The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for NATO
Warrant for War Project Launches “The NATO Challenge”
Today, the Warrant for War Research Project has oficially launched The NATO Challenge – a unique attempt to develop a grass-roots, global civil society solution to perhaps the most important problem we face in the Twenty-First Century: How can we help protect human beings across the globe whose rights and lives are arbitrarily threatened by humanitarian and environmental disasters?
If, after reading the outline of The NATO Challenge below you are interested to participate, please CLICK HERE to access the Warrant for War Wicki, register and participate in this innovative and important global civil society experiment.
The Quest: How can we help protect human beings across the globe whose rights and lives are arbitrarily threatened by humanitarian and environmental disasters?
The Problem: The United Nations, originally designed to protect the sovereignty of its member states, usually cannot act in a timely and effective manner in situations of crisis; and states or organizations willing and able to so act usually do not receive UN approval. Thus we are caught in a double bind: legitimate UN impotence or illegitimate state / coalition intervention. This vicious circle must be broken.
The Challenge: Draft the Charter of a new level of supranational governance entrusted with the protection of human security in all its forms.
The Means: The Charter will be drafted under a Creative Commons license by means of a bottom-up approach allowing any and all contributions and suggestions from any individual regardless of race, religion, residence, nationality, creed or profession.
The Rationale: The ongoing global media and communications revolutions is increasingly empowering an emerging global civil society – us! – to organize ourselves and take charge of our own lives not only in our own neighborhoods, regions and countries, but also globally. Only by actively participating in this Challenge can we create the required pressure to develop and implement this new level of governance and endow it with the necessary legitimacy to ensure its adoption and implementation. Human security is too important for all our futures to be left solely in the hands of professional politicians and expert academics. We must get involved and make a difference!
The Rules:
1. The Charter must be democratic (it must allow for some form of direct citizen participation).
2. The Charter must be reflexive (not only democratic, but arrived at and implemented democratically).
3. The Charter must be effective (decisions must be made and implemented in practice).
4. The Charter must be inclusive (it cannot exclude anyone who wishes to participate).
5. The Charter must be tolerant (it must respect diversity in all its forms).
6. The Charter must be accountable (as long as some members are themselves not democratically governed, they may participate in debates, but will have no votes in the decision-making process).
7. The Charter must be achievable (it must propose an actually existing point of departure and define a realistic transition process from this point to the optimum environment defined therein).
The Solution: the proposed point of departure is the only truly multinational military institution with proven capabilities to effectively intervene on a global scale to protect human security: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). NATO would be re-founded by its current members into a legitimate supranational level of governance (Novum Aedificium Terrae Orbis – New Structure of the Global Earth) entrusted to preserve, protect and promote human security in all its forms across the globe, in accordance with the Rules outlined above.
The Tools: The Charter and the debates, discussions and proposals leading up to it will take place on this wiki, allow the use of any other appropriate tools of social networking and communication, and facilitate the creation of a global on-line community of participants who will all be entitled to contribute to this Challenge – although not all proposals may be able to be integrated into a coherent, final Charter draft.
The Product: The final draft of The Charter and its Commentary (including both supporting and dissenting opinions) will be subjected to a democratic ratification process arrived at democratically by all NATO Challenge participants.
The Start: Initial pages will be set up with key questions allowing the debates, discussions and drafting process to start. The rest is up to you!
The Timeline: Up to two years for a Charter first draft and supporting Commentary; up to one further year for revisions and final ratification.
The Follow-up: The new draft Charter and Commentary will be published and promoted as a Global Civil Society Initiative leading to its final ratification, adoption and implementation.
Key Questions: The Charter and its supporting Commentary will need to address, at a minimum, twelve key questions, in a manner consistent with The Rules above:
1. What are the basic principles on which The Charter is founded?
2. What are the legitimating foundations of The Charter?
3. Who are the member organizations of The Charter?
4. What is The Charter’s implementation procedure?
5. How does The Charter and its membership change over time?
6. What specific emergencies does The Charter cover?
7. What are the aims of intervention?
8. Who decides when intervention is necessary?
9. Who, specifically, intervenes, and under whose direct authority?
10. What are the rules of engagement in the intervention?
11. What happens after the intervention?
12. What are the checks and balances of The Charter system?
Please join the Warrant for War Wicki, take part in The NATO Challenge -and don’t forget to let your friends know about it so they may also join and help out!
