THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Read Free Page A

the same way as princely states mutated into dynastic territorial states, and they in their turn into nation-states, now nation-states are mutating into what Bobbitt terms “market-states,” and the second part of his book is devoted to describing the nature of market-states and the possible kinds of world that they may create. The plural is significant: Bobbitt provides no single scenario for the future but multiples, none of them very attractive: we are required to choose among a wide range of equally disagreeable dystopias. We are also required to choose among a wide range of possible wars, because Bobbitt is under no illusion that, any more than their predecessors, market-states will provide perpetual peace. At worst there may be cataclysms, at best a continuation of the low-key global violence to which we have become accustomed over the past ten years and from which not even the wealthiest and most powerful communities will be able to escape. The best they can do is reduce their vulnerability, and the only victory they can look forward to is avoidance of defeat.
    This book was virtually complete before the events of September 11 gave a horrible reality to Bobbitt's description of the possibilities that now lie before us. But for that,
The Shield of Achilles
might be ranked with such massive prophecies of doom as Spengler's
Decline of the West
, which scared us witless in the 1930s and is now deservedly forgotten. Such a fate is unlikely to befall this volume. Anyone who believes that the author contemplated with equanimity the future that lies before us should first read the poem from which the book takes its title. Bobbitt believes that mankind could be facing a tragedy without precedent in its history. It is not clear that he is wrong.
    —Michael Howard

 

Prologue
     
    We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state: only states could muster the huge revenues, conscript the vast armies, and equip the divisions required to threaten the survival of other states. Indeed posing such threats, and meeting them, created the modern state. In such a world, every state knew that its enemy would be drawn from a small class of potential adversaries. This is no longer true, owing to advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone
.
     

THE END OF THE LONG WAR AND
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MODERN STATE
     
    This book is about the modern state—how it came into being, how it has developed, and in what directions we can expect it to change. Epochal wars, those great coalitional conflicts that often extend over decades, have been critical to the birth and development of the State, and therefore much of this book is concerned with the history of warfare. Equally determinative of the State has been its legal order, and so this is a book about law, especially constitutional and international law as these subjects relate to statecraft. This book, however, is neither a history of war nor a work of jurisprudence. Rather it is principally concerned with the
relationship
between strategy and the legal order as this relationship has shaped and transformed the modern state and the society composed of these states. A new form of the State—the market-state—is emerging from this relationship in much the same way that earlier forms since the fifteenth century have emerged, as a consequence of war. This war, the fifth great epochal war in modern history, began in 1914 and only ended in 1990. The Long War, like previous epochal wars, brought into being a new form of the State—the market-state. The previous form—the constitutional order of the nation-state—is now everywhere under siege.
    As a result of the Long War, the State is