included problems with the Clinton administration and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as
well as with the European NATO allies, is well told in his book Waging Modern War
(Clark, 2002).
What was the character of the strategic history of the post-Cold War decade? As
the title of this section suggests, the strategic violence of the 1990s and beyond was tied
by some scholars into a master narrative which postulated two kinds of war, the ‘old’ and
the ‘new’ (Kaldor, 1999; Duyvesteyn and Angstrom, 2005). Broadly understood, the
thesis was that old wars were those between states and their Industrial Age regular armed
forces. The Gulf War of 1991 to liberate Kuwait was a classic example of an old war. The
regular armed forces of both sides were organized and equipped in a manner not greatly
dissimilar from their predecessors in World War II. The new wars of the post-Cold War
era, in contrast, were expected to be principally internal to states, possibly transnational,
and at least one of the belligerents would not carry state authority. It followed that
the character of warfare waged by non-state entities most likely would be irregular. The
thesis that the world was moving into a period of new wars was keyed logically to the
popular belief that the modern state was in decline. Several processes of globalization
were held to have reduced dramatically the ability of nominally sovereign states
unilaterally to provide security in its many forms (political, socio-cultural, economic,
military, individual human) for their citizens.
The new wars thesis found Clausewitz obsolete. Some theorists argued that the
Prussian had theorized solely about and for war among states. Supposedly, his
remarkable, or paradoxical – depending upon which translation one is using – trinity,
the core of his theory of war, comprised the people, the army and its commander, and
the government (Van Creveld, 1991: ch. 2; Honig, 1997). This, though, was a serious
misreading of On War. As was explained in Chapter 2, Clausewitz wrote that war is the
product of the inherently unstable relations among violence and passion, chance and
genius, and reason or policy (Clausewitz, 1976: 89). It is true that he associated the three
elements primarily respectively with the people, the army and the government, but that
association was a matter of no essential consequence for his argument. Clausewitz’s
primary trinity – passion, chance and probability or genius, and reason or policy – is valid
for wars of all kinds and for warfare of any character. This apparent digression into
strategic theory is of great importance because it bears directly upon a major issue of the
1990s. Did most of the politically motivated violence of that decade comprise a new
phenomenon? Did the world witness examples of new wars or of a new paradigm
of warfare? Without denying the prevalence of intrastate and irregular warfare in those
years and since, the new wars thesis has been criticized by scholars who argue that war
is war (Gray, 2005: 139–45). There are no old wars or new wars, at least not with respect
to their nature. But assuredly the character of warfare periodically is transformed by
socio-cultural, political and technological change. However, it would be a mistake to
endorse an unduly neat, linear view of strategic history. At any one time there will be a
wide variety of modes of warfare waged by different kinds of belligerent political entities
for diverse sets of motives.
To return to the question posed above, what was the character of the strategic history
of the post-Cold War decade? Did it reveal a true transformation of war, as the Israeli
strategic theorist Martin van Creveld asserted in his brilliant and influential book The
Transformation of War(Van Creveld, 1991)? (The title revealed the whole of the plot.)
After the Cold War: an interwar decade 227