Commentary No. 17, June 1, 1999
"Wars, unwinnable and interminable"
The NATO attack on Yugoslavia has led to two kinds of debates. One is moral: Should NATO bomb Yugoslavia? But the second is pragmatic: Can NATO win the war? Or, can it win the war if all it does is bomb Yugoslavia? What makes wars winnable, and why have wars seemed more difficult to win, and therefore to end, in recent years?
What it takes to win a war has always been a combination of superior military capacity plus the willpower to pay the price of winning the war. The U.S. certainly has superior military capacity to Yugoslavia, as it does to Iraq. Everyone agrees that, at the present moment, the U.S. has superior military capacity to all other states, and certainly to any which is, or might be, a potential military opponent. But of course, the price of winning a war against Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or North Korea, not to speak of Russia or China, is high - very high.
No doubt, the price of war is high on the other side, too. In the two wars in which the U.S. is currently involved - Yugoslavia and Iraq (for the war with Iraq continues daily) - the other side has apparently been willing to pay the price, the price of being bombed and boycotted. The U.S. thus far has not been willing to pay the price of using land forces (and therefore losing substantial numbers of lives) in either case. So what we have had in Iraq and what we seem to be having in Yugoslavia is an interminable, unwinnable struggle.
Of course, these are not the only interminable wars that are going on. Among the most active wars at the moment are the continuing war in Kashmir, which has just started again; the war in Timor; the war in the Congo, in which the troops of at least seven other African countries have been involved; the murderous civil wars in the Sudan, Congo/Brazzaville, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia; the renewed struggle between Ethiopia and Eritrea. And then there are the wars that are momentarily relatively quiet but could reerupt at any moment: Cambodia; Israel and the Arab world; northern Ireland; Rwanda and Burundi; various parts of the Caucasus.
There is however a difference between the list of "local" or civil wars on the one hand and the wars that pit U.S. versus other countries. In the case of the former, the reason so many of the wars are interminable is that neither side commands truly greater force than the other and the rest of the world is content to stand by and permit the wars. In the case of the wars that pit the U.S. versus other countries, the explanation cannot be that, since the U.S. does in fact command greater force than the other countries. The explanation has to lie in the U.S. attitude towards the wars.
How does the U.S. feel about waging such wars? On the one hand, the United States considers that it the world's "only superpower" and it is proud of this appellation. It wants to be the only superpower. It feels it deserves to be, and it trusts itself with the wise use of its power. It feels it is morally superior to most of the world, and surely to all those countries with which it might engage in warfare. It feels it symbolizes virtue in government, and is (or ought to be) a model for the rest of the world. It therefore resents any country (even close allies) who challenge this moral vision and this evaluation of the United States role in the world-system. So, when a Saddam Hussein or a Slobodan Milosevic defies the United States openly, the U.S. government usually feels it has to react. And in those cases that the government decides that it is wiser to ignore such defiance at a particular moment, one can be sure that the opposition party in the U.S. will shout loudly about the failure of the existing government to defend U.S. honor and therefore U.S. interests. We can see this happening right now in terms of U.S.-Chinese relations, where Clinton is trying to play down differences and the Republicans are trying to play them up.
There is in addition another consideration, probably far more important than the self-image of the U.S. Real power in the world-system involves getting one's way - by persuasion when one can, by intimidation when one can't persuade. The threat of force by the world's only superpower is a major political weapon. But of course, threats only work when opponents believe them, or believe them at least in part. It is a game of poker. From time to time, the opponents call the bluff, to see what will happen. In point of fact, what has happened in the last 50 years is that sometimes the U.S. has carried out its threat, and other times it has not. It has a spotty record, which thereupon becomes a factor in everyone's calculations. We all worry about reading the signals right. Still today, there is debate about whether Acheson's speech in 1950 was a factor in persuading the North Koreans that the U.S. would not enter a Korean war, or whether the U.S. ambassador's talk with Saddam Hussein in 1992 was a factor in persuading him that the U.S. would not respond to an invasion of Kuwait.
Would not then the simplest policy for the U.S. be not merely to flex its muscles, but to use them? Well, no. First of all, there are endless conflicts around the world, and the U.S. does not begin to have the money or the power to enter all of them militarily. It must pick and choose. And secondly, those it has entered have been extraordinarily costly in lives and money. The Korean War ended with a truce line virtually at the point where it was before the war began. The Vietnam war was a major defeat for the U.S. despite its military superiority. The incursion into Lebanon in the early 1980's was a defeat. The greatest military triumph of the U.S. since the Second World War has been its invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island with an army smaller than the police force of a tenth-rate U.S. city.
Wars by a superpower require wide public support. U.S. public support would have been there no doubt for a war with the Soviet Union, had the U.S. dared to wage one. But in that case the other condition was missing, the necessary military superiority. And for wars with anyone else, U.S. popular support is at best lukewarm. Vietnam was justified as a war against a Communist country, hence a proxy for a war with the Soviet Union. And even then, only half the country went along.
So what can a U.S. government do? It can fight wars on the cheap - with spectacular airpower and no ground troops, hence no loss of life. And it can try not even to pay for them, so that they are painless to the U.S. public. This is the basic constraint when the U.S. faces Yugoslavia, Iraq, North Korea, or China. Can this constraint be overcome? Not really, because the U.S. is struggling simultaneously to maintain an economic edge over western Europe and Japan and is struggling to keep civil strife from breaking out in the U.S. It does not have the resources or the political energy to do more than it is presently doing. And what it is presently doing is a formula for interminable, unwinnable wars, that will contribute further to creating anarchy in the world-system, with the consequence of continuing breakdown of the legitimacy of the state structures, everywhere.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
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