Warrant for War
I have recently decided to focus my post-graduate studies and research around the theme of legitimate force and the force of legitimacy in the global arena, under the title “Warrant for War”.
The “Warrant for War” research project is an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise, crossing the boundaries of various fields of study, such as political theory, strategic studies, constitutional and international law, history, sociology, international relations, philosophy and even physics. It has developed out of my eclectic readings on these topics and my attempts to find linkages, similarities, and synergies between and across them.
I have set up a blog Warrant for War Blog and Warrant for War Wiki, which will hopefully assist me in my work by building up, over time, a community of interest around this topic. Anyone is more than welcome to visi, join, and contribute to these sites.
Lone Civilian and Tanks - Beijing, China 1989
“Warrant for War” hypothesizes that the emergence of a proactive, dynamic global civil society as an essentially democratic, participative grassroots network of movements, opinions and interests has become a critical factor both enabling and constraining developing legal rights of universal jurisdiction, use of emergency powers to apply military force in protecting communities at risk across national borders, and the manner in which such force is deployed and employed. This sui generis process of developing a global legitimacy requirement “from below” represents a key factor in the emergence of a global cosmopolitan citizenship heralding not the birth of a hierarchical, centralized “world state” based on the traditional European state-building model, but rather of a post-Westphalian multi-level world order where particular levels of governance will accommodate various state and non-state, territorial and non-territorial actors as well as various forms of grassroots, individual participation.
The “right of participation” of these various actors in the process of public opinion-formation and actual decision-making regarding the use of force across borders, the reasons why and the manner in which such force is deployed and wielded, and the specific actors who can legitimately exercise such powers in various circumstances will profoundly affect not only the shape and structure of a new international juridico-political order, but also the nature of the actors which will constitute this order. These trends and processes are by no means inevitable; rather, they are contingent upon the ability of today’s liberal democracies to create a “pole of attraction” possessing a critical mass sufficiently resilient in space and time to allow the progressive transformation of illiberal, totalitarian regimes and their integration in the emergent post-Westphalian international order by means of a variety of political, economic, military and ideological networks of governance expanding across their borders and their progressive transformation both from “inside” and “outside”.
Managing the transition between the current, state-centric international system structured around the key principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention tending towards a multi-polar, global balance of power system based on realist notions of interaction between territorially-defined, sovereign nation-states, and a post-Westphalian international order defined by a universal jurisdiction, cosmopolitan citizenship, and legitimate processes of multi-level governance providing effective rights of participation to various state and non-state actors will constitute the central strategic challenge of the Twenty-First Century.
This presupposes the conceptualization of more sophisticated and dynamic strategic theories than either those of a multi-polar balance of power combining both liberal democratic and illiberal totalitarian states, each pursuing their national interest in an essentially anarchic international environment, and those of a “League of Democracies” counter-posed to a set of illiberal totalitarian states in a new ideological “Cold War”. Such a transition will exhibit three simultaneous, interactive, and dynamic processes of “global social capital building” : a “bonding” process deepening the integration of liberal democracies and accelerating their transition from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian system of governance; a “bridging” process providing illiberal totalitarian states with a voice (but not a vote) in the development of the new international order, thus endowing them with increasingly high stakes in its success and attracting them to gradually move towards this new order; and a set of “evolutionary”, national processes at work within each totalitarian state generating internal legitimacy and direction to the progressive integration of illiberal totalitarian states in the emerging system of global governance.
An evolving NATO, a revitalized G-8 and a possible NAFTA-EU Free Trade Area could provide the initial institutional military, political and economic frameworks allowing the development of such “bonding” processes of global social capital formation between liberal democracies, whilst the UN and its specialized agencies, the WTO, IMF and the World Bank could provide settings for the creation of the “bridging” processes mentioned above. Together, these three processes would lead to the progressive consolidation of today’s emergent global civil society and cosmopolitan citizenship as part of an expanding, increasingly global post-Westphalian system of governance where emergency powers of intervention and use of force for protection purposes in a universal jurisdiction will be democratically legitimated, enabled and constrained.
“The Road Not Taken”: Reassessing the Cold War In light of NSC-68 and the Korean War
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
David Frost, The Road Not Taken
“A détente is beginning. a modus vivendi. It started already in Korea. The dangers of war at present are less and less. The decisive point in Korea was the quarrel between MacArthur and Truman. This showed that the United States did not want war. After Truman said no to MacArthur’s proposal to attack China, [world] war was excluded… These are the imponderables that make for a modus vivendi…; it is an armed peace.”
