Aron [1905-1983] was a distinguished French intellectual, historian, commentator, and sociologist, of whom more below. In this extract, Aron discusses a wide range of historical episodes in developing the dimensions of this “supreme alternative,” but most of his examples are drawn from the wars of the twentieth century. Even at the time of composition, the relevance of the strategic history of the two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) was problematic. In his Memoirs, Aron describes as “obvious to everyone” the particular characteristics of the utterly novel international scene that had arisen after the end of the Second World War, and in the shadow of which Peace and War was drafted. These included “a world concert rather than a European concert; dispossession of the former great powers, notably the Europeans; a distinction between the superpowers and all the others; a rivalry between the two superpowers and the two halves of Europe that was both ideological and political; the improbability of global war because of the existence of nuclear weapons.”[2]
The Cold War now seems
distant, as does the world of “bipolarity” it evokes; of much greater interest
today are Aron’s reflections on the strategic predicaments presented by "subversive” or “colonial”
wars. France, defeated in Indochina in 1954, was still engaged in its war in
Algeria when Aron was writing Peace and War, and Aron’s analysis of the dilemmas of his native country was acute.
It is also very familiar, resembling U.S. strategic dilemmas in the wars in Vietnam
and Afghanistan. (Article length: 2600 words)
* * *
Perhaps the supreme alternative, on
the level of strategy, is "to win or not to lose." A strategy can aim
at decisively conquering the enemy's armed forces in order to dictate the terms
of a victorious peace to the disarmed enemy. But when the relation of forces
excludes such an eventuality, the war leaders can still propose not to lose, by
discouraging the superior coalition's intention of conquering.
German authors like Hans Delbriick
have found the ideal example of such a strategy in the Seven Years' War [1756-1763]. Frederick
II [of Prussia] nursed no illusions of conquering the Austro-Russian army, but he counted on
holding out long enough for his adversaries' morale to disintegrate, and for
the Alliance to fall apart. We know how the death of [Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, in early 1762, succeded by Peter III, a great admirer of the king of Prussia] actually
provoked a reversal of Russian policy. The recollection of this piece of luck
was so deeply engraved in the German memory that Goebbels, learning of
Roosevelt's death [in 1945], believed that the miracle of Frederick II would be repeated:
was not the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union still more
contrary to nature than that of St. Petersburg and Vienna?
Other, more immediate examples will
illustrate the problem's lasting nature. Given the relation of forces, what
must be the strategist's goal? This was the basic question, by 1915-16, that
divided German generals and statesmen. Were the Central Powers to choose as
their goal a victory that would permit them to dictate the clauses of the peace
treaty? Or, given the superiority of forces that the Allies were acquiring,
should the Central Powers renounce victory and limit their ambitions to a
compromise peace based on the recognition by each side of its incapacity to
prevail over the other decisively?
Contrary to what most Frenchmen
believed, the Verdun offensive, in the framework of General von Falkenhayn's
strategy, aimed at wearing down, rather than defeating, the French army. The
German command intended to weaken the latter until, by the spring and summer of
1916, it would be incapable of any major undertaking. Unconcerned about the
west, the German army could take the offensive in the east and score successes
there which would convince the Allies to come to terms, even if they were not
obliged to.
The Successor group,
Hindenburg-Ludendorff, chose, on the contrary, the other alternative. Until the
spring of 1918 the German armies tried to force the decision. Russia had been
put hors de combat in 1917; American
troops were flowing into Europe; the balance of forces, still favorable at the
beginning of 1918, was becoming increasingly unfavorable. The German general
staff tried to win before the intervention of a still intact American army with
inexhaustible forces. Historians and theoreticians (in particular Hans
Delbriick) have speculated whether such a strategy of destruction didn't, by
1917, constitute an error. Shouldn't the generals have economized their means,
limited the German losses in order to hold out as long as possible in the hope
that the Allies would weary of the struggle and be content with a negotiated
peace? Renouncing the effort to force a decision, strategy would have tried, by
defensive successes, to convince the enemy as well to renounce his ambition of
victory.
Another more striking example of
this dialectic of victory and non-defeat is that of Japan in 1941. How could
the Japanese Empire, engaged for years in an endless war against China, launch
itself into the assault of every European position in southeast Asia,
simultaneously challenging Great Britain and the United States, when it
produced scarcely seven million tons of steel a year and the United States was
producing over ten times as much? What calculation of the war leaders was
responsible for this extravagant venture?
