The first very basic complaint to be made about peace research is that it accepts the same overarching premise about international relations, and about life, that most traditional American liberals-this is a category that includes Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater and Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan and it is not what George Bush was trying to impute to Michael Dukakis-have accepted and that most Marxists also accept, namely, that good things go together. Most Americans have, ever since 1776, assumed intuitively that good and proper domestic institutions will lead to international peace. As Louis Hartz noted several decades ago, this has not been the normal assumption in the continental European tradition, but Americans were able to escape that tradition almost from the Mayflower Compact.' Hartz noted that such assumptions go unquestioned for the great majority of people in the United States, because alternative world outlooks have always had very little following inside our borders. If there is an orthodox approach to issues of war and peace in America, this assumption is it, and peace research could thus be accused of reflecting a very deep and pernicious orthodoxy here. The assumption that domestic reform will lead to international peace or that one kind of international improvement will always support another kind of international improvement has emphatically not been endorsed by traditional European analysts of power politics. It has been endorsed, however, as part of another intellectual tradition, by Marxists in their own approach to the analysis of the causes of war. To cure a domestic evil, by such a set of assumptions, is to eliminate an international evil as well. Liberals and Marxists indeed very much agree that wars and arms races are international evils, while dramatically disagreeing about what is better or more evil at home.2 By contrast, a third perspective, that of the realist, or power-politics, school of international relations analysis, most persuasively put forward after World War II in the writings of Hans Morgenthau,3 argued that there is no such benign pattern to the universe, no pattern by which one would not have to choose between goals. While there is much of the power-politics perspective that today's researchers on arms control and international security would have rejected or dropped, they would nonetheless retain at least some of the pessimism or realism of acknowledging that there is often some need to choose, and this is lacking in the peace-studies peace. When asked how they would choose between preventing nuclear war and preventing conventional war, many people who style themselves peace researchers will thus simply refuse to comment, regarding it as a moral betrayal even to acknowledge that such a choice might ever have to be made, arguing that there must somehow be a solution that never would require giving up on either gain. Similarly, if asked to choose between eliminating poverty and eliminating war, the same researchers will again run away from the question, as if it were some kind of trap. Yet there are tough choices to be made in this world. The same nuclear weapons that, by being deployed in Western Europe, might produce an escalation to an all-out thermonuclear World War III may also have contributed to keeping Europe from engaging in another conventional war for more than four decades, an unusually long time for that continent. The arms-control perspective recognizes such tough choices, in effect, by stressing a yardstick of at least three outputs, phrased most aptly by Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin some three decades ago:4 reducing the likelihood of war, reducing the destruction in war if it actually occurs, and reducing the economic and other burdens of peacetime readiness for the possibility of war. These outputs are each important, but in case after case, they get in each other's way, may conflict with each other, and may force us to make difficult and unpleasant choices. Compared to these outputs, the variable of disarmament is only an input, something that is valuable if, and only if, it conduces to these desirable end outputs. Peace researchers would, of course, hardly question that the three categories of output listed by Schelling and Halperinwhich can again be broken into many, possibly conflicting, subcategories-are a good thing. Yet they tend, nonetheless, to focus on disarmament very directly, often advocating total disarmament, as if this were a good thing in and of itself, or as if something as good as disarmament could not possibly conflict with anything else in life that was morally desirable. The peace researchers are thus somehow convinced that there are no good weapons, and they regard any talk of arms control as merely a trick, intended to persuade them to relax their opposition to every form of preparation for war. When the case is made that submarine-based nuclear missiles have actually been desirable for the world, since 1960 markedly reducing the tensions of each side's fearing an attack by the other, perhaps even thereby reducing the total of resources that would otherwise have been wasted on military programs, the peace researcher makes himself or herself intellectually blind to such arguments. If someone from the international- security research community were to suggest, perhaps facetiously, perhaps more seriously, that