The final judgement in this discussion is provided by the historian Donald Kagan. He
comments, advises even, that ‘What seems to work best, even though imperfectly, is the
possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and
of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose’
(Kagan, 1995: 570). Unfortunately, as Kagan recognizes, that is not always feasible.
More often than not in modern strategic history, power has been roughly in balance
among major state players. In such a context, Kagan’s principle would tend to spark a
war that might easily spread far beyond its local origins. One thinks of the local Austro-
Serbian quarrel in the summer of 1914 as a possible example.
There can be no single, all-contexts solution to the challenge of maintaining inter-
national order. There is, however, at least one maxim of enduring merit: international
order needs to be policed by someone or something. From time to time, order is menaced
by threats, great and small. Disorder looms as a potent possibility. Today, it is the menace
posed by irregular warriors for an extreme variant of Islam, as well as by the threat of
weapons of mass destruction in the hands of those motivated to employ them. In the
future, international order may well be challenged primarily by the rise of a rival or two
to American hegemony. In addition, climate change has the potential to create disorder
on a global scale, as the geographies of population distribution, energy, and food and
water resources move ever more severely out of balance. Disorder is a fuel of conflict
and a context that favours violence and warfare.
Conclusion
‘Peace’ is a word with two principal meanings. On the one hand, it is a simple description
of a condition of non-war. On the other, it can carry a normative judgement on political
relations, as well as describing a non-war condition. In its second definition, ‘peace’
refers to a political relationship wherein war is all but unthinkable. For illustration: in
1938 and 2007 Britain was at peace with Germany. But in 1938 that peace was tenuous
and, emphatically, strictly of the simple, non-war variety. In 2007, war between the two
countries was unthinkable. And yet the same term is used in both cases.
Peace is a very high concept, bearing much emotional, normative and prescriptive
content. The choice of words employed in strategic historical analysis can matter deeply.
For example, were the years 1947–89 a period of Cold War or one of Long Peace (Gaddis,
2001: 32–3)? With hindsight, it was Long Peace, but to policy-makers in the 1950s and
1960s it did not look like that. They were obliged by the dictates of prudence to assume
that the condition of non-war rested upon a delicate balance of power, especially strategic
nuclear power (Wohlstetter, 1959). In retrospect, it is not difficult to explain why the Cold
War really was the Long Peace. One can cite a lack of political motivation to go to war;
the fear of nuclear war; and some skill in the interacting bilateral management of the
consequences of the nuclear and missile revolutions. To those rational explanations one
should add the vital factor of luck. In truth, there is no way of knowing for certain why
the Cold War did not provide the context out of which World War III exploded. What is
more, historical research will never yield a definitive answer.
If one asks, ‘What causes peace?’, the character of the peace referred to matters
greatly. If one means simply peace as the absence of war, replies might include: a balance
of power; a temporarily unchallengeable imbalance of power; mutual nuclear terror; and
War, peace and international order 275