General Charles De Gaulle
I. The Critical ‘Conjoncture’ of the Cold War and Resulting Pathway Dependencies
NSC-68 and the Korean War combined to create a critical ‘conjoncture ’ in the early Cold War that crystallized the terms of debate, the means of confrontation and the rules and arenas of engagement of the global, militarized conflict which constituted the central dynamic of the bi-polar world system of the next four decades. Most importantly, it militarized the Cold War, transformed Asia into the central military battlefield between the two camps, and created a US foreign policy consensus in aggressively opposing communism by any means necessary not only in Europe, but throughout the emerging Third World.
The analytic part of this paper concentrates neither on the ‘macro’ (structural/systemic) nor on the ‘micro’ (individual/agency) levels of social analysis, but rather on the ‘mezo’ level, where various institutionalized epistemic communities interact and create ‘path dependencies’ which open up specific avenues of inquiry, decision-making, action and development whilst simultaneously closing off others . Thus, we will focus on the evolving paradigms and interactions of the US, Communist bloc, and Western European foreign policy networks before and during the Korean War.
The explanatory part will then examine the consequences of the ‘conjoncture’ analyzed above, in both space and time. We will briefly highlight its effects and the path dependencies it generated in the central, secondary and peripheral arenas of the Cold War over the short, medium and long term.
II. Dynamics of Foreign Policy Networks Before the Outbreak of the Korean War
Three critical foreign policy networks dominated the first decade after the end of World War II: one centered in Washington, DC, the second in Moscow, and the third in key West European capitals. The internal dynamics of each of these networks, and the interaction between them, provide us with a better understanding of both the origins and the consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War.
1. Western Europe: Always Fighting the Last War
Although the Marshall Plan was coming to an end, a true Western European economic recovery had not yet taken place by 1950; the threat of powerful Communist parties capable of exploiting this situation with the help of the Soviet Union was therefore still very real, especially in Italy and France. In addition, the three major European powers seemed unwilling to coordinate their foreign policy aims and strategies. NATO remained a paper alliance; the French proposal for a European Defense Community was designed to preclude West Germany from joining NATO and re-establishing its own armed forces ; West Germany under Adenauer insisted to join NATO as an equal partner and be allowed control of its own Army ; while Great Britain, slowly recovering from the post-war slump, still dreamt of re-shaping the British Empire into a “Third Force” comparable, if not equal, to the USA and USSR .
2. The Communist Bloc: “Team Stalin”
All national communist party leaders of the Communist bloc (Yugoslavia’s Tito excepted) acknowledged Joseph Stalin’s unquestioned leadership, particularly in foreign policy matters. Throughout his rule, Soviet foreign policy approaches had been defined by two variables: an ideological one, gravitating between a national/imperialist pole and a communist / revolutionary pole ; and an administrative one, oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state. Unlike in the USA, however, there were no factional divisions between “Team Stalin”’s members: only the Boss himself could decide what the right mix of the four resulting paradigms would be the correct one at any given time and accordingly, which members of his team would belong to his inner circle -and which would not .
New documentary evidence shows us, however, that relations between “The Boss”, China’s Mao and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung were rather more complex by 1950 . Despite Stalin’s reluctance to engage in a war that might lead to an unwanted direct confrontation with the USA, Mao’s military romanticism and Kim’s impatiently aggressive nationalist push to reunite the Koreas into a viable state under his rule played decisive roles in the former’s final acquiescence to direct logistical and indirect military support of the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea . In turn, Mao’s promise to assist Kim should he require military support after the start of hostilities was motivated by his fear of encirclement by the USA from its Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese bases , by internal Chinese political reasons aiming to radicalize and thus consolidate the still young Chinese Communist revolution ; and by his desire to finally obtain Stalin’s approval as the leader of a true Communist revolution and Party – and not be thought of as potentially “just another Tito” .
3. USA: “The Great Debate” and the Korean War
By 1950, the “Great Debate” splitting asunder the US foreign policy establishment combined two sets of dichotomies -between “American Exceptionalism” and the fear of its replacement by a “Garrison State”; and between the “Welfare State” and the “Warfare State” . This resulted in four foreign policy approaches –each with its own supporters and detractors:
Until 1947, the majority US foreign policy view was that of cooperative multilateralism, based on three pillars: an effective UNO; collaboration with the USSR; and reliance on Britain to manage the international system as an equal partner . By 1948, these pillars were failing. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, National Security Act and NATO laid out the political and institutional foundations of a new US foreign policy. However, President Truman opposed for both political and ideological reasons the substantial increases in the US Defense Budget which would give the United States the means to implement its professed policies.
