Testing security theories: explaining the rise and demise of the Cold War

Abstract

Hobbes, Clausewitz, and Thucydides laid the foundation for security studies. Their work has stood the test of time. They demonstrated that humans could step out of their own time and look beyond their own particular historically defined security problems to generalize about the security behavior of actors across different societies and eras. They compressed space and time in explaining security. If they can do that, there is no reason why we can't, too, and build on the foundations they laid to fit our times and needs. Security can be subject to systematic study. Generalizations can be validated by reference to the thinking, decisions, and actions of humans and their agents, like states and international organizations. This triumvirate has also shown that force and coercion have a distinctive logic. Whether it can be directed to human purposes depends on the ability of actors to discipline force to their strategic, political and socio-economic interests and moral aims. Absent meaning, value, and political purpose in directing the use or threat of violence, competing actors are induced to submit to its logic, unmixed and unconstrained by any other humanly created limit. They are led rationally toward Hobbes' endgame or a war of all against all or toward Clausewitz's more narrowly conceived conception of pure war, as a duel between two rivals to the death or the subjugation of one to the other.