Abstract
International security is both a relative and an uneven notion. In an ‘anarchic society’ of nations that live in a condition of troubled peace or in a ‘state of war’ — depending on whether one takes a more Lockian or a more Hobbesian view of world affairs — there will always be a modicum of insecurity. Not all the actors can be simultaneously secure as long as we have not reached the unlikely stage of living in a world without threats and enmities or the distant stage of inhabiting a world so well organized that its members are both deprived of, and saved from, self-help. Moreover, the scope of insecurity is not fixed; the security of the world as a whole is threatened only by some perils, whereas certain regions, or individual members, can be endangered also by threats that do not affect the security of others.
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Notes
Richard N. Cooper, Economics of Interdependence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
See Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962).
Stanley Hoffmann, Primacy and World Order (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), Part 2.
Miles Kahler, ‘Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy’, Foreign Affairs .vol. 58, no. 2 (Winter 1979), pp. 374–96.
Robert J. Art, ‘To What Ends Military Power?’, International Security ,vol. 4, no. 4 (Spring 1980), pp. 3–35.
See Walter J. Levy, ‘Oil and the Decline of the West’, Foreign Affairs ,vol. 58, no. 5 (Summer 1980), pp. 999–1015.
Kissinger’s view, which can be found in his White House Years (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979) — see my review,
‘The World of Dr Kissinger’, New York Review of Books ,6 December 1979 — has been laid out even more starkly in his ‘statement on the geopolitics of oil’ before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate, 31 July 1980.
Paul Jabber, ‘US Interests and Regional Security in the Middle East,’ Daedalus (US Defense Policies in the 1980s) (Fall 1980), pp. 75–6.
Peter Jay, ‘Regionalism as Geopolitics’, Foreign Affairs (America and the World in1979) (January 1980), p. 487.
See Scalapino’s ‘Asia at the End of the 1970s’, Foreign Affairs (America and the World in 1979) vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 693–737, and Allan S. Whiting, ‘China and the Super-powers: Toward the Year 2000’, Daedalus ,(Fall 1980), pp. 97–113.
See the remarks by Zalmay Khalilzad, ‘Afghanistan and the Crisis in American Foreign Policy’, Survival ,vol. XII, no. 4 (July/August 1980), pp. 151–60.
See Richard Betts, ‘The Tragicomedy of Arms Trade Control’, International Security ,vol. V, no. 1 (Summer 1980), pp. 80–110.
Robert Jaster, South Africa’s Narrowing Security Options, Adelphi Paper No. 159 (London: IISS, 1980).
Roger Hansen, ‘North-South Policy — What is the Problem?’, Foreign Affairs ,vol. 58, no. 5 (Summer 1980), pp. 1104–28.
McGeorge Bundy, ‘The Future of Strategic Deterrence’, Survival ,vol. XXI, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1979), p. 271.
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© 1982 The International Institute for Strategic Studies
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Hoffmann, S. (1982). Security in an Age of Turbulence: Means of Response. In: Bertram, C. (eds) Third-World Conflict and International Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06312-3_8
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