Why is diplomacy better than war

Indeed, the break-up of the Soviet Union led to various conflicts throughout the former Soviet territories. The prospect of a reunified Germany alarmed many people—including some Germans—yet it took place with remarkably little conflict, and Europe and the world are far better off as a result. There were many players involved, but sober guidance from the first Bush administration was an important ingredient in the relatively benign outcome.

Answer: they were all primarily diplomatic initiatives, where the use of force played little or no direct role.

This stands in sharp contrast to U. It failed in Indochina and in Iraq, it is failing in Afghanistan, and it is by no means clear that trying to kill our way to victory against al Qaeda is going to work out either. The apparent futility of military power is partly due to selection effects: governments tend to use force when other approaches have failed and one is therefore dealing with highly resolved opponents and situations where success may be elusive.

But our poor track record in recent years is also due to a tendency to shoot first and talk later, and to use military force to solve problems for which it is ill-suited. Just look at the recurring debate over whether the United States should even talk to Iran, and you get an idea of how much we have devalued diplomacy and privileged military power.

To be sure, military power can be a key to diplomatic success. As George Kennan once remarked, "you have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet force in the background. Having a big stick is nice, but speaking softly is usually more effective.

At the heart of the modernist conception of the relationship between diplomacy and war was the idea that the former might moderate the dynamics and consequences of raw power politics between states, but that it could not remove them entirely.

However, the prospects for conducting successful wars — in the form of peacekeeping and peace-building operations or violent acts of resistance or emancipation — are similarly enhanced by claiming that they are waged to defend, restore, or achieve peace. Insofar as such wars appear to have been less destructive and costly to date than those of the twentieth century , this state of affairs may be regarded as an improvement. However, it often places diplomacy in the position of calling for war — albeit small wars — to sustain or achieve a general peace.

Should the required wars become bigger, because those against whom they are directed have become stronger, then present trends in the relationship between diplomacy and war may begin to look less benign.

Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database. At www. An excellent site for the study of hydrodiplomacy, which focuses on the prevention and resolution of water conflicts.

The site contains freshwater agreements that date from to It also contains an extensive water conflict and cooperation bibliography, with items from to , which is being updated. Finnish Conflict Management Initiative. It publishes excellent reports including The Private Diplomatic Survey of , which provides invaluable information and a map about the activities of 14 key private diplomatic actors engaged in conflict resolution.

This site deals with the efforts of a major European regional organization to prevent and resolve conflict. It works to implement confidence-building measures as well as post-conflict reconstruction. Conflict News Browser. Click on diplomacy in the index. The site provides comprehensive information on the relationship between diplomacy and war, culled from 15 English language newspapers around the world, focusing on past and contemporary news stories about diplomatic efforts to end conflict.

The reportage goes right up to the current efforts of the Obama administration to engage the Iranians in a diplomatic dialogue. Diplomacy Introduction. The site contains summaries of relevant books and also web pages that deal with such issues as preventive diplomacy, the use of force in diplomacy coercive diplomacy , multitrack and two-track diplomacy, and the lessons learned from international diplomacy in attempting to prevent genocide in Burundi.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. Oxford Research Encyclopedias International Studies.

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Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Especially if your weapons can survive that attack and allow you to retaliate.

In an environment as insecure as the Cold War, gaining a nuclear arsenal was a way to achieve deterrence and a measure of security that was not otherwise attainable. This was obviously an attractive option for states. For this reason, any hope of creating an international regime of moderation over nuclear weapons seemed doomed during the Cold War. The United Nations UN , which was created in in part to give international diplomacy a focal point and create a more secure world, attempted in vain to outlaw nuclear weapons in the late s.

Following that failure, a series of less absolute goals were advanced, most notably to regulate the testing of nuclear weapons. Weapons that were being developed required test detonations, and each test released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, endangering ecosystems and human health.

By the late s, high-level diplomacy under a United Nations framework had managed to establish a moratorium or suspension on nuclear testing by the United States and the Soviet Union. However, by a climate of mistrust and heightened tensions between the two nations caused testing to resume.

One year later, in , the world came to the brink of nuclear war in what is now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union sought to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, a small island nation in the Caribbean less than kilometres off the southern coast of the United States. Cuban leader Fidel Castro had requested the weapons to deter the United States from meddling in Cuban politics following a failed US-sponsored invasion by anti-Castro forces in Kennedy and Khrushchev found that via diplomacy, they could agree to a compromise that satisfied the basic security needs of the other.

