War and Diplomacy, Then and Now

The history of war is a history of failed diplomacy. By reflecting on past conflicts, we can begin to see how to avoid future ones.

Several weeks after the shock of Canada’s UNSC debacle, discussions concerning the larger implications of that disaster continue. And so they should. Among the many possible messages and interpretations, it is clearly time to turn the page on Pearsonian internationalism and to get on with the job of rebranding this country as the globalization nation.

Where else but in Canada could a professor named Naheed Nenshi get elected mayor in a place like Calgary? That happened only days after the electoral meltdown at the General Assembly in New York, and the two events taken together represent a powerful symbolic combination – an epochal coda, and, quite possibly, a historic new beginning.

So ... Out with the old, in with the new.

In the meantime, though, some reflections on diplomacy and war.

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In 1971, at the height of the Cold War, celebrated University of Toronto historian James Eayrs wrote Diplomacy and its Discontents. Among its many prescient passages, this one especially stands out:

[The] fact of modern international life accounting for the impotence of force and the weakness of great powers is … the heightened constraint of opinion and the nature of the only kind of war the great powers are free to fight. This is not big war, thermonuclear war. It is little war, guerrilla war. And for great powers no experience is more frustrating. It frustrates not least because the targets are so few, and so fleeting … [T]he enemy always knows more about what’s going on. After all, it’s his country … There’s always an intelligence gap in these conflicts ... [T]he great power is invariably disadvantaged …

Twentieth-century war is increasingly an instrument of doctrinal conviction. Doctrinal war, more than war fought for gain, or pre-emptive attack, is likely to be … brutal war. Crusades are notorious for their cruelty …

Those who serve the state as warriors are largely spared these stresses and strains. They are protected by their training and their ethic, which, more than in any other profession, cultivate the ideal of unquestioning obedience to higher command. The diplomatist may well experience malaise when required to execute policies which seem to him likely to result in war; for the onset of war is to him a signification of his failure.

War, as Eayrs observed, represents the failure of diplomacy, and recourse to violence is diplomacy’s antithesis. Distilled to its essence, and at its best, diplomacy embodies and gives voice to three of the most elemental human qualities: reason, understanding, and the capacity to communicate. It may be, in the words of retired American ambassador Charles Freeman, “the most difficult of the political arts”; it is certainly one of the most undervalued. Still, diplomacy helps keep the wheels on the civilizational cart, and it’s the key to approaching a perilous future by design rather than by default.

When considering these questions, most analysts of international relations have focused on the observation that over the course of the 20th century, both the nature of conflict and the motives that inspire it have been completely made over. And of course this is true. The First World War was a contest between nation-states fought by regular, uniformed soldiers in set-piece engagements. Today’s violent confrontations are more often assymetrical or intra-state, and may include the participation of child soldiers or shadowy mercenaries employed by contractors with political connections. In those days, men fought for the glory of their country, their empire, and their King, Tsar, or Kaiser. Today, men fight less for flags than for ideals, like freedom or social justice, for religious beliefs, over ethnic and tribal differences, or over control of resources like water, oil, and minerals. In the case of volunteer and private armies, the main motivation for participation might be a paycheque, or the mercenary lifestyle, or the prospect of leaving their past behind.

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It will soon be the 11th day of the 11th month: Remembrance Day. Back in 1914, the contest was profoundly state-centric and territorial, up-close and personal. Across opposing lines often only a few hundred yards apart you could sometimes see your enemy’s face. Fixed positions and trenches that barely moved over the course of years of attacks and counter-attacks ensured the loss of countless young lives. But yesterday’s bayonet charges on blood-drenched bunkers have been supplanted by a kind of carnage more random, impersonal, and disconnected – predator drones, cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions.

For mass audiences in today’s world, war has taken on the qualities of a remote-control video game. Death has become more anonymous.

The lines have blurred, and now anyone, anywhere can become a target.

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Historians are fond of reminding their readers that change is rarely experienced in isolation. Elements of continuity are almost always located nearby and are usually closely related. The industrial revolution of the mid to late 19th century – driven, not coincidentally, by developments in science and technology – ensured that early in the 20th century, warfare, too, would become mechanized and thus facilitate assembly-line killing on an epic scale. For the individual soldiers whose “whose names liveth for evermore,” or for the hundreds of thousands whose names are “known only unto God,” this meant going up and over, with a high likelihood of being shot, or gassed, blown to bits, or vaporized.

Then as now, military thinking had not caught up. In 1914, it remained mired largely in the doctrines of the pre-industrial past – essentially the use of large formations for purposes of taking and holding additional physical territory in order to tip the perceived balance of power in your direction. Similarly, those responsible for framing today’s strategic calculus have yet to move their mindset far enough beyond the Fulda Gap in Central Europe. Estimating the order of battle in conventional conflict, or even the throw-weights of ballistic missiles, seems somehow a more comforting task for war planners than contemplating counterinsurgency or how best to defend against suicide bombers or improvised explosive devices.

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Immediately after the war, from 1918 to 1920, the world was ravaged by a flu pandemic, against which it its exhausted population had few natural defences, and for which the response was hindered by the damage caused by the conflict. Total casualty numbers, estimated at about 50 million, far exceeded those incurred in the fighting.

There is undoubtedly a lesson there, too, especially a propos the grave risks associated with the failure to prepare for unanticipated or unconventional threats, not least those with their roots in science and their branches in technology. That theme, and discussions on the role of diplomacy such as those held recently at the 2010 Canadian Science Conference, merit much more sustained reflection.