The Foreign Policy Dilemma
The State of War,
by Stanley Hoffmann.
Praeger. $5.95.276 pp.
It was James Mill who claimed that practice without theory is bad practice. Certainly today's students of world affairs could not agree more. The search for a viable theory of international relations has grown apace with the rapid and radical changes in the ways that governments and peoples deal with one another. Since World War II, the amount—and quality—of the attention devoted to foreign policy in general, and strategy in particular, has dwarfed the more traditional concern with the question of the best domestic political order. All too frequently, however, the result of these exertions has been a literature of desperation which constantly highlights the gap between effort and effect, and in which one finds only meager and highly qualified hopes. André Beaufre, for example, strikes the characteristic note in An Introduction to Strategy:
. . . the strategist is like a surgeon called upon to operate upon a person who is growing continuously and with extreme rapidity and of whose detailed anatomy he is not sure; his operating table is in a state of perpetual motion and he must have ordered the instruments he is to use five years beforehand.
If this is an accurate analogy, how can anyone be more than prayerful about the outcome?
The State of War, a collection of nine essays by Stanley Hoffmann, who is professor of government at Harvard and a research associate at its Center for International Affairs, is a fairly typical contribution to this genre. Professor Hoffmann's interests range far and wide but, directly or indirectly, they all focus on one overriding problem: the foreign-policy dilemma of modern man. The overt thesis of his book is that nations are in a permanent state of war with one another and that foreign policy, which can be understood only in this context, thus differs radically from domestic policy, which aims at a state of peace. Yet this rather unstartling assertion—that conflicts among nations are something on the order of the status quo rather than nightmare interludes—is never sustained at any length; it is even compromised a bit by Hoffmann's admission that regional political federation is clearly possible. The occasional paragraphs he devotes to demonstrating his proposition suffer from his seeming unwillingness to argue for what he considers self-evident. Hoffmann's main purpose is not to side with Churchill, who claimed that the history of mankind is the history of war, as against Adlai Stevenson, who claimed that all wars are civil wars (and hence presumably eliminable). The real thesis of these essays is something quite different. It is that recent thinking about international relations has been hampered by two factors: it has been conducted on a level of generality that is woefully unsophisticated, considering the number and nature of the variables with which it must contend; and it has proceeded on the basis of an almost criminal optimism about the extent of control men can exercise over foreign affairs.
According to Hoffmann, the study of international relations before World War II was basically—indeed exclusively—philosophical, but this is no longer the case. In his view, current research in the field is decidedly new if one takes it, as he most earnestly does, “in the sense of a systematic study of observable phenomena that tries to discover the principal variables, to explain the behavior, and to reveal the characteristic types of relations among national units.”
What is really novel, then, is the dimension of the discipline supplied by something called “empirical research.” Hoffmann's insistence on its systematic application to international relations is grounded in his own distrust of the traditional generalizations that have held sway in the field.
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In an admiring essay on the work of Raymond Aron (to whom the book is dedicated), Hoffmann makes quite clear just how far his distrust goes. “Every one of the concepts used by historians, lawyers or sociologists,” he writes, “must be refined, subdivided, and broken down so as to account for the many different realities that are lumped together.” This recommendation applies especially to the most basic concepts: power, balance of power, risk, force, etc. In the Hoffmann lexicon, equilibrium, for example, is described as merely an “evocative metaphor” because “the phenomena to which it is applied are not measurable and are as disparate as, for instance, military potential, relations between social classes, structures of international organizations, and a state's international commitments.”
Hoffmann's somehow defensive methodological discussions would seem to indicate that the “new” theory of international relations is far from having completely replaced the old. Moreover, one suspects that a preoccupation with methodology in any field of study is a clear sign that the discipline is onto lean days, that it is having trouble in articulating its nature and establishing its proper limits.
Even Hoffmann's best efforts—his discussions of the specific factors affecting a particular country or situation—do not completely allay this suspicion. The essay, “Restraints and Choices in American Foreign Policy,” though at times quite brilliant, is a case in point. It deals with the disadvantages imposed on American foreign policy by its defensive posture vis à vis both the Communist countries and the anti-colonials, by its lack of a competitive ideology, by its numerous alliances, by both its liberal and conservative traditions, by its isolationist past, and, above all, by the public opinion that is so decisive for its domestic politics. All these factors are admirably and candidly analyzed. Yet despite the facility, the lucidity, and even the occasional profundity with which Hoffmann treats each part, the whole does not add up to a coherent picture because the relative weight of the various considerations is not given; the question as to which are primary and which secondary is left unexplored. The result is an almost homogeneous distribution of emphasis throughout some very crowded pages.
Such a result is almost inevitable, given Hoffmann's over-emphasis on “empirical research” and his concomitant misunderstanding, or complete disregard of, political philosophy. Hoffmann's rejection of that very important dimension of political thought is based on his distrust of any “belief in eternal truths of human nature”; such a belief, he thinks, leads to seeing in history only the evidence that fits one's principles—that is, to a “providential reading of history.” One may well doubt that this is a discriminating critique of traditional political thought, much of which was in fact drawn from careful and close observation: Machiavelli, after all, was hardly an a priori theorist. It is, of course, true that political philosophers have never pretended to be primarily strategists or tacticians. Their business, as the greatest among them traditionally have seen it, is not to shape and alter theory to the transient requirements of the particular and the contingent, but to articulate their vision of the most basic principles of political life. Nevertheless, their work is far from being without value to the strategist and the tactician. For it is only by reference to the ideal, that the complex variations of the actual can be given sufficient coherence.
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The conclusions of The State of War reflect Hoffmann's rejection of any such reference to the ideal. He continually stresses that there are severe limits to what one can expect from the discipline of international relations. Any kind of predictability is definitely precluded, and no overall network of general laws is considered to be of any utility whatsoever. In the case of some problems, all one can do is guess at their solutions; in the case of others, one solution presents itself with as much force as another. The given situation always includes a large area of uncertainty, which at one point is rather fancifully called the area of “delicacy.” It is one of Hoffmann's most emphatic conclusions that this area cannot be radically reduced. One is therefore hardly surprised to find that his book raises many more problems than it solves.
In large measure, this is a consequence of Hoffmann's unwillingness to set the many variables he discusses against the background of a stable set of general principles. He seems to be saying that the search for such a rational underpinning for policy is the worst mistake one can make in a world much or most of which is irrational. The best one can do is rapidly to reformulate theory to apply to specific and constantly changing situations, to limit one's expectations from its practical application, to exercise as much caution as possible—and to hope. In a world in which the margin for error grows constantly smaller while the stakes grow immeasurably larger, these conclusions are unacceptable.
They are unacceptable not, to be sure, because the necessary must be assumed to be possible. To assume so is wishful thinking. Rather, Hoffmann's conclusions are unsatisfactory because—though one may start with a confused situation and be confused about how to deal with it—there are valid theoretical underpinnings to which one can refer in order to attain clarity. Granted, there is uncertainty in all practical decisions since they are all made on the basis of probabilities, but the probabilities in many areas of international relations are nevertheless high. They can be kept high and made even higher if those who execute policy have a clear idea of what they are doing, and what they expect to achieve by it.
In these respects, however valuable it may be in others, The State of War offers little help to the statesman. The problem of the statesman is to produce a unified policy out of multiple variables through an understanding of what, in any situation, are the most important considerations. If one attempts this without any appeal to general principles, with only a set of transient theories directed to even more transient phenomena, one must end, sooner or later, in paralysis.