The calculation was as follows: by
the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese fleet would gain several
months' control of the seas, extending at least as far as Australia. Infantry
and air force could conquer the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, and perhaps the
American outposts of the Pacific, such as Guam. Controlling an enormous area
rich in stockpiles of raw materials, Japan would be in a position to organize
and prepare her defense. None of the highest-ranking generals or admirals
conceived of Japanese troops entering Washington and dictating an unconditional
peace following a total victory over the United States. The Japanese leaders
who took the responsibility of launching the war intended to resist the
American counteroffensive long enough to exhaust the enemy will to be
victorious (which, they believed, must be weak, since the United States was a
democracy).
The calculation turned out to be
doubly false: in four years American submarines and planes destroyed virtually
the entire Japanese commercial fleet. The latter was already basically defeated
even before American bombs set fire to the Japanese cities and Roosevelt purchased
Soviet participation in the war (though he should have been ready to purchase
Soviet abstention). The calculation was no less false with regard to
psychology. Democracies often cultivate pacifist ideologies: they are not
always pacifist. In any case, once enraged, the Americans struck hard: the
attack on Pearl Harbor gave the Japanese fleet a temporary mastery of Asian
waters, but it made United States renunciation of victory very unlikely. The
success of the military calculation during the first phase excluded the success
of the psychological calculation regarding the final phase. Not that a better
strategy was available to the Japanese leaders: none could reasonably promise
victory in a showdown between adversaries so unequal.
The hope of winning by attrition
assumes another meaning in the case of revolution or subversive wars.
Insurrections are launched by minorities or by mobs without consideration of
the "relation of forces." Usually the rebels have no chance on paper.
Those in power command the army, the police: how can men without organization
and without arms prevail? For that matter, if the government obtains the
obedience of its servants, they do not prevail. But the Parisian rioters in
1830 and 1848 won because neither the soldiers of the regular army nor, in
1848, the garde nationale seemed
determined to fight and because, abandoned by part of the political elite, the
sovereigns themselves lost their courage, quickly abdicated, and went into
exile. . . . Let us avoid mythologies. Bare-handed rebels are irresistible when
those in power cannot or will not defend themselves. The Russian armies of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries effectively restored order in Warsaw and in Budapest.
The wars known today as
"subversive," for instance that of a population in a colonial regime
against the European power, are intermediary between civil and foreign wars. .
. . We bring together the problem raised by these subversive wars with that
which confronts the strategist who must establish his plan of war because the
rebel and the traditional leader must both deal with the alternative: to win or
not to lose. Yet there is a difference: in 1916, in 1917, even in 1918 the
supreme commanders on either side nursed hopes of destroying the enemy's power
to resist. Nivelle in the spring of 1917 and Ludendorff in the spring of 1918
counted on forcing the decision by a direct offensive. Both dreamed of an
annihilating victory in the Napoleonic style—a victory inaccessible to the
efforts of both camps until the end of the war, the attrition of one side, and
the reinforcement of the other by American forces deciding the outcome. In the
case of a subversive war in which one side controls administration and police,
assures order, and mobilizes regular armies, the disproportion of forces is
such that only one of the belligerents can dream of a total military success.
The conservative party has the desire to conquer, the rebel party the desire
not to let itself be eliminated or exterminated. Here again we find the typical
dissymmetry: one side wants to win, the other not to lose.
But this dissymmetry, which
formally resembles that of the Seven Years' War (Frederick II against an
overpowering coalition), has, fundamentally, an entirely different meaning.
Frederick hoped to obtain a compromise peace on the day his adversaries
recognized, if not the impossibility of beating him, at least the cost and the
time victory would have demanded. Not having been defeated, the King of Prussia
was in relative terms a victor: he would keep his previous conquests, and his
prestige would be increased in proportion to his heroism. Not having been
victorious, the coalition of the traditional great powers admitted the newcomer
on a basis of equality. But if the rebellious side—the Neo-Destour, the
Istiqlal—is not eliminated, but seizes power and obtains independence, it has
won a total victory in political terms, since it has achieved its objective,
the nation's independence, and since the protecting or colonial power has
ultimately abandoned the authority it had arrogated to itself. In this case it
would be enough for the rebel side not to lose militarily in order to gain
politically. But why does the conservative party accept its defeat politically
without having been defeated militarily? Why must it win decisively by
eliminating the rebellion if it wants not to lose?
