Thomas Schelling, who taught economics at Yale and later Harvard, understood the relationship between technical advances in the development of weaponry and the ability of such weaponry to shape political outcomes. “To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear, “War is
...more
