Content:
- War and nation states, history of nation states, historical consequences, including definition of the market state and strategic choices.
- Society of nation states, history of society of states and international order, (looking at settlements Augsburg, Wesphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles and Paris).
- Looks at the future dominated by market states, challenges to international order, possible futures, coming age of war and peace.
Relevance: Useful overview as far as the long view of history is concerned. Comes to different conclusions to me as these quotes (p 779) show;
"Then why not simply renounce foreign intervention for the domestic acts of other states? What's wrong with a little modest circumspection? Firstly, we forfeit the chance to build a collaborative relationships with other peer competitors through the management of joint interventions. Second, such a renunciation saps the moral role of the State as protector at a time when when its constitutional order, that of the market state, is particularly vulnerable too charges of amorality."
This is wrong on so many levels. It is a principle of international law that one should not intervene in the internal affairs of another country, war is for self defence. It is more honoured in the breech than the observance anyway but Bobbitt drives a coach and horses through it. Setting up right wing dictatorships to fight communism obviously sapped this weak legal constraint. What is proposed is that gangs of like minded peer states (coalitions of the willing) go in for regime change. It completely ignores the role the UN. Using phrases like "saps the moral" echo theorists like Foch who thought the morale effect (The Will) could overcome machine guns. It has the premise that the market state is a morally superior form of organisation which completely ignores the way in which multi-national corporations organise themselves so as to escape taxes - they don't pay what is due to Caesar.
"China must know that an intervention....to trap Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan is not preparation for intervention on behalf of Tibetans" why must they? In project management terms one would want the people with the problem to deal with the problem - given the geography and a significant Uyghur population presence in Xinjiang perhaps trying to project US power so far is a strategic error - the US suffer overreach, and China doesn't leaving it free to persecute its minority muslim population.