the Nobel Peace Prize is overdue for the developers of the Polaris missile program, the peace researcher would react with anger and dismay, rather than having his or her curiosity aroused by the suggestion.' There are indeed many bad weapons, weapons that make war more likely and more destructive, and weapons that waste a great deal of money. But not every choice in this field of life is thus what the economists would call Pareto optimal, whereby an improvement can be made by all measures and no difficult choices have to be made. Rather, we quickly enough run out of the simpler choices and then reach the hard decisions, where disarmament might make wars more likely, or where making war less likely in one theater would make it more likely in another, and so forth. More broadly, the peace researcher is convinced that the elimination of social ills will almost always tend to reduce the risks of war as well. No one in the more realistic international-securities community is opposed to the spread of literacy or to the eradication of disease and starvation and poverty. Yet what are we to make of the fact that the Mediterranean country with the highest per capita income has been Cy- prus? There is, unhappily, no real evidence that the conflicts that cause a nation to be ready to go to violent warfare disappear when other problems disappear; the linkage often seems to be the reverse. Peace researchers often style themselves as protesting heretics, at odds with the orthodox establishment. Yet, on this first basic point, they are, as noted, much less rebellious than they realize and much more ready to accept what most Americans accept as an orthodox intuition, namely, the premise that God did not play dice with the universe on moral entities, that good things go together, that eliminating one evil will eliminate others as well. Morgenthau and his colleagues, when they began offering alternative-more traditionally Europeantheories of realpolitik to Americans, indeed also felt like heretics, protesting against an orthodoxy of ideas, and probably had more justification for this feeling. Most American students, and most Americans in general, approach the study of war and peace with this most orthodox of assumptions, an assumption that the peace-research community panders to, that war would become unlikely if economic injustices and human rights violations were eliminated, and that war would become unlikely if arms were reduced.6 It may simply be factually wrong to accept this kind of assumption uncritically, or to refuse to consider the possibility that an improvement on one front might come only at the price of a setback on another. Given that our subject is the avoidance of some very disastrous possibilities of war, it might indeed be dangerous to stick to these underlying premises of peace research. (99-101)
peace research could be accused of reflecting a deep and pernicious orthodoxy that domestic reform will lead to international peace has emphatically not been endorsed by traditional European analysts of power politics. While there is much of the power-politics perspective arms control would have rejected they would retain a pessimism there is often some need to choose, this is lacking in the peace-studies When asked how they would choose between preventing nuclear war and conventional war peace researchers will refuse to comment regarding it a moral betrayal to acknowledge such a choice might have to be made Yet there are tough choices to be made in this world The arms-control perspective recognizes tough choices by stressing a yardstick three outputs 4 reducing the likelihood of war, reducing the destruction in war if it occurs, and reducing the economic and other burdens of peacetime readiness for the possibility of war These are each important, but may conflict and force us to make difficult and unpleasant choices. Peace researchers tend , to focus on disarmament very directly, often advocating total disarmament, as if this were a good thing in and of itself, as if something as good as disarmament could not possibly conflict with anything else in life that was morally desirable. peace researchers are convinced there are no good weapons, they regard arms control as merely a trick to persuade them to relax their opposition to every form of preparation for war There are indeed many bad weapons, But not every choice is Pareto optimal we quickly run out of the simpler choices and reach the hard where disarmament might make wars more likely, where making war less likely in one theater would make it more likely in another the peace researcher is convinced elimination of social ills will reduce the risks of war as well There is, unhappily, no real evidence that the conflicts that cause a nation to be ready to go to violent warfare disappear when other problems disappear the linkage often seems to be the reverse. Peace researchers style themselves as protesting heretics Yet, on this they are, much less rebellious than they realize ready to accept what most Americans accept as an orthodox intuition It may simply be factually wrong to accept this kind of assumption uncritically, or to refuse to consider the possibility that an improvement on one front might come only at the price of a setback on another. Given that our subject is the avoidance of some very disastrous possibilities of war, it might indeed be dangerous to stick to these underlying premises of peace research.