Giving War a Chance: What is the Relevance of Luttwak’s Polemic for Contemporary UN Conflict Management?

Biography: Iseult is a BCL (with Politics) graduate from Dublin and incumbent Editor-in-Chief of the UCD Law Review. She is currently undertaking the Fe-1 examinations while tutoring part-time at UCD Sutherland School of Law. She was awarded the Conor Martin Memorial Prize by UCD SPIREe in 2019/20, and has interned with McCann FitzGerald, DLA Piper and Arthur Cox. She will pursue an LLM in the United States in autumn 2023 before beginning a training contract.

Giving War a Chance: What is the Relevance of Luttwak’s Polemic for Contemporary UN Conflict Management?

‘All except full-scale war are temporary expedients.’[1]

Barry R. Posen’s quote aptly encapsulates Edward N. Luttwak’s core argument, the essence of which is that states need to be totally committed if they intend on intervening in a war. The purpose of this piece is to demonstrate how Luttwak’s polemic against humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping is relevant to contemporary UN conflict management. It begins by conceptualising UN conflict management during the Cold War period and introducing Luttwak’s three main assertions. It proceeds to analyse the relevance of his position as it relates to modern-day UN conflict management in a disappointingly stagnant post-Cold War era. Finally, in the interests of ensuring a well-rounded analysis, some criticisms are levelled at Luttwak’s account before concluding.

Cold War Conflict Management

It is necessary to briefly conceptualise Cold War UN conflict management and to discuss Luttwak’s polemic, with a view to highlighting the relevance of his criticisms for contemporary UN conflict management. The Charter of the United Nations was drafted in 1945 in the wake of World War II with the intended purpose of prohibiting the use of force and  providing a collective security mechanism through the creation of a standing army.[2] Chapter VI provides for peaceful dispute settlement while Chapter VII effectively  acts as a call to arms by creating a comprehensive method of dealing with local conflicts by establishing a military staff committee and mandating that member states permanently assign forces to the UN.[3] Neither the standing army nor the intended aims of the Charter were ever fully realised due to the onset of the Cold War between 1945 and 1990. This led to the de facto absence of the international community in conflict management because any attempts at mediation in local conflicts were vetoed by one of the opposing blocks.

Introducing Luttwak’s Polemic

Writing with the experience of disinterested intervention attempts in Kosovo in mind,  Luttwak in his provocative paper entitled “Give War a Chance” predominantly aims to highlight the dangers of disingenuous warfare carried out under the auspices of the UN and claims that peacekeeping and humanitarian aid only serve to prolong conflict instead of alleviating its effects. He considers three valid yet uncomfortable arguments. Firstly, violent conflict has one major advantage, namely that war in itself is a means of conflict management that resolves conflicts of interest and leads to peace either ‘when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively.’[4] Secondly, the intervening state must be seriously willing to wage war and have both the political will and military capabilities to intervene with sufficient force to both win the initial war as  well as to impose a long-lasting solution against local actors.[5] Thirdly, without the aforementioned will and capabilities, any notion of intervention must be abandoned. He maintains that intervening a little bit through peacekeeping is more harmful than not intervening at all because it prevents war-induced fatigue and allows combatants to recuperate and rearm their forces, and can delude civilians into remaining in place until it is too late to flee.[6] He also attacks humanitarian relief and refugee camps sanctioned under the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because they preserve resentment, dissuade local integration and inhibit  emigration, as is evidenced by the perpetual Palestinian refugee nation after the Arab-Israeli war half a century ago.[7]

Luttwak’s Stance Reflects UN Conflict Management Today

Having outlined Cold War UN Conflict Management in the previous section, this section compares it with contemporary UN conflict management and demonstrates how Luttwak’s aforementioned assertions are applicable in the present. The Boutros-Ghali Report acknowledged the crippling effect of the Cold War and recommitted to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter with renewed optimism.[8] From 1990-1993, member states began to  adopt an intrusive interpretation of Chapter VII in which peacekeeping began to take the  shape of peace enforcement. Since the publishing of the Brahimi Report at the turn of the century,[9] the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine has become more prevalent, with the language of self-defence in peacekeeping mandates being replaced by ‘robust’ measures and the solicitation of the use of offensive force.[10] While the intervention in the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait was deemed to be a success, it soon became evident after the catastrophic intervention in Somalia that the UN was neither a very good peace enforcer nor war maker in many of the conflicts that emerged after the Cold War.[11] The Brahimi Report acknowledged the shortcomings of outside enforcement where there is nothing to be gained and provided practical recommendations on making conflict management more successful.[12] Kofi Annan’s 2005 report was a sad but realistic assessment of the inherently limited role that the UN can play mediating states that cannot agree and also served as a reflection of the dramatically increased reluctance internationally to get involved in peacekeeping and enforcement in light of the failures during the Iraq war and Yugoslavia.[13] 

