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American Policy Toward Russia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
I Believe that much historical data can be assembled to support the following propositions:
(1) The trend of power politics is toward a bipolar world, and such a world tends toward increasing rivalry, suspicion, and tension between the two leading states, making them develop into garrison states in a continuous relationship of cold or hot war.
(2) A state actively preparing for war in time of peace tends to become over-centralized, intolerant, and aggressive; to encourage other states to gang up against it; and, when war eventuates, to win the first battles but to lose the war.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1950
References
1 Wright, Q., A Study of War, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942, pp. 382, 763, 816Google Scholar; Weigert, Hans W. and Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, eds., Compass of the World, New York, Macmillan, 1944, pp. 55 ff.Google Scholar; Ogburn, W. F., ed., Technology and International Relations, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949, pp. 189–92.Google Scholar See also Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations, New York, Knopf, 1948, pp. 270 ff.Google Scholar; Wright, Q., “Accomplishments and Expectations of World Organization,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. LV, No. 5 (August 1946), pp. 882 ff.Google Scholar, and Lasswell, Harold D., “The Interrelations of World Organization and Society,” loc. cit., pp. 889 ff.Google Scholar; Fox, William T. R., The SuperPowers, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1944, p. 99Google Scholar; Wright, Q., ed., A Foreign Policy for the United States, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947, pp. 12 ff.Google Scholar; Poole, De Witt C., “Balance of Power,” Life, XXIII (Sept. 22, 1947), pp. 76 ff.Google Scholar
Increase of tension (rivalry among the powers), of rigidity (garrison character of each power), and of polarization (reduction in number of powers and orientation about two poles) reciprocally augment one another, all reaching a maximum, periodically at the crises of global wars and secularly at the transitions from systems of power politics to universal states. The above writers emphasize the possibility of mitigating the tendency toward such maximizations by rational action introducing complications.
2 Wright, , A Study of War, pp. 398, 1311 ff.Google Scholar, and tables pp. 641 ff.
3 Ibid., pp. 847 ff., 959 ff., 1007 ff., 1312; Lippmann, Walter, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, Boston, Little, Brown, 1937, pp. 89 ff.Google Scholar
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