Contending Perspectives on Managing Insecurity 307threat of another war with Germany seemed increasingly likely. In the post– World War
II era, two major alliance systems— NATO and the Warsaw Pact— arrayed states into
two separate camps. States dared not engage in action against an ally or a foe, even if
that state was an aggressor, for fear of causing another world war.
Collective security may also fail due to the problematic nature of a key assump-
tion, that aggressors can be easily identified. Easy identification is not always the
case. In 1967, Israel launched an armed attack against Egypt: clearly an act of aggres-
sion. The week before, however, Egypt had blocked Israeli access to the Red Sea, kicked
the UN out of Sinai, and, in combination with Syria and Jordan, moved hundreds of
tanks and planes closer to Israel. Clearly these, too, were acts of aggression. Twenty
years earlier, the state of Israel had been carved out of Arab real estate. That, too, was
an act of aggression. Where does the aggression “begin”? The George W. Bush admin-
istration argued in 2003 that its invasion of Iraq was a preemptive war because Sad-
dam Hussein was preparing to operationalize and possibly use a nuclear weapon (or
transfer one to a terrorist group). So who is the aggressor? Furthermore, even if an
aggressor can be identified, is that party always morally wrong? Due to an understand-
able fixation on the individual and collective costs of war, collective- security theorists
argue, by definition, yes. Yet trying to right a previous wrong is not necessarily wrong;
trying to make just a prior injustice is not always unjust. Like the balance of power,
at its best, collective security in practice supports the status quo at a specific point in time.
If that status quo is unjust, then why isn’t the collective security that supports it also
unjust?
Ar Ms Control And dIsArMAMent
Arms control and general disarmament schemes have been the hope of many liberals
over the years since the first Hague Convention of 1899. In the rich history of arms
control and disarmament treaties since the nineteenth century— including hundreds
of treaties limiting the militarization of the polar regions and space, the types of weap-
ons that may be legitimately used (such as antipersonnel land mines, anti- ballistic-
missile defenses, and cluster munitions), or even limiting the testing and development
of certain weapons (such as nuclear weapons)— there have been two striking features
overall: (1) most signatories to these treaties actually abide by their treaty obligations;
cheating is rare; and (2) many of those who have been signatories have been of an
avowedly “realist” orientation. This is counterintuitive because, as observed in
Chapter 3, realists tend to conflate “security” with “capacity to do physical harm.”
Yet even at the very first Hague Convention in 1899, realist states such as Germany,
France, Britain, and Rus sia all found themselves agreeing to limit the quantity and
quality of arms they would manufacture and employ in war. What ever the rationale
for reductions in each individual case, the logic of this approach to security is both