To answer the title question directly, Luttwak’s polemic is relevant to contemporary  UN Conflict Management because it foreshadowed the reality that the international community, and  the American military, in particular, have been profoundly reluctant to use force in the post-Cold War era having learnt harsh lessons from humiliating withdrawals from places such as  Iraq, Vietnam, and Somalia.[14] Posen presents the same uncomfortable truth by discussing how the cost-benefit analysis of going to war with a party who has nothing to lose will rarely secure political support.[15]

An Imperfect Polemic

Luttwak’s submissions should not be considered without caveats, however. Though he makes a thought-provoking point about ‘giving war a chance,’ he does not engage with the fact that wars are very often not decisively won and that tensions can persist even in the absence of intervention as is the case in Rwanda or Northern Ireland due to the absence of the will and capability of the winning  party to impose a solution. It is also submitted that the notion that peacekeeping is a frivolous endeavour undertaken by self-serving NGOs should be rejected as peacekeeping serves a valuable purpose in the correct circumstances. The strategic logic behind peacekeeping is one of disengagement  and creating a buffer between warring parties as is the case in Cyprus and between Israel and  Palestine.[16] The role of interpolation is not to resolve the conflict in  question but to create breathing space for an eventual resolution, a process that could take  generations, and which does not necessarily indicate the failure of a mission.

Conclusion

This piece aimed to compare pre- and post-Cold War UN conflict management and to highlight how relevant Luttwak’s assessment, though flawed, is to contemporary UN conflict management by drawing on the lessons learnt about the harsh realities of disinterested interventions in the past. The effective absence of UN conflict management during the Cold War due to the deadlock between the two blocks was analysed alongside a consideration of Luttwak’s core claims. The revitalisation of conflict management and peace enforcement in the post-Cold War era was discussed, followed by a levelled reflection on Luttwak’s polemic as it relates to the reality of modern UN conflict management strategy. Ultimately, the overarching point of Luttwak’s polemic, and what the international community is beginning to realise in  contemporary conflict management, is that the altruistic intentions of outsiders to local conflicts are unfortunately limited unless they are willing to wage full-scale war, which, in most cases, they are not.

[1] Barry R. Posen, ‘Military Responses to Refugee Disasters’ (1996) 21(1) International Security 72, 108.

[2] Alex Morrison, ‘Fiction of a U.N. Standing Army, The Non-Traditional Missions and the  Use of Force: The Debate over Peacekeeping, Peace Enforcement, and Related Operations’ (1994) 83(1)  Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 83.

[3] ibid 84.

[4] Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Give War a Chance’ (1999) 78(4) Foreign Affairs 36.

[5] ibid 40.

[6] ibid 38.

[7] ibid 42.

[8] Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping’ (1992) UN Doc A/47/277 - S/24111, 1.

[9] Lakhdar Brahimi et al., ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’ (2000) UN Doc A/55/305 - S/2000/809.

[10] James Sloan, ‘The Evolution of the Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping’ (2014) 37(5) Journal of Strategic Studies 674, 675.

[11] Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: The United Nations  since the 1990’s (Princeton University Press 2000) 7.

[12] Brahimi Report (n 9) 8.

[13] Report of the Secretary General Kofi Annan, ‘In Larger Freedom. Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All’ (2005) UN Doc A/59/2005/Add3.

[14] Kenneth J. Campbell, ‘Once Burned, Twice Cautious: Explaining the Weinberger-Powell  Doctrine,’ (1998) 24(3) Armed Forces & Society 357.

[15] Posen (n 1).

[16] Scott Sheeran, ‘The Use of Force in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations’ in Marc Weller (ed), The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (Oxford University Press 2015) 5.