Can too much restraint endanger peace?

The United States is on the verge of war. A rogue nation on the other side of the globe increasingly seems a menace – it has stubbornly stocked its arsenals, strengthened its military, and even invaded neighboring countries. Serious economic sanctions have been enforced, to little effect. But resistance to US military intervention remains high among both Americans and international allies.

That scenario may sound familiar. But the rogue nation in question is 1940s Japan, after its invasion of China and just before the Pearl Harbor attack.

It's one of several historical examples that Donald Kagan, professor of classics and history at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., calls on when he examines historical parallels to the current tensions with Iraq.

"If you look at how nations like ours get into war," Professor Kagan says, "there's an incredible pattern that takes place. You start out with the assumption that you're absolutely secure and have nothing to worry about. Countries like ours love then to disarm and stop thinking about these problems. But meanwhile, our interests are enormously broad."

Kagan has been looking at such patterns for some time. His 1995 book, "On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace," reviewed the buildups to a number of conflicts – including World War I, World War II, the Peloponnesian War, and the Second Punic War. Understanding of the causes of war in the past, Kagan hopes, might help to avoid repeating them in the future.

To that end, notes Kagan, some examples are more useful than others. Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, for instance, had much in common with America today: "They are both commercial states, they are popular governments, they have worldwide interests, and [there is] a strong element in their culture that says war is not only evil but is something that really can be avoided by avoiding involvement."

But less obvious comparisons are also relevant, Kagan says. Pericles, the 5th-century BC Athenian statesman, may have lacked the pacifist streak of many leaders today, but he tried everything he could to prevent the Peloponnesian War, since it threatened the prosperity of ancient Athens.

Like Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, Kagan believes that "honor, fear, and interest" are always the prime motives for war. The key, he says, is ferreting out the particular roles each played in the origins of individual conflicts.

As in other times when the threat of war looms over foreign-policy decisions, history emerges from the shadows. Critics of Congress's recent resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq, for instance, compared it to 1964's Gulf of Tonkin resolution – essentially a congressional green light for the Vietnam War, passed on the basis of evidence that turned out to be false.

Kagan, on the other hand, uses history to support the resolution, pointing to instances such as World War I and World War II, when earlier action by the US and other nations could arguably have prevented war.

In a recent phone interview, he discussed these and other historical buildups to war – and what lessons they hold for the present.

On America's tendency to ignore threats:

One of my favorite examples is when, prior to the Korean War, Secretary of State [Dean] Acheson made a famous speech in which he laid out a perimeter of states in East Asia that were important to us, that we were going to defend – and he left out Korea. And months later they invaded. And the minute they invaded he realized, my God, we can't let that happen....

We don't recognize ... that we have interests we can't run away from. We don't recognize that requires that we have the military force, ideally, to deter anybody from doing anything that would cause us to go to war.

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