To understand the political outcome
of a struggle that is indecisive in military terms, we must recall another
dissymmetry of the parties in a colonial conflict. The nationalists who demand
the independence of their nation (which has or has not existed in the past,
which lives or does not live in the hearts of the people) are more impassioned than
the governing powers of the colonial state. At least in our times they believe
in the sanctity of their cause more than their adversaries believe in the
legitimacy of their domination. Sixty years ago the Frenchman no more doubted
France's mission civilisatrice than
the Englishman questioned the "white man's burden." Today the
Frenchman doubts that he has the moral right to refuse the populations of
Africa and Asia a patrie (which
cannot be France), even if this patrie
is only a dream, even if it should prove to be incapable of any authentic
independence.
This dissymmetry is confirmed by
the change in the colonial balance-sheet. To administer a territory today is to
assume responsibility for its development. Most often, this responsibility
costs more than the enlarging of the market or the exploitation of natural
resources brings in. It is hardly surprising that the conservative party
eventually wearies of paying the price of pacification and of investments for
the benefit of the very populations that oppose it. A formally total defeat
(the rebel side has finally won the sovereignty it sought) is not necessarily
experienced as such by the ex-colonial power.
The apparent simplicity of the
stake—independence or not—conceals the complexity of the situation. If the
independence of the protectorate or the colony were considered by the imperial
state as an absolute evil, an irremediable defeat, we should return to the
elementary friend-enemy duality. The nationalist—Tunisian, Moroccan,
Algerian—would be the enemy, not occasional or even permanent, . . . but rather the absolute enemy, the one with whom no
reconciliation is possible, whose very existence is an aggression, and who
consequently must be exterminated. Delenda
est Carthago: the formula is that of absolute hostility, the hostility of
Rome and Carthage; . . . If Algeria were to have remained definitively French,
the nationalists seeking an independent Algeria would have had to be pitilessly
eliminated. If millions of Moslems were to become French in the middle of the
twentieth century, they would have had to be prevented even from dreaming of an
Algerian nation, and made to forget the witnesses "who got themselves
murdered."
Perhaps some Frenchmen would have
preferred this to be the case: reality is less logical, more human. The
colonial power conceives of various ways to retreat, whose consequences are not identical; some of these ways are in the long run preferable to
maintenance by force. The interests of the metropolitan country will be more or
less preserved depending on which men wield power in the ex-colony, promoted to
the rank of an independent state. Henceforth the imperial power is not in
conflict with a single, clearly defined enemy, the nationalist; it must choose,
delimit its enemy. In Indo-China, Western strategy should and probably could
have held the Communist nationalist to be the enemy, but not the nationalist
who was hostile or simply indifferent to communism. Such a decision would have
implied that France did not regard the independence of the Associated States as
fundamentally contrary to her interests. France would have had more
opportunities of winning the war by separating Communists and nationalists,
granting the latter's chief demands. But to the officers thinking in terms of
empire, this so-called rational strategy would have seemed sheer idiocy.
* * *
While Peace and War
did not displace Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics
Among Nations from atop the pecking order of IR theory in the early Cold
War, it always seemed to me the superior work. Of course, the thing is
gargantuan, coming in at just under 800 pages of rather small print, and thus impossible for undergraduate instruction. In his Memoirs, Aron dismisses the objection
that it was too difficult—it was just real long, he says—and he is defensive
about his relative inattention to transnational and economic forces. Though Leo
Strauss, in a private letter to Aron, called it “the best book on the subject,”
few American professors, Aron notes ruefully, seemed to like it—“many of them
remarked only on its defects or lacunae.”[3]
It was often, unfairly, dismissed as journalism—a word denoting inferior powers of ratiocination in many precincts of academe. So,
too, the American science of international politics was moving in a positivist and behavioralist direction not
hospitable to Aron’s pluralist methodology. One suspects that few graduate
students in IR would have it today among their assigned readings. Yet many of
Aron’s analyses remain surprisingly fresh and cogent, as the above extract suggests.
Here's an even better pic from Wikipedia:
[1] Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Translated from the French by Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (New York: Doubleday, 1966). Daniel Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson brought out a new edition, published by Transaction, in 2003. The extract is from pages 30-35 of the paperback edition published by Praeger in 1967.
[2]Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of
Political Reflection. Translated by George Holoch. Foreward by Henry A.
Kissinger (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990), pp. 302-304.
[3]
Ibid. The first photograph above is from the 1962 French edition published by Calmann-Levy in Paris, Paix et Guerre entre les nations.
