Abstract
The dialogue between morality and politics varies in its complexity depending on the period, while their trajectories shift as each of the terms transforms itself. They form a couple; they are also the dual face of a single event. The modalities of the relationship are many and varied. There are at least two, as I have come to realize at the end of these reflections on war. We have, first, the “accountability” approach: institutions are required to give an explanation of behavior that goes back to the more or less distant past (from a few weeks to several centuries) and to justify their decisions, on the basis, mainly, of their collective responsibility. This is a dynamic oriented toward the past. Things are different today. Preventive war is the most “futuristic” of wars. It is based on anticipatory scenarios, requires the use of ever-renewing technologies, and aims to change the world to bring about a better future. Justification, in this case, is a priori justification. Its point of application has shifted. There are clearly pendulum swings between these two postures; the one leads to the other.
“Your crystal ball worked better than mine.”
Henry Kissinger1
“The strategist of tomorrow may well look more like a meteorologist.”
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations2
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Notes
Cited in Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 134.
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, “The Impact of Globalization on Strategy,” Survival 40 (Winter 1998–1999): 14.
Robert Litwak, “The New Calculus of Preemption,” Survival 44, no. 4 (Winter 2002–2003): 53–79. Robert Litwak, a counter-proliferation specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, subsequently expands on his thinking in a work that bears on the notion of regime change and draws on other examples, including Iran and North Korea.
See Robert Litwak, Regime Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Edward Luttwak, “Three Reasons not to Bomb Iran—Yet,” Commentary 121, no. 5 (May 2006): 21–28. Luttwak is the author of many works on war. He works as a senior research associate in a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington.
For other historical comparisons, see Scott Silverstone, Preventive War and American Democracy, (New York: Routledge, 2007).
See also Lyle J. Goldstein, Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Cited in Kora Andrieu, Preemption in the Bush Doctrine: Just War or Moral Crusade? (Graduate Center of the City University of New York, typescript, 2006), 9.
See the definitions and typology set out by Jack Gibbs in “Norms The Problem of Definition and Classification,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 5 (March 1965): 586–594.
This is what is advocated by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane. See Robert Keohane and Allen Buchanan, “The Preventive Use of Force: a Cosmopolitan Institutional Perspective,” Ethics and International Affairs 18, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1–22.
Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Westport: Praeger, 1965).
André Beaufre, Bâtir l’avenir (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), see particularly the Chapter “L’avenir technologique”;
Raymond Aron, Les Guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). See, in particular, the Chapters “La surprise technologique” and “Logique et hasards.” Thanks are due to Pierre Hassner for pointing out these lines of research.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, David Newman, and Alvin Rabushka, Forecasting Political Events: the Future of Hong Kong (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
For game theory applied to international conflicts, and particularly asymmetric warfare, see a work produced by an Israeli army mathematician, Haim Assa, and a retired vice-admiral, Yedidia Groll-Yaari: Diffused Warfare: The Concept of Virtual Mass (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2007).
The role of mathematicians in the American armed forces goes back at least as far as 1942 when statistical studies of past operations enabled the air force to maximize the effects of its bombing (efficiency increased by 1,000%). Saul I. Gass and Arjang A. Assad, An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History (Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 2004), p. 53.
US Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, Requirements Planning for Development, Test, Evaluation, and Impact on Readiness of Training Simulators and Devices, Project 5AB–0070.00, Appendix D, January 10, 1997. See Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex” in Helmar Schramm et al. (eds), Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 427–456.
Pierre Hassner, “Violence, rationalité, incertitude,” Revue française de science politique, December 1964. Reprinted in La Violence et la Paix (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
Herman Kahn created the Hudson Institute in 1961 after working at RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1960. Herman Kahn, “The Alternative World: Future Approaches,” in New Approaches to International Relations, (ed.) Morton Kaplan (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1968), pp. 83–136.
John R. Freeman and Brian L. Job, “Scientific Forecasts in International Relations. Problems of Definition and Epistemology,” International Studies Quarterly 23, no. 1 (March 1979): 113–143.
John Gordon IV and Brian Nichiporuk, Alternative Futures and Their Implications for Army Modernization (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2003), p. 59.
Steven Bernstein et al. “God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Sciences to an Unpredictable World,” European Journal of International Relations, 6, no. 43 (2000): 55.
John Murphy, The US and the Rule of Law in International Afffairs (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 359.
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© 2013 Ariel Colonomos and Éditions Denoël
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Colonomos, A. (2013). Possible Worlds. In: The Gamble of War. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137018953_8
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