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International Force in a Disarming—but Revolutionary—World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Lincoln P. Bloomfield
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Extract

General disarmament plans, like weapons of mass destruction, supply excessive solutions to problems, and, like those weapons, they tend to leave unanswered many highly pertinent questions about lesser conflicts, low-level disorders, ambiguous enemies, and local policing jobs. By and large, strategic planners have come to recognize this weakness in military doctrines, but it is not certain that the planners of general and complete disarmament (GCD) yet recognize that a blueprint geared to the deliberate violation, the great war, the two super-states in hostile confrontation, may turn out to be quite irrelevant to the real problems of a disarmed or even semidisarmed world. At best such a blueprint is bound to be deficient until it comes to grips with disorders other than classic open encounters of two states—that is, with the painfully familiar gamut ranging from civil war fomented in a great state by outside agents to the purely internal breakdown of law and order in a small state.

Type
II The Internationalization of Force in the Future
Information
International Organization , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Spring 1963 , pp. 444 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1963

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References

1 See Waskow's, Arthur able and provocative paper entitled, “Non-Lethal Equivalents of War” (mimeographed, Peace Research Institute, Washington, D.C.)Google Scholar.

2 see inter alia, Bloomfield, Lincoln P., “Arms Control and World Government”, World Politics, 07 1962 (Vol. 14, No. 4), pp. 633–645CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Earlier historical examples which are provocative because of their special circumstances might include the Russian Revolution, which led to Allied intervention in Northern Russia in 1918 when British, French, and American troops occupied Murmansk and Archangel until 1919 for a variety of muddled reasons, one of which, simply stated, was the belief that a dangerous vacuum had been created which outside forces must fill. Another had to do with an internal vacuum which was not filled by the outside: Weimar Germany, in the last years of the 1920's and the first years of the 1930's.

4 Two other cases outside the present scope are interesting: the first is the Irish disorders, reaching a peak of violence between the Sinn Fein and Black and Tans during the early 1920's; the other is a case of predicted internal outbreak which did not happen, for reasons which are instructive: the former Belgium trust territory of Ruanda-Urundi, which became two independent states—Rwanda and Burundi— in 1962 to the accompaniment of sharply diminished disorder and tension.

5 The extent to which that apparent paradox represents reality and the extent to which it is a caricature is examined in detail in Bloomfield, Lincoln P., Evolution or Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

6 This thesis is elaborated in detail in Chapter 2 entitled ”Strategic Doctrine and National Interest” in Bloomfield, Lincoln P., The United Nations and US. Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960)Google Scholar.

7 See speech by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to Dallas Council on World Affairs, October 27, 1956, in Department of State Bulletin, 11 5, 1956 (Vol. 35, No. 906), p. 697Google ScholarPubMed.

8 This point was well made by Schelling, Thomas C. in “The Role of Deterrence in Total Disarmament,” Foreign Affairs, 04 1962 (Vol. 40, No. 3), pp. 392–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The New York Times, October 23, 1962.

10 In October of 1962 it was reported, undoubtedly apocryphally, that units of a 22-nation “International Combat Brigade” were in Cuba to defend her from a United States invasion. The countries listed by the Cuban newspaper Revolutión as participating were Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, British Guiana, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, East Germany, the Dominican Republic, Senegal, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Venezuela, and North Vietnam. (The New York, Times, October 24, 1962.)

11 Outline of Basic Provisions of a Treaty on General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World, United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Publication 4, General Series 3, May 1962.