Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1989 by Charles William Maynes

Charles William Maynes is the editor of Foreign Policy.

John Mueller says we shouldn't worry about major wars anymore, Don't be too sure.

* Retreat From Doomsday The Obsolescence Of Major War John Mueller. Basic Books, $20.95.

What if the Cold War is over? What if war itself is being abandoned by all major powers as an instrument of policy?

This is the thesis of Mueller's provocative book.* Its implications are profound not only for America's foreign policies but also for its domestic politics.

Mueller's thesis, in brief, is the following: Woodrow Wilson would have been right except for one man-Adolf Hitler. World War I would have been the war to end all wars except that a fanatic took over Germany and forced the world to relearn a lesson World War I had already taught: modern war has no rational purpose because the level of violence attained far exceeds any benefit obtained.

Most strategists would join Mueller in at least conceding that nuclear war is not rational. But Mueller goes further than most strategists by arguing that the memory of World Wars I and II is enough to convince officials of major countries that war is now irrational. In addition, governments have another reason to eschew war: nation states now seek economic prosperity more than political power. Japan is the state others wish to emulate, not the United States or the Soviet Union.

Mueller's thesis will gain greater credibility with most readers if he can demonstrate that the communist threat, either from the Soviet Union or China, is over. He is willing to concede that while Stalin lived a "lunatic war was certainly conceivable." But he contends that since 1953 there has never been a real threat of war between the Soviet Union and the United States. To some, the Cuban Missile Crisis might seem the exception. John Kennedy believed that the chances of war were then one in three or one in two. But new revelations have documented that Kennedy was prepared, if necessary, to make major concessions to avoid war. And Mueller approvingly quotes recent studies suggesting that the odds of going to war even in that supreme crisis were "close to zero."

Whatever the actual threat at the time, the Cuban Missile Crisis discredited "crisis as a methodology." Neither in the Kremlin nor in the White House have officials since been anxious to push the world to the precipice. Jimmy Carter's response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or Mikhail Gorbachev's answer to the presence of the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf offers eloquent proof of this point. The former canceled U.S. participation in the 1980 Olympics and imposed the grain embargo, while the latter proposed a U.N. naval peacekeeping force to replace the Americans. In both cases the response was decidedly nonthreatening.

What about China? In Mueller's view American military intervention in Vietnam may have played a role in warding off a more direct and more serious military contest with China. When the Johnson administration dramatically escalated U.S. involvement in the war, the two great powers of the region-China and Indonesia-were extremely hostile to the United States and were pursuing parallel policies. But shortly after American troops arrived in Vietnam, the rationale for their presence ended. A communist coup in Indonesia failed spectacularly. The army counterattacked and murdered hundreds of thousands of communist party members, effectively eliminating the communist party as a political force in Indonesia. Then China plunged into the Cultural Revolution and ceased to be a significant presence on the international stage for several years.

So an attractive future unfolds. Absorbing the experience of two world wars, the major states rule out war as a realistic option. Frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union rule out nuclear confrontation. Dazed by the insanity of the Cultural Revolution and sobered by U.S. steadfastness in Vietnam, China abandons the Cold War, Engrossed in glasnost and perestroika, the Soviet Union, too, finally leaves it behind. The smaller states copy the more pacific attitudes of the great powers, just as they copy their development patterns. In time, major wars cease. Boers and neocons

Is the argument convincing?

In its central thesis the book is correct: attitudes toward war have changed. At the turn of this cenwry Theodore Roosevelt could delight his sister with descriptions of shooting a Spanish officer in Cuba and watching him double over "like a jackrabbit." Virtually no one feels that way after the experience of the two world wars.

Many in the United States who lament this trend against war blame television for reducing the nation's will to fight by bringing the carnage into the nation's living rooms through direct broadcasts. But Mueller is right in pointing out that the attitudes that the bellicose denounce developed long before television existed. The British had difficulty sustaining popular support for the Boer War at the turn of the century. Robert Sherwood called World War 11 "the first war in American history in which the general disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot." The French people turned against the effort to maintain Vietnam as a colony. In none of these cases can one attribute the change in attitudes to the influence of television.