The World Crisis: 1914–1953

Abstract

In the early twentieth century the ancient ways of mobilizing power for force and using it to scatter foes gained terrifying new lethality and reach. All this did not happen at once, of course, and it happened amid great shifts in the three principles of force: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. The resulting world wars devastated Europe and made its colonial empires untenable, while creating an enduring ideological fissure (over notions of “systemic violence”) between the European powers. Though the coalition that had won World War II fragmented, aggressive war between states was now not only illegal under the new United Nations Charter but it could seemingly no longer yield strategic decision. Yet this reality brought no end to conflicts and the use of force. The way to fight in the spreading Cold War was through terror and guerrilla war, while deterring strategic conflict with nuclear weapons. The result would be chronic “asymmetric conflict” and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.