A Durable Peace (40 page)

I answer this question with a clear affirmative. This may sound surprising in view of what I have presented thus far, but
there is no need for either surprise or despair. It is possible to reach peace in the Middle East, provided that we know what
kind of peace it is we are setting out to achieve.

The most important step is to recognize that there are two kinds of peace. The first is the kind we mean when we use the word
peace
in the West: open borders, commerce, tourism, mutual exchange and cooperation in areas such as science, education, culture,
the environment, the curtailment of hostile propaganda, the absence of fortifications and standing armies, the elimination
of military preparations and preparedness, and above
all, the absolute certainty of the absence of any aspiration for armed conflict. This is the kind of peace that prevails in
North America between the United States and Canada, the United States and Mexico, and for that matter between Canada and Mexico.
It is the kind of peace prevailing among the countries of Western Europe, where you can literally cross the border from one
state to another without noticing it until you actually have to buy something. (With the introduction of a common European
currency, that too may be changing.)

This is not to say that there are no conflicts, even acute ones, among these states. Canada regularly accuses the United States
of polluting its forests with acid rain that American industry produces across the border. The United States has serious problems
with drug smuggling along the Mexican border, not to speak of the entry of millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico into
American territory. In fact, if you scratch the surface, you will find a multitude of grievances over trade imbalances, environmental
problems, border controls, and the like harbored by each of these states against each of its neighbors. In addition, there
are often national jealousies and bigotries, as well as historical rivalries whose psychological dust has not yet settled
and that whirl up again at any time.

Yet clearly these nations are irrevocably at peace with one another, because just as clearly they will not resort to war to
settle any of these disputes. This is not because of a balance of power and the fear of the response that armed action might
elicit from their neighbors. Certainly the more powerful among them would have no military difficulty in squashing their neighbors.
But the reason they will not resort to force is that it is simply unthinkable—because they are immersed in a physical, psychological,
and political state of peace.

There is one attribute common to all countries that are in such a state of peace: They are democracies. They share a system
of values that is inherently antagonistic to the initiation of the use of force. In this century, modern democracies have
shown a marked
reluctance to initiate wars. This is not to say that they have not
responded
to attacks, impending or actual. But even these responses, whenever they required a full-scale war (as opposed to a limited
operation of a few days’ duration), have generally been undertaken only with exceeding caution. Witness, for example, the
hesitation of the United States to enter World War I (joining only in the last year of the war, 1917), World War II (its fleet
in Pearl Harbor had to be bombed first by the Japanese, despite the obvious threat posed by Hitler), and the Gulf War (in
which the United States undertook a campaign to reverse naked aggression only after months of agonizing domestic debate).
Even the Vietnam War, which many believe the United States entered too hastily, was characterized throughout by a marked ambivalence
as to whether the war should be prosecuted, and ended with an American withdrawal as a consequence of growing domestic opposition.
Similar examples can be drawn from the democracies of Western Europe. Indeed, in the postcolonial world it is difficult to
provide examples in which democratic nations have pursued unprovoked aggression against other nations and have done so in
full-scale war.

One reason for this is that democracies require the consent of the governed to go to war, and that is not easy to secure.
Parents will not readily vote for a government that endangers their sons in unnecessary military adventures. But there is
a second reason connected to the first that is less obvious and that relates to the inherent predisposition of democratic
societies against violence. After all, within a democracy, the use of force is strictly limited and applied only against violators
of the law. Within the law there is more than enough room for conflict, competition, and contest. The sharper a dispute, the
more encompassing the scope of the disagreement, the more likely it is to become an issue on the agenda of national elections.
In other words, such confrontations are settled by ballots, not bullets. Other, lesser conflicts are resolved in parliamentary
compromises or are adjudicated in the courts. In fact, the whole idea of politics in democratic states is the
nonviolent
resolution of conflict—not harmonious agreement,
not even tolerable disagreement, but the dynamic reconciliation of opposing views and conflicting interests. The point is
that this dynamic reconciliation is always peaceful; otherwise, the democracy is endangered internally.

It is not surprising, therefore, that this built-in psychological inclination toward “conflict resolution” (a social science
jargonism that happens to be useful in this case) is so ingrained in the minds of the citizens of democracies and their governments
that they are inclined to apply it to
all
disputes. That is,
democracies tend to resolve their external disputes the way they resolve their internal ones:
by argument, even by heated argument, by cajoling, by applying various pressures, and very often by compromise—but
not
by resorting to force in the first instance, or even in the second or third. The peaceful tendencies of democratic governments
are therefore a product of the practical limits that their electorates impose and of the moral constraints that the system
of values shared by the entire citizenry sets upon them.

The desire for this kind of peace—
the peace of democracies
—may be common in the West, but it suffers from one main drawback: It is not necessarily common elsewhere. In fact, since
modern democracies have evolved only in the last two centuries, this “internally enforced” peace, deriving from built-in reluctance
of the citizenry to go to war, is rather new in the history of nations and in the history of conflict. (The warlike disposition
of some of the “democractic” city-states of ancient Greece does not alter this fact, since neither their value systems nor
the regimes in question were comparable to those of modern democracies.) Until very recently, we should remember, most of
the world was composed not of democracies but of despotisms of one shade or another, and despots are under none of the inhibitions
and constraints described above. They certainly have no upcoming elections they have to consider carefully.

