War and Peace (Not Tolstoy!)

Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War (and the Preservation of Peace) is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for several months. Now that we're out at sea, with a tenuous internet connection that leaves me little opportunity for time-wasting, I've finally gotten around to it.

It's a series of case studies- not of wars themselves, but of several situations that led to wars. Kagan jumps from the ancient world (the Pelopennesian War between Athens and Sparta, and the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage) to the 20th century with both World Wars. He finishes, optimistically (?) with the Cuban Missle Crisis.

(Well, it's optimistic in the sense that war didn't break out. Though Kagan's picture of the crisis is very different from what I've read before.)

Kagan's points are clear and pretty well-established in his work here. We think of war as an interruption of the natural state of things; but it's not. War historically is much more common than times of peace. We are prone to conflict.

Peace, Kagan says, doesn't exist without someone making an effort to maintain it. It requires proactive behavior, diplomatic skill, and political will; and even then it may fail.

It fails because all nations pursue three things: honor, interests, and security. These are unstable, insatiable pursuits; no matter how much you have, you can never really be done with them. And they often conflict with other nations' pursuits; so it comes to war to resolve them.

Kagan's study of honor was perhaps the most interesting part of the book. He uses the term to cover prestige, respect, reputation; these psychological forces are a real form of power, and nations will fight to keep them. (Paradoxically, if they don't, the result may also be war: because a nation that loses the respect of others will have to fight to prove its strength. Its diplomacy won't be taken seriously on its own merits.)

There's a lot here I still have to digest. But Kagan has shaped and reshaped a lot of how I view international relations.