The Rosy Future of War

Elegantly Gallic in its logic and presentation, this consideration of war's future by Delmas, author of the novel The Watchmaker and a military analyst at the French ministry of foreign affairs, rests on the postulate that the main causes of future war will be the fragility and instability of states whose standing began eroding during the Cold War. Delmas points out that mutually assured nuclear destruction restricted any major-power confrontation and created a common pattern of forced alliances. Once the threat of nuclear destruction lifted, divergent political interests flourished. They reemerged, however, in a world in which supranational economic integration and international law are increasingly regarded as organizing systems superseding individual states. Prospects for peace, according to Delmas, have become correspondingly grim. Borrowing a bit from von Clausewitz and a bit more from Machiavelli, Delmas argues that only powerful, confident states can limit conflict. He is particularly critical of an international climate depending on ""legal utopias"" and ""soft laws."" For Delmas, peace, democracy and economic development are consequences of stability. Like Martin van Creveld in Transformations of War, which this work strongly resembles, Delmas seems to have developed a theory and then mined the recent past for supporting data. He oversimplifies the role of the nuclear issue in U.S.-European relations. Nor does his image of an American military operating essentially outside the control of political authority for much of the Cold War square with documented reality. Delmas's selective use of evidence places this a book in line with other attempts to predict the future course of a history that, contrary to Francis Fukuyama, has certainly not ended with the triumph of anything in particular--including war. (May)