Review of John H. Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959)

Abstract

Abstract In Wight’s view, “Herz’s estimate of the contemporary strategic revolution follows from his picture of the classical state-system. Ideological conflict and nuclear weapons have, in principle, replaced territorial impermeability by mutual pervasion, ‘so that the power of everyone is present everywhere simultaneously,’ and in the two Great Powers the extreme of military strength coincides with the extreme of vulnerability. But here, once again, it might be permissible to reduce the emphasis on discontinuity with the past. In every age the majority of Powers have been Small Powers, and for them territorial impermeability, like legal sovereignty, has been largely a fiction. Effective impermeability has been a mark of Great Power status (witness Soviet anger over the U2). Similarly, the Clausewitzian doctrine of war as imposing your will on the enemy may need reformulation. It might be truer if transposed into the negative, saying that most Powers in most ages have seen war as the means to prevent the enemy (usually a neighbouring Great Power) from imposing his will on them, by maintaining forces to discourage any but the most determined attack. This is what we now call deterrence. On such a view, the chief political consequence of the strategic revolution has been to reduce the Great Powers to the Small Powers’ condition of permeability, and to adopting a deterrent instead of an acquisitive conception of war.”