ACTS OF VIOLENCE NATIONS ARE REDISCOVERING CLAUSEWITZ’S FAMOUS DICTUM

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31385, 2 June 1967, Page 8

ACTS OF VIOLENCE NATIONS ARE REDISCOVERING CLAUSEWITZ’S FAMOUS DICTUM

(By

MICHAEL GARDNER

of the "tconomist")

Years and years ago there was a theory, touchingly held by quite large numbers of people, that war was out of date. From now on international disputes were to be settled by negotiation, and indeed every country that is a member of the United Nations has formally committed itself to that course.

Today we have one war raging in Vietnam, another that may or may not burst out in the Middle East, riots in Hong Kong that might become at least an international “incident.” In half a dozen places round tne world the regular forces of one country are engaged against guerrillas openly or secretly supported by another country.

The fact that we have two and possibly three really serious crises on our hands at the same moment is probably coincidence. The Soviet Union is indirectly involved in Vietnam and in the Middle East, but there is nothing to show that it has sought to worsen either situation, and some evidence that it has done the opposite. The Chinese are directly involved in Hong Kong and eager that the Vietnam war should continue, but we cannot blame them for the actions of the Syrian Government or of President Nasser. On the other side, simple theories that imperialism is the villain of the piece are no more convincing. The United States is responsible for the latest escalation in Vietnam, but not for the violence that started this war in the first place. It is not the Americans who have made the Israelis threaten to retaliate against guerrilla attacks and border gunfire from Syria. In Hong Kong the British have been running a relatively liberal colonial policy—and a highly successful economic one so well that Hong Kong has been pulling great numbers of refugees in from China. Common Element Yet there is one common element in our troubles. The nations of the world are rapidly rediscovering Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is the continuation of policy by other means.”' There was nothing selfevident about this dictim, even when it was first produced in the days before total war, guerrilla war or nuclear war had been invented. Even a century ago, diplomacy meant talking, while war meant destruction and death. In our own times, one would have thought that Clausewitz’s theory had been disproved beyond resuscitation. When the powers of Europe carried it to its logical conclusion in 1914, they found to their dismay that words and gestures and mobilisations had suddenly turned into a. torrent of bloodshed. The lesson of that experience, that there is indeed a sharp line between talking and shooting, was

largely learned. But the Japanese never had the experience, and Hitler chose to make light of it. The result was a second world war, one of the few wars there have been in which at least one side knew perfectly well what it had let itself in for. Back to 1914 After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the whole world knew, one would have thought. Yet the new understanding has been steadily undermined from two directions. On one side are the Chinese Communists, who have not merely noted but made a fetish of the continuity between politics and war. On the other the very revulsion that existed against war, and the threat of nuclear weapons, has made it possible, for anyone who chooses, to use any gesture short of war itself as a means of diplomatic pressure, in the hope that be will never actually have to cross the brink. This was what Stalin did in the 1948 blockade of Berlin. So, by degrees, we have come right back to where we were in 1914. Vietnam is the prime example. On one side the Vietnamese Communists have repeated the experience of the Chinese, moving from persuasion to terrorism and so to war. On our side the process has been more complex. War has become an object of academic study. Instead of shuddering and shutting our eyes, we consider calmly and dispassionately all the gradations of pressure from a “cool reception” to a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as a con-

tinuum. And from practising the lower forms of pressure we have moved, almost without noticing it, step by step up the ladder. Conducted Openly This has been the logic of American action in Vietnam, and the resemblance to diplomacy has been heightened by the new openness of war. One used, in diplomacy, to be relatively clear with one's opponents, warning them that action A would be met by reaction B. But in war everything was concealed. Today we conduct war, on the strategic level, openly. The North Vietnamese get advance warning of what will happen to them next, and it does.

The continuity of diplomacy and war has been perfected. The process may not have been sophisticated to such an extent in the Middle East But it has been evident there too, particularly in Israel’s problems in dealing with the guerrilla raids organised in Syria, and, for that matter, in the Egyptian bombing of Saudi Arabian border towns. It is an eminently rational process, Clausewitz’s. It just has the slight disadvantage that at a certain point you start killing people. First a few, and then more and more and more. If there is a single lesson to be learned from the crises that are rumbling around the world this week, it is that once the first act of violence has been committed by Communist rebels in South Vietnam, or by Arab saboteurs in Israel—it is desperately hard to stop the spiral ascending.