Recommended: Why realists don't go for bombs and bullets

There is an excellent short post on Stephen M. Walt's blog Foreign Policy (Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international relations at Harvard University.), by David M. Edelstein (himself an associate professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University), entitled Why Realists Don't Go For Bombs and Bullets. And Walt has en equally excellent follow up in his posting Hawks, doves, and realists.

I agree with them, and with the realists in general. War is expensive, unpredictable, and usually produces unexpected and unpleasant side effects elsewhere in the international order. War is very occasionally really necessary, but only very, very occasionally.

That doesn't mean I am a dove. I think our nation ought to have a very strong military, and very strong alliances to make that military power even more formidable. As the Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus said thousands of years ago, Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war). Anybody who ever lived in a neighborhood with a bully knows that nothing prevents fights better than being seen to be a formidable adversary.

But the real point of having that formidable military is to deter opponents from forcing us to use it. That is exactly what happened during the Cold War. Our huge military strength prevented a war with the Soviet Union. Does anyone really think Stalin would not have tried to conquer Western Europe if he thought he could get away with it? Does anyone doubt that World War II could have been prevented if Hitler had thought the allies were strong enough and determined enough to beat his armies? If we actually have to use our military force, we have probably failed somewhere in our foreign policy, because the threat of military action should have been enough to keep us from having to use it.

I also note in passing that, despite some common perceptions, it is not the military who favor using military force, it is the non-military politicians. The military knows all too well the costs, the difficulties, the losses and the uncertainties of wars. It is the politicians who send young people (but not their own children) to war and spend huge amounts of money (but not their own money) on military adventures. They have done it before in history (in fact, world history is a repeated chronicle of ambitious leaders squandering their people's lives and wealth on wars), and our own leaders in Washington are doing it now in Iraq and Afghanistan.