'The revenge of the Melians' revisited

By Ken Weisbrode

Best Defense department
of Thucydidian analysis

Some months after the 9/11 attacks the diplomatic historian Paul
Schroeder published an article in The
National Interest with the title, "The
Risks of Victory: An Historian's Provocation." He posed a simple question
that has been asked many times: How does a minor crisis lead to a major war? He
considered the possibility that the 9/11 attacks would result in something far
worse, and the analogy he gave was to the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in 1914.

Another Great War has not taken place, and even if it were to
happen in the near future, it would be difficult at this point to claim that
the fuse for it was lit on September 2001. Much has happened since in Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Schroeder's provocation
should still be taken seriously. We recall that not once during the entire Cold
War (with the partial exception of Soviet pilots in the Korean War) did
soldiers of the two main protagonists fire on one another. But both superpowers
were engaged in armed conflict to one degree or another during the entire
course of the conflict. The remarkable thing is that none of these smaller wars
or crises escalated to an all-out hot war between the superpowers.

The consensus seems to be that nuclear weapons and the doctrine of
mutually assured destruction are primarily responsible for that. This may be
true but there is no way to prove it. We are told that John F. Kennedy had the
1914 scenario in mind (thanks to his reading of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August)
during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War calculus may have been reversed whereby
nuclear weapons and the prestige associated with deterrence made escalation
more, rather than less, likely in this instance.

A higher cost attributed to escalation, in other words, does not
do away with Schroeder's basic question. How and why do major powers make
crises worse? Political scientists and others have been testing hypotheses for
a long time, but a general blueprint still eludes us. One reason may be that
their models emphasize the roles of major actors over minor ones. For nearly a
century historians have debated whether Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia or the
"system" was most responsible for the escalation leading to World War I.

Tom has recently reminded us to ask who
won the Peloponnesian War and, by implication, who lost the most after
starting it. Our eyes are trained to hunt for underlying structural conditions,
"the long fuse," and great, zero-sum rivalries.

Overlooked in many of these accounts are the active and sometimes
dominant roles of instigators: Corcyreans, Serbs, Cubans, et al. These second-
and even third-tier revisionist powers tend to follow a different, more
opportunistic calculus. They too -- potentially -- have everything to lose, but also
much more to gain, they must imagine, from provoking a war among much bigger
powers. The burden falls upon the latter to
master the ways of defusing crises before it is too late.