World War at school in the seventies, memories of the Second World War were still fresh and bitter enough amongst parents and teachers that there was never really a question that the Germans were the 'bad guys' in both wars while we (the Brits, primarily, though a little bit of credit was occasionally given to the Allies) were the knights in shining armour. Enough time has passed since both wars now for a more rational view to be taken and this book by Margaret MacMillan is a well balanced, thoughtful and detailed account of the decades leading up to 1914.

MacMillan begins by giving an overview of the involved nations as they were at the turn of the century - their political structure, alliances and enmities, their culture and economic status. She then takes us in considerable depth through the twenty years or so preceding the war, concentrating on each nation in turn, and going further back into history when required. She introduces us to the main players: political, military and leading thinkers. She explains how and why the two main alliances developed that divided Europe and shows the fears of each nation feeling threatened or surrounded by potential enemies. And she shows how this led to an arms race, which each nation initially thought would act as a deterrence to war. Throughout she draws parallels to more recent history and current events, sometimes with frightening clarity.

In the mid-section, MacMillan discusses public opinion and cultural shifts, highlighting the parallel and divisive growth of militarism and pacifism and how the heads of government had to try to reconcile these factions. She indicates that, although the peace movement was international, that at times of threat, the membership tended to split on national lines - an indication that the movement would falter in the event of war, as indeed it did.

Next MacMillan explains the development of military planning and how these plans gradually became fixed, allowing little room for movement when war began. She explains that the Schlieffen Plan assumed war on two fronts and that, when it came to it, the military insisted that it wasn't possible to change the plan at the last moment to limit the war to the Eastern front, with all the implications that had for ensuring that France and therefore Britain would become involved. MacMillan also shows how the plans of each nation assumed an offensive, rather than defensive, strategy, taking little account of how modern weaponry would change the nature of warfare. Thus, when the war did come, the leaders still expected it to be short and decisive rather than the long drawn out trench warfare it became.

In the final section, MacMillan walks us through the various crises in the Balkans and elsewhere in the years leading up to the war. She makes the point that not only did these crises tend to firm up the two alliances but also the fact that each was finally resolved without a full-scale war led to a level of complacency that ultimately no country would take the final plunge. And in the penultimate chapter, she takes us on a detailed journey from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand up to the outbreak of war, showing how each government gradually concluded it was left with no alternatives but to fight. In a short final chapter, she rather movingly summarises the massive losses endured by each nation over the next four years, and gives a brief picture of the changed Europe that emerged.

Overall, I found this a very readable account. MacMillan has a clear and accessible writing style, and juggles the huge cast of characters well. I found I was rarely flicking backwards and forwards to remind myself of previous chapters - for me, always the sign of a well-written factual book. As with any history, there were parts that I found more or less interesting. I found the character studies of the various leaders very enlightening, while I was less interested in the various military plans (though accepting completely MacMillan's argument of their importance to the eventual inevitability of war). I got bogged down in the Balkans (always a problem for me in European history) but in the end MacMillan achieved the well-nigh impossible task of enabling me to grasp who was on whose side and why. This is a thorough, detailed and by no means short account of the period, but at no point did I feel that it dragged or lost focus.

One of the problems with the way I was taught about WW1 was that we tended to talk about the nations rather than the people - 'Germany did this', 'France said that', 'America's position was'. MacMillan's approach gives much more insight, allowing us to get to know the political and military leaders as people and showing the lack of unanimity in most of the governments. This humanised the history for me and gradually changed my opinion from believing that WW1 was a war that should never have been fought to feeling that, factoring in the always-uncertain vagaries of human nature, it could never have been avoided. This isn't MacMillan's position - she states clearly her belief that there are always choices and that the leaders could have chosen differently, and of course that's true. However, it seemed that by 1914 most of them felt so threatened and boxed in that it would have taken extraordinary courage and perception for them to act differently than they did, and inaction may have meant their country's downfall anyway. A sobering account of how prestige, honour and national interest led to a devastating war that no-one wanted but that no-one could prevent. Highly recommended.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Random House.
Another review: 
J. Lindner
5,0 de 5 estrelasThe War that Ended Peace
6 de março de 2014 - Publicada na Amazon.com
Compra verificada
As we approach the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of World War One we should pause to reflect on the terrible loss that conflict brought. In terms of western culture, 1914 was truly a watershed year that ended one way of life and introduced another. Margaret MacMillan followed up her epic study of the Versailles Treaty with this equally impressive work. She attempts to show how the war came about primarily because too many people either wanted war or did not do enough to prevent it from happening. The result is perhaps the most thorough analysis of the pre-1914 world available to the modern reader.

MacMillan begins her book with an account of the major players (France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and Austria-Hungary) to illustrate their national hopes and dreams pitted against their fears and suspicions andn introduces the reader to the primary individuals who helped shape national policy. She then looks at the psychology of war and the peace efforts and compares them to the militarism that each nation experienced. She describes how the new concept of public opinion helped drive the leaders towards certain decisions. Next she looks at the series of run ups to the Great War's outbreak, Morocco, Bosnia, the Balkan Wars, and even the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife. None of these events meant that war was ultimiately inevitable. So long as there were at least some key players willing to negotiate and work through differences, war could be avoided.

MacMillan concludes that war came about because the forces that sought it outnumbered and outmanourvered those who did not. But she also works to debunk myths that have evolved over the years. Germany and the Kaiser were not solely responsible for war in 1914. Germany had repeated backed down in the face of international pressure during the Morocco crises of 1905 and 1911. The Kaiser, while having the personality that modern day people would call a "jerk" (or worse), had a way of standing down at the last minute. Granted, he was fascinated with all things military, he was the inheritor of the Prussian military tradition, but he did not set out to bring war upon the world as he has often been blamed for doing. She also critiques the Anglo-French entente that developed after 1904. Britain and France were not a unified front as British leaders continually looked for ways to be non-committal in backing France on international affairs. She also looks at the relationship between France and Russia, and considers the challenges facing Austria-Hungary and the upstart Serbia. All of these have had myths develop around them and MacMillan works through the hyperbole to understand the root causes of national decisions. In fact, MacMillan ultimately blames no one and everyone for the war. The Great War, and she uses this term throughout the book, was the sum total of government's unwillingness to resort to diplomacy when the world needed eiplomacy the most.

MacMillan is not only a fine historian but is also an excellent writer. Thoughout the book she interjects modern analogies to compare with her subject matter to help illustrate her points. One key such analogy appears near the end of the book when she states how John F. Kennedy employed diplomacy against the advice of his advisors in part because he had recently read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Kennedy gave diplomacy a chance, the players of 1914 did not.

MacMillan's writing style is crisp and lively. Truly, there is never a dull moment in this book. College history courses should utilize this book. The leaders of today should read this book. The average citizen who thinks that guns and war solve problems should read this book. There are lessons to be learned from MacMillan that need to be understood and appreciated. This book has all the makings of a Pulitzer Prize and as such cannot be discounted by anyone who is in the position of decision-making in international affairs. And on a large scale, that really means all of us, as public opinion is now counted for much by politicians and pollsters. This book should remain the standard for a long time to come, much like her work in Paris 1919 remains the standard for understanding our modern world as it resulted from the Paris peace conference.