The 1949 Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and Mao’s Communist victory in mainland China convinced Truman that a re-examination of US national strategy was required . The ascendant State Department foreign policy team led by Secretary Acheson and Office of Policy and Planning Director Nitze drafted NSC-68 and submitted it to the President on April 14, 1950. However, because of its dramatic budgetary implications, as well as anticipated opposition in Congress, President Truman did not act on these recommendations, asking instead for further details and specifications.
After June 25, 1950 NSC-68 provided President Truman with a legitimating intellectual lens though which to view and understand what he considered North Korea’s unprovoked and unexpected aggression on South Korea , and with a means to both build up support for his multilateral containment foreign policy and discredit its main competitors: traditional isolationism and aggressive unilateralism.
The MacArthur-Truman conflict personified, internally, a clash between the very notion of civilian control over the US armed forces and the rise of a true Garrison State ruled by a military elite ; and externally, a conflict between Truman’s policy of multilateral containment and a likely direct confrontation between the USA and the USSR combined with a probable disintegration of the US-European alliance network. The confrontation reached its peak then faded away after Truman relieved MacArthur of all his commands in April 1951. The presidential election, in 1952, of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who essentially pursued the policy of multilateral containment embodied in NSC-68, established a cross-party foreign policy consensus in the USA that was to last virtually until the end of the Cold War.
III. Consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War
The aggregate impact of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the three foreign policy networks discussed above, and hence on the conduct of the Cold War, was not only dramatic in the short term, but also significant in the medium- and long-term.
Although the Cold War had started since at least 1948, by 1950 the European, Soviet bloc and US foreign policy networks were still largely turned inward, focusing primarily on issues deeply embedded in the historical experiences of their own states and regions. The Korean War propelled them together and connected them for the very first time in a truly global adversarial governance network articulated by the Manichean conflict between freedom and tyranny as described in NSC-68.
The three key short-term consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War were a massive militarization of the Cold War, not only in the United States but also in Western European countries; the jumpstarting of West European and Japanese economies as they scrambled to supply the vast needs of the UN-sponsored troops fighting up and down the Korean Peninsula; and the establishment of a wide network of US-centered alliance systems designed to contain and perhaps even roll back the communist threat: General Eisenhower was appointed NATO’s first SACEUR and given as mandate to transform the alliance into the world’s first truly multinational military organization; a peace treaty was signed with Japan in 1951, just as ANZUS was being ratified; and SEATO and the Baghdad Pact were established in 1955. Perhaps most remarkable, France decided to abandon its historical enmity with Germany and acquiesce, however reluctantly, to its rearmament and entry into NATO as an equal partner.
In the medium term, drawing on the lessons learned in Korea that nuclear weapons could hardly be used as offensive weapons on the battlefield, but only as a means of deterring larger conflicts between the two super-powers , the US adopted a dual strategy of a global nuclear arms race with its main rival, whilst fighting low-intensity wars in Asia designed, in its view, to “free (its peoples) from age-old forms of social and ideological oppression” . From Korea though Indo-China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam, Asia became the central battlefield of the Cold War for the next two decades.
Within the Soviet Bloc, although the Korean War cemented in the short-term the sino-soviet alliance, China’s ability to stand up militarily to the United States during this conflict had the dual effect of solidifying the Communist regime in China and establishing its reputation internationally, especially among the existing and emerging Third World states, thus sawing the seeds both of the sino-soviet split and confrontation of the 1960s and 1970s, and of the proliferation of revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America -which the US saw it as its duty to confront by both direct and covert means.
Finally, in the long term, “[t]he Cold War provided an extreme answer to a question that had been at the center of US foreign policy since the late eighteenth century: in what situations should ideological sympathies be followed by intervention? The extension of the Cold War into the Third World was defined by the answer: everywhere where Communism could be construed as a threat” . Korea was its first true battlefield –and the military, political, economic and ideological competition whose nature and rules of engagement it largely defined would play no small part in Ronald Reagan’s view of the “Evil Empire” and his “Star Wars” program, in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and, finally, in the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the peaceful implosion of the USSR two years later.