Over a series of negotiations Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba in return for the United States removing missiles they had deployed in Turkey and Italy.

As the two sides could not fully trust each other due to their rivalry, the diplomacy was based and succeeded on the principle of verification by the United Nations, which independently checked for compliance.

Once the immediate crisis over Cuba was resolved, high-level diplomacy continued. Neither nation desired such a dramatic break down in communications to occur again, so a direct hot line was established linking the Kremlin in Moscow and the Pentagon in Washington. Building further on the momentum, in July the Partial Test Ban Treaty was agreed, confining nuclear testing to underground sites only.

It was not a perfect solution, but it was progress. And, in this case it was driven by the leaders of two superpowers who wanted to de-escalate a tense state of affairs. Although early moves to regulate nuclear weapons were a mixed affair, the faith that Kennedy and Khrushchev put in building diplomacy was pivotal in the course of the Cold War and facilitated further progress in finding areas of agreement.

In that climate, progress was also made on nuclear proliferation. The Treaty sought to channel nuclear technology into civilian uses and to recognise the destabilising effect of further nuclear weapons proliferation on the international community.

It was a triumph of diplomacy. The genius of the treaty was that it was aware of the realities of the international politics of the time. It was not a disarmament treaty as great powers would simply not give up their nuclear weapons, fearful their security would be diminished. So, instead of pursuing an impossible goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, the Non-Proliferation Treaty sought to freeze the number of nations that had nuclear weapons at the five nations which already possessed them: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China.

Simultaneously, those five nations were encouraged to share non-military nuclear technology with other nations — such as civilian nuclear energy — so that those nations would not feel tempted to pursue nuclear weapons. In short, those who had nuclear weapons could keep them.

Due to the well-considered design of the treaty and its enforcement, it has been deemed highly successful. Granted, it has not kept the number of nuclear nations to five, but there are still fewer than ten — which is far from the twenty or more projected by diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic before the treaty entered into force in States with nascent nuclear weapons programmes, such as Brazil and South Africa, gave them up due to international pressure to join the treaty.

Today, only a small number of states are outside its bounds. India, Pakistan and Israel never joined as they controversially in each case had nuclear ambitions that they were not prepared to give up due to national security priorities. Underlining the weight of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in , when North Korea decided to rekindle earlier plans to develop nuclear weapons, they withdrew from the treaty rather than violate it.

It is also a system with an inherent bias, since a number of nations are allowed to have nuclear weapons simply because they were first to develop them — and this continues to be the case regardless of their behaviour. Yet, while humankind has developed the ultimate weapon in the nuclear bomb, diplomacy has managed to prevail in moderating its spread. When a nation is rumoured to be developing a nuclear bomb, as in the case of Iran, the reaction of the international community is always one of common alarm.

Due to skilful diplomacy in decades gone by, non-proliferation is one of the central norms underpinning our international system.

Following the end of the Second World War, Iran found itself placed in a geostrategic hotspot. It shared a long border to its north with the Soviet Union and as a result acted as a geographical buffer to any Soviet moves into the Middle East. So, a coincidence of time, place, politics and economics judged Iran — in most ways a weak and underdeveloped state — important. In certain cases, therefore, the United States took interventionist action to contain communism from spreading.

The coup was a watermark in US-Iranian history. It set up a pattern of close relations that would last 25 years, as the Shah became a loyal ally of the United States in a volatile region.

The wider region was embroiled in a series of crises caused by decolonisation and the resulting phenomenon of Arab nationalism, regional opposition to the creation of Israel, and a major ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan. Then, as now, this was a highly unstable area of the world to live in. Iran has always been a nation that, despite different manifestations of its internal shape and character, has aspired to greater stature internationally, or at the very least regional predominance.

For example, the Shah, whose autocratic rule was brought to an end by the revolution that erased his regime and created the Islamic Republic of Iran, harboured grand designs for Iran as the premier nation of the Middle East.

The United States hoped its support of the Shah would allow him to widen and deepen Iranian power in order to help stabilise the region. However, a significant caveat is that the regional and global role Iran was to play under the Shah was largely in line with American desires, while the role envisioned by the Islamic Republic of Iran is deeply antagonistic to just about every facet of American politics.

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