Philip C. Bobbitt

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

How the West has won

by Frederic Raphael
The Sunday Times (London), June 9, 2002

The shield that Hephaestus made for Achilles famously depicted scenes of war and peace, even though its main function was to protect the hero in his confrontation with Hector. Philip Bobbitt's theme, in his very important book, is the indissociable interplay of war and peace in human history.

Bobbitt is an American lawyer (aware that this may not procure him unhesitating admiration), an academic and a one-time high-ranking Washington adviser. He knows his stuff, but rarely struts it: he is earnest but seldom pompous, well informed but never grand. He covers some of the same ground as Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy, with a less static view of the subject, and a less cynically Metternichian one. He plays hardball, but with a sense of the importance of rules as well as muscle. What review could do justice to the range and intelligence of a work so full of ideas, proposals and fears and hopes for the future of civilisation?

The muscle on which Bobbitt relies is, of course, the United States. Like Alfredo Valladao, he proclaims that the 21st century will be American. And just as well, he thinks, though never smugly. America is the hyperpower on which all our freedoms depend; it is, he insists, the paramount force for good, by which he means the existence of democracy, which alone certifies the legitimacy essential to reasonable and binding agreements to live and let live. Ideology kills; pragmatism survives.

The will and capacity of America to act with intelligent, unfettered urgency are, he argues, essential to human progress and established by Uncle Sam's long, patient victory in the cold war. Now, however, "The provision of information by the US in order to enable missile defence may play as large a role in the 21st century as the provision of extended deterrence did in the 20th." By contrast, institutions such as the United Nations act slowly, if at all, and usually get things wrong. The UN record in Rwanda and Bosnia is, in Bobbitt's closely argued account, evidence enough of its wilful impotence.

Part of the chilling quality of The Shield of Achilles lies in the details. For instance, the French commander of the "peace-keeping" force in Bosnia, General Janvier, would not authorise air strikes on the Serbs threatening Srebenica because the Dutch general, Karremans, "used the wrong request form". Mladic's massacres followed five days later.

Bobbitt has the knowledge and nerve to cut the quibbles. It may be that, in Bosnia, there were "atrocities on all sides", as both Lord Carrington and David Owen said, but our former foreign secretaries were the Walrus and the Carpenter of European diplomacy: they supplied an excuse for hand-wringing stagnation. Only when America came into the situation – belatedly, it is true – were the Serbs properly stigmatised, and punished, as systematic murderers. Tony Blair learnt his lesson and backed the Americans immediately after 9/11.

Bobbitt forecasts the replacement of the nation-state with what he calls "the mercantile state". National boundaries, forces and interests will become more soluble. In the future, cyber-spacious world, complex associations, backed by ad hoc contracts, will make sometimes contradictory calls on the "international community", in which the media have an unprecedently moderating or baleful role. History may have ended; journalism has taken over. Life now approximates to showbiz.

As a lawyer, Bobbitt sees no scandal in contract law being the model for international agreements (what else have you got?). For the "mercantile state" – ours, like it or not – wealth is the root of all virtue. "Money has no smell," said Emperor Vespasian, when chided for taxing tanners, who used urine to cure their hides. Our modern, democratic princes take the more positive view: nothing smells quite so sweet, even when pornographers coin it. Fetishising the pound, rather than seeing it as just another commodity (which is what it is) blinkers vision, but cannot banish facts.

Bobbitt's legalistic mind favours slyboots such as Richelieu – no "ethical foreign policy" nonsense with the cardinal – and undramatic plodders, such as Wellington's grey eminence, Castlereagh. The architect of the concert of post-Napoleonic Europe was, it is maintained, the target of unjust rant from Byron and Shelley. Compromisers are better than visionaries; men live longer, and more happily, under them.

Bobbitt reads history as being divided by what he calls "epochal wars", the most recent lasting from 1914–90. It was, he is sure, started by Germany. He insists on this not for accusatory purposes, but to explain why Hitler found so ready a constituency for the second world war, the (decisive) replay.

Bobbitt is so persuasive that a few dubious assertions stick out. A prefatory remark about Alexander the Great, for instance, is way off target: we are told that Macedon's ending of the independence of the Greek city-states "proved that only a larger empire could maintain itself and defend Greece". Sorry, but Alexander's empire crumbled into fractious fiefdoms immediately after his death. Nor, at the time, was Persia minded to attack Greece. Alexander was less interested in "security" than in glory and booty. Biffing the Persians – on whose side as many Greeks fought as Alexander recruited – was a means to both.

Although solicitously humane, Bobbitt does not fail to endorse a ruthless line. For instance, he makes an unequivocal case for the use of both of the atomic bombs on Japan in order to end the war. But he does concede that if the Americans had not imposed an oil embargo in 1941, there might have been no attack on Pearl Harbor.

This tome is readable more for its sustained intelligence and honesty than for its style. Bobbitt is no Tacitus, nor even – though this is certainly "one more damn thick book" – a Gibbon or a Spengler. He does not believe in the decline of the West, still less in the imminence of its fall: under American leadership (he recommends it be modest) we are on the up, and we may as well have the grace to enjoy it, while it lasts.

The events of 9/11 came as The Shield of Achilles was almost complete; they do more to confirm than to challenge its nervous optimism. Terrorism, however appalling, is a loser's tactic. It seeks to negate what has no plausible alternative, except tyranny and regression. Claiming no oracular prescience, Bobbitt mixes argument with decisive clarity. The last sentence of his warily encouraging estimate of the future society of nations is "I invite amendment."

Imagine Marx, or Bin Laden, saying that.