The invention of peace

You mention a few specific individuals in the book -- along with Napoleon and Hitler, you mention Henry Kissinger. I was interested in that, especially in light of the two articles by Christopher Hitchens accusing Kissinger of war crimes that recently appeared in Harper's.

Henry Kissinger was Machiavellian in both the best and the worst senses of the word. He believed in the necessity for his country to be strong. But also, if the peace was to be preserved, then there had to be the creation of a concert of powers. He did not believe that the United States alone could impose peace on the rest of the world, nor did he believe, being a skeptical European, that the Americans were more virtuous than anyone else. He was concerned with re-creating the old European balance of power by balancing the Russians against the Chinese against the Europeans against the Japanese. He believed that that consortium of powers would be able to keep the peace. He didn't regard the Russian or the Chinese leadership as inherently evil but, rather, as people with whom you had to do business. It certainly did not mean that the United States should abstain from doing disagreeable things if it was necessary for policy. You did them, but you best not let anyone know anything about it.

Kissinger was a devil figure for good liberals who believe that peace can be kept by purely virtuous means. He's also a devil figure for old-fashioned patriotic Americans who couldn't begin to understand what he was doing talking to these Russian and Chinese leaders. But he was entirely consistent in his policy, and it is arguable that on the whole, thanks to opening up better relations with both the Russians and the Chinese, he in the end did a great deal more good than harm.

Throughout the book, you mark the emergence of these new world orders. The Cold War was a faceoff between two different ideas of a world order. Why didn't the Cold War go hot?

Neither side really wanted to fight. Both of them had had very disagreeable experiences in World War II. That went for the Russians more intensely than it did for the West. The Europeans after World War II just were not prepared to fight any more wars if they could avoid it. The United States, which had been only marginally involved in World War I and had not really suffered much in World War II, still preserved traditional patriotic commitment in being prepared, at least in principle, to make heavy sacrifices for the country. But the experience of Vietnam was so disillusioning and so disagreeable that after that even Americans found themselves as cautious and unwilling to get involved in a serious conflict as their European allies. That still remains the case.

Do you think people have the same sort of patriotism that they once had?

It varies from state to state. In the United States, there is still a very, very strong feeling of patriotism and willingness to serve. But elsewhere, and especially in Europe, the old loyalties to the nation-state have disintegrated as a result of the two world wars. In countries like Germany and Italy that suffered so terribly from the two world wars, there's no longer the sense that the young manhood of the nation should be trained for war. The disappearance and downplaying of the whole concept of the nation-state have left a vacuum of loyalties on the part of many of its inhabitants.

If there were to be a war in which civilians in Britain or the United States or France were under the kind of bombardment and risk of death that, for example, the Israelis are under now, I honestly don't know whether it would be a disintegrating or a reintegrating factor. But the fact that we have not been under that kind of threat or pressure for many decades now has very much eroded the sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice which did distinguish our countries in World Wars I and II.

Now we are in what you call a post-heroic age. There isn't face-to-face fighting and we keep our fighting at a distance; modern weaponry enables us to fire at a distance.

In World War II and all previous wars, if you were engaging the adversary, even if you couldn't see him, he could kill you. Now you have a situation in which you -- by you I mean the United States -- can fire off Tomahawk missiles with a range of hundreds or thousands of miles without the faintest possibility of anybody getting back at you. That does create an entirely new attitude toward war. It chimes in with the general development in Western society of risk avoidance -- the belief in the undesirability of death or of being wounded and the sense that governments have the right and the duty to save their peoples from risk and to save them from death. That certainly was not the attitude 100 years ago, let alone 200 years ago, when it was regarded as the duty of people to fight and die for their country and the right of government to ask them to do so.

What do you think is the possibility of peace or full-scale war for the 21st century?

Oh, a century is a very long time. When historians prophesy about the future, the one thing that history teaches us is that they will fall flat on their faces and get it wrong. All that one can say is that if we act as if peace were necessary and possible, we are more likely to achieve it than if we don't.

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