Worse, they exhibit innate tendencies opposed to those found in the democracies. For dictatorships, too, tend to resolve their
external disputes the way they resolve their internal ones, except
that here this tendency leads them toward, and not away from, the use of force. The very definition of dictatorship is the
maintenance of internal power not by popular consent but by the use of force or threats of violence, a principle that despots
are naturally inclined to extend to their foreign disputes as well. This is why in the last century virtually all the major
wars and most of the minor ones have been launched by dictatorships.

This issue used to be hotly contested before the fall of Communism in Russia. Many people in the West explained away the Soviet
Union’s aggressive politics as “defensive” in nature, as they did the aggression that the Soviet Union encouraged among its
clients around the world. This is no longer a plausible argument, since even before the final collapse of the Soviet Union,
Soviet leaders occasionally admitted the unprovoked nature of their military escapades, embarrassing their former apologists
in the West. Similarly, the attacks of international terrorism against the democracies were initiated by a coalition of Middle
Eastern and East European dictatorships, and the full scope of their involvement in terrorism is only now being revealed.

We can see the relationship between forms of government and the proclivity for war by looking at the cases of countries that
changed from democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy. It is not happenstance that when such countries had military
governments, they tended to initiate military action to achieve their national aspirations. The Falkland Islands, however
tenaciously most Argentineans claimed them to be Argentinean territory, were physically seized when a military dictatorship
ruled Argentina. Its democratic successor later agreed to enter political negotiations with Britain to resolve the dispute.
Similarly, it was the regime of the colonels in Greece that sparked the Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus in 1975. The subsequent
democratization of both Greece and Turkey has not ended the dispute but has diminished the prospects for a military confrontation.
The armed conflict in and around Nicaragua, which seemed malignant and interminable, disappeared
virtually overnight with the establishment of a democratic government in Managua.

This formulation may not be foolproof, and here and there an exception may be adduced. But few would question the powerful
pattern that emerges: Democracies tend toward peace, while despotisms tend toward war. Does this mean that a world inhabited
by despotisms cannot have peace? Immanuel Kant may have been the first to grapple with this question in his essay “Perpetual
Peace,” written in 1795, an age that saw very few democracies. Kant stressed the predominance of the first factor I described—the
restraining influence of a concerned electorate—as the decisive factor for keeping the international peace:

If, as is inevitably the case under [a democratic] constitution, the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether
or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise.
For this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the
costs of the war from their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having
to take upon themselves a burden of debt which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on account of the
constant threat of new wars.

Without democratic government, argued Kant, it is child’s play to slide into war over and over again:

But under a [despotic] constitution… it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow
citizen, but the owner of the state, and war will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts,
pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without any significant reason, as a kind of
amusement, and unconcernedly leave it to the diplomatic corps
(who are always ready for such purposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety… [The] glory of its ruler consists in
his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern them, while he need
not himself incur any danger whatsoever.
¹

Since the examples of Stalin and Hitler and their less successful would-be imitators were not available to Kant (Napoleon
was just starting out), it must be admitted that his assessment of the problem was prophetically precise. His solution was
to advocate a world federation of free countries strong enough to compel the arbitration of disputes instead of war. As the
League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, show, such federations fall apart or are of limited use when they
include dictators who have the capacity to manipulate the organization in pursuit of their next conquest.

The issue for democracies is therefore this: how to keep the peace when they are engaged in conflicts with dictatorships.
(For obvious reasons there is far less need to ask how to keep the peace when they are in conflict with another democracy.)
The experience of the last two centuries tells us that it is indeed possible to maintain peace under such conditions.

In the absence of the internal restraints that prevent democracies from going to war, the inclinations of dictatorship in
this direction can nevertheless be controlled by the application of
external
constraints. Even the most predatory of tyrants can be deterred from using his state to wage war if it is clear to him that
he will lose power, land, honor, control of his country, and perhaps his own life if he persists in warmongering. Historically,
this idea has been given the name of “balance of power,” and most recently, in the catchy slogan of the Reagan era, “peace
through strength.” But the underlying idea is the same, and it is sound. As long as you are faced with a dictatorial adversary,
you must maintain sufficient strength to deter him from going to war. By doing so, you can at least obtain the
peace of deterrence.
But if you let
down your defenses, or if it is even thought that you are letting them down, you invite war, not peace.

This was the tragic lesson of the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been carefully applied to Western policy
in the second half. The basic difficulty for the democracies early in the century was in distinguishing the peace of democracies
from the peace of deterrence, and the greatest tragedies of the century occurred when this distinction was not made. In 1925,
the West pushed to have all military powers sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war forever. The democracies seriously
believed that they could refrain from maintaining their armed forces and that dictators would do the same. While Japan and
Italy, and later Germany, ignored the treaty they had signed and pursued a military buildup that enabled them to invade other
countries, the West continued to abide by its pledge until the eve of World War II.