THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
II
-in anticipation of what I have to say-short of total annihilation
and short of a decisive technical development in warfare, the present
conflict between the two parts of the world may well be decided by
the simple question of which side understands better what is involved
and what is at stake in revolution.
In the following I would like to take up, almost at random, a
few considerations which all seem to point in the same direction.
1. Obviously, Clausewitz' definition of war as the continuation of
politics with other means, however appropriate it might have been
for the limited warfare of European nation states in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, no longer applies to our situation. This
would be true even without nuclear warfare. Since the First World
War, we know that no government and no form of government can
be expected to survive a defeat in war. A revolutionary change in
government--either brought about by the people themselves, as after
World War I, or enforced by the victorious powers through the
demand of unconditional surrender and the establishment of War
Trials-belongs among the most certain consequences of defeat even
if we rule out total annihilation or complete chaos. Hence, even
prior to nuclear warfare, wars had become politically, though not
yet biologically, a matter of life and death.
At the moment when we are so preoccupied with the threat of
total annihilation this may appear irrelevant. But it is not at all
inconceivable that the next stage of technical advancement may bring
us back to a kind of warfare which, though probably still horrible
enough, will not be suicidal and, perhaps, not even spell complete
annihilation to the defeated. Such a development seems to be within
the range of definite possibilities for the simple reason that our present
stage of international relationships, still based upon national sover–
eignty, cannot function without force or the threat of force as the
ultima ratio
of all foreign policy. Whether we like it or not, our
present system of foreign affairs makes no sense without war as a
last resort; and put before the alternative of either changing this
system radically or making some technical discoveries which would
bring war back into the political arena, the latter course may well
turn out to be much easier and more feasible.
Politically, the point of the matter is that even under changed
technical circumstances it is not likely that governments, no matter .
