London -- Last week's reported incident at sea, when a U.S. aircraft carrier and a Chinese nuclear submarine squared off in international waters, is a vivid reminder of the dangers of big-power politics, even at a time when there appears no apparent reason for conflict.
Military establishments will always be tempted to fill a vacuum, and one side's strength will always be the excuse for another side's build-up. During the Cold War the bi-polar relationship between Moscow and Washington had a certain symmetry, and both sides worked pretty hard to keep it that way.
These days China is becoming a regional military power of consequence. So is India, with Indonesia not too far behind. Israel and Egypt have long been local heavyweights, and South Africa seems determined to be as militarily strong under black rule as it was under white. In this multipolar world, with regional powers carrying stocks of armaments that would have been the envy of European generals in the 1940s, keeping the peace cannot be taken for granted. There is a dangerous complacency in passively accepting the utility of nuclear deterrence or the preparedness and staying power of (primarily) American conventional overseas deployments.
Recent essays by two of our better military thinkers discuss the uses of military power. The first, by the distinguished war historian, Michael Howard, appears in the current issue of Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Mr. Howard reminds us how important American power was in containing the Soviet Union until the Western market-economy model had time to do its stuff and the Marxist-Leninist economies had enough rope to hang themselves. Western military strength did not win the Cold War, but it made victory possible by providing a framework for economic stability and parliamentary progress, from which all Western nations benefited -- and quite a few Third World nations, too.
Military power has three functions, Mr. Howard argues -- deterrence, compliance and reassurance. Reassurance is particularly necessary in a Europe that has still not settled down after the end of the Cold War. It is needed in the Pacific, where peace and prosperity depend, not on any regional balance (that would be both too complicated and too destabilizing), but on the presence of a benign and dispassionate U.S. whose military capacity can outclass any local power. The Chinese, despite this latest, probably accidental, confrontation, are among the first to realize this. In the Middle East, a U.S. military presence continues to be necessary, as its removal would open a Pandora's box of regional wars, which would be unlikely to remain regional.
Like it or not, these roles have to be played out mainly by the United States. "Nobody else wants the job. Nobody else could do it effectively."
The weakness in this otherwise faultless survey is that Mr. Howard, like so many, is still stuck in the rut of nuclear-deterrence theory. He seems to think what was good for the Soviet goose will be good for the up-and-coming Third World ganders of today.
An old-time arms-controller, Barry Blechman, an adviser to the former U.S. Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, writing jointly with Cathleen Fisher in Foreign Policy, reconsiders nuclear deterrence. "The U.S. seeks to convince would-be proliferators that nuclear weapons are neither legitimate nor an effective means of protecting national security," they write. "Yet U.S. foreign and defense policies telegraph exactly the opposite message. American nuclear reliance makes efforts to avoid proliferation appear self-serving and insincere."
Nuclear weapons are of little use in dealing with the types of
dangers presented by Saddam Hussein, Somalia, Haiti and North Korea. Meanwhile, continued reliance on them makes the chance of accident or inadvertent use more likely and gives a false incentive to would-be nuclear powers. American conventional abilities are not only sufficient in themselves to deter or deal with problems abroad, they are also usable, as nuclear weapons are not.
Mr. Blechman and Ms. Fisher are not overnight unilateral nuclear disarmers, but they do believe that getting rid of all nuclear weapons from all countries should be a major U.S. objective -- which it clearly isn't. The last Western leader to say it was -- Ronald Reagan.
B6 Jonathan Power writes a column on the Third World.