After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century

4. ARMS AND AFFLUENCE

63 4❖ ARMS AND AFFLUENCE If you would have wealth, prepare for war. —Unattributed Whatever happened to World War III? For almost forty years, two great military alliances faced off across a line drawn through the center of a middling-sized peninsula, ready to destroy the world at a moment’s notice in order to save it. John Lewis Gaddis (1987) called this time the “Long Peace,” Mary Kaldor (1990), “the imaginary war.”1 When it was over, a few sentimentalists warned that we would soon miss it, and tried to tell us why (Mearsheimer, 1990a, 1990b). For many—especially the 20 or 30 million who died in Third World wars— the violence was only too real. For other billions, there was a peace of sorts, purchased only at great cost (Schwartz, 1998) and perpetual terror. For the United States and its allies, it was a time of great opportunity and prosperity. The 10 trillion or more dollars expended on the Long Peace brought a period of unprecedented economic growth and wealth. Affluence, it often seemed, was possible only with arms. But even imagined wars must end (Iklé, 1971). Those that exist in the fevered fantasies of war gamers and war-game writers can continue on computer monitors everywhere but, after a time, those played 64 Chapter 4 out by nuclear strategists within the Beltway, or by Special Forces in far-off countries begin to lose their raison d’être as well as their authority and ability to discipline when the “big one” does not come to pass as threatened. If threats are to retain their power to terrorize, therefore, they must be reimagined and fought, over and over, through words, through symbols and images, through languages and rhetorics. World War III was such a war. Although it never took place, it was always about to break out. Peace became a fragile interregnum of not-war. Preparations for the imaginary war were extensive and, in the end, the war that never happened was extravagantly expensive. A poorer world could not have afforded the peace of World War III, but it was that peace that made the West so rich that it could afford to imagine fighting World War III in Europe (and to actually fight it at a much lower level in other parts of the world). These days, there is no shortage of wars, despite the end of the Cold War. But these are minor wars, relatively speaking. Big wars are too expensive to wage in human terms, although they have also become too costly not to imagine. No U.S. president, present or future, could afford the political costs of even a fraction of the fifty thousand American deaths suffered in Vietnam (apparently, the millions of Vietnamese who died carried no such costs for American presidents). At the same time, neither could a U.S. president, present or future, afford the political costs of abandoning preparations for the “big one.”2 The Gulf War cost more than $50 billion, but at a loss of less than two hundred American lives (more died in accidents before and after the fighting than in actual combat). The immediate costs of the war were paid for largely through grants from allies; the strategy, underlying technology, and resulting weaponry, however, were the products of the imagined World War III. In the short term, the Gulf War gave no great boost to the U.S. economy; in the longer term, the enduring “problem” of Iraq has provided a justification for not abandoning imagined wars. Pace Clausewitz, imagined war is the continuation of economics by other means. So, what does this mean for the future of war? The literature is vast and growing. For some, the next enemy has been chosen, and the coming war already imagined (Bernstein and Munro, 1997). But most theorists and journalists of war are like the fabled drunk, looking for opponents in the well-lit places, rather than in the shadows. For them, Arms and Affluence 65 prevention of major wars through reliance on nukes, cruise missiles, and the electronic battlefield remain paramount (Cohen, 1996). Yet, such wars are the least likely. Moreover, most commentators seem to remain fascinated by the kill rather than the whip, by missile defense rather than mental offense. Few analysts of war bother to ask why a war might begin or, for that matter, whether the kinds of wet-dream...