With the end of the Cold War, we no longer face the imminent prospect of a thermonuclear war between the superpowers, a war that would have certainly killed hundreds of millions of people, quite possibly have destroyed civilization as we know it, and conceivably extirpated human life on Earth. None the less, war remains a pressing issue facing the human race, and in some ways the floodgates of war have been opened wider than they were during the Cold War era.
In the few years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have witnessed, among others, a major U.S.-led war against Iraq in the Persian Gulf, a civil war of genocidal proportions in Rwanda, and another war, combining elements of civil war and war between national groups, and one with genocidal episodes, in the Balkans. These wars, and other less newsworthy conflicts, have taken place within an international context of exceptional uncertainty. During the Cold War, Americans at least had a sense that an overall framework defined the world's conflicts, or at least that we could define whether and why a particular conflict was alarming to us.
We now sense ourselves to be in a world without well-defined rules, where the news is filled with wars among unfamiliar peoples, fought for incomprehensible reasons. An evocative fact of history perhaps lends sharpness to the sense of anxious uncertainty about war. Few Americans have any coherent sense of why the present conflict in the Balkans is taking place, but educated Americans are hazily aware that "Serbs," "Bosnia-Herzegovina," and "Sarajevo" had something to do with the outbreak of the First World War, and thus with over two generations of war or the imminent fear of war.
In this environment of uncertainty, we are particularly concerned with the causes of war, and a number of recent writers have addressed this question. The writers and works considered here are William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (1982); John Kee...