The risks of victory: An historian's provocation.

• Author: Schroeder, Paul W.
• Position: Politics of terrorism

IF IT is true, as so many pundits rushed to tell us after the events of September 11, 2001, that everything is different, all is changed, and nothing will ever again be the same, then it follows that the study of history is unlikely to provide any guidance as we navigate our suddenly more uncertain future. But, of course, it is not true. The essential structure of contemporary international politics has not changed, and neither has human nature. That said, there are more and less intelligent ways to engage historical knowledge in service to the present.

The historical analogy most commonly heard after September 11- between the attacks of that sad day and the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor--is worse than useless. It is not just superficial but misleading. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise first blow in what the Japanese government knew would be a conventional war about power and territory. It was informed not at all by the strategy of terrorism, a strategy in which the weak attempt to goad their target into counterproductive reaction. The only thing that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have in common is that both were directed against the United States.

There is another historical analogy, however, of far greater utility--as long as in using it we know the history cited well and, even more important, that we value differences as well as similarities between past and present circumstances. After all, knowledge of history can never tell us exactly what to think or do in a given situation-it only offers a richer reservoir of possibilities to think about. That more useful analogy is to the events of June-July 1914, the beginning of the Great War.

Three lessons emerge from reasoning by historical analogy from the early summer of 1914 to the late summer of 2001. The first is that a great power must avoid giving terrorists the war they want, but that the great power does not want. The second is that a great power must reckon the effects of its actions not only on its immediate circumstances, but with regard to the larger structure of international politics in which it clearly has a significant stake. The third is that a great power must beware the risks of victory as well as the dangers of defeat. If it is not careful and wise, the United States could find itself enmeshed even deeper in the Middle East and Southwest Asia than it is today, and risk generating greater prospective dangers in the process of containing smaller near-term ones.

After sketching the logic of the analogy between July 1914 and September 2001, I will pass lightly over the first two of these lessons but dwell more on the third. Let me say only before pressing on that the analysis presented here is (by temperament, not ideological formulae) a conservative one, and yet it is most likely to challenge--and perhaps even to annoy--those who think of themselves as conservatives. That this is so may bear another kind of lesson for us to ponder.

The Analogy

THE EASIEST way to present the analogy between what happened in June-July 1914 to the events of September 11, 2001 is simply to describe what happened roughly 88 years ago in language germane to what happened about three months ago.

The 1914 crisis and war resulted directly and immediately from a terrorist action: the assassination in Sarajevo, Bosnia (then part of Austria-Hungary) of the heir-apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a group of terrorists--mostly Bosnian students--led by Gavrilo Princip. (1) A widespread network of organizations, agencies and governments was connected directly or indirectly to this conspiracy. In varying degrees of involvement and complicity, these included: secret revolutionary organizations both within the Habsburg Monarchy and in Serbia; the Serbian military intelligence apparatus led by Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, which trained, supported, and armed these terrorists; the Serbian government headed by Nikola Pasic, who knew something about all this but chose to remain officially ignorant; the nationalist organization in Serbia promoting pan-Serbism and its goal of Greater Serbia, now aimed principally at the destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy and at the Serbian annexatio n of large tracts of its territories; the Serbian press, parliament, and political public that supported this radical ideology; and the Russian government, which supported Serbia as part of a policy of isolating and paralyzing Austria-Hungary, and whose minister to Serbia actively encouraged anti-Austrian irredentism and subversive-revolutionary activity until his death just before the assassination.

The Austro-Hungarian government knew a good deal about this, though not all the details. It considered the assassination the final outrage in a series of Serbian provocations and attacks directed against the monarchy; believed that the heart of the conspiracy lay in Belgrade; was convinced by experience that combating Serbian state-sponsored terrorism and subversion by means other than military force would prove useless because the Serbian government never kept its promises; and therefore concluded that Austria-Hungary's existence as a great power required a direct attack that would, as the phrase went, eliminate Serbia as a political factor in the Balkans.

Yet one cannot simply link the whole terrorist-subversive conspiracy directly to Austria's action and thus to the war. For though several organizations and individuals were complicit to some degree in this terrorist act, the only ones directly responsible for deciding on it and carrying it out were Gavrilo Princip and his small group of co-terrorists. None of the others ordered it, knew precisely about it, or wanted it to happen. Indeed, though others complicit in the act also hated the Habsburg Monarchy, they opposed making war against it at that particular time. Many anticipated the monarchy's downfall with approval, but a gradual downfall caused by internal dissolution was what most had in mind and were working to promote. Some argued and hoped that such a process would not promote an international war but help prevent one. Princip and his fellow conspirators, however, consciously intended to promote an international war through their deed. Princip said during his wartime imprisonment that he had wanted a war because if Serbia won, then Greater Serbia would be achieved; and if it lost, then Austria-Hungary would annex the Kingdom of Serbia--in which case all the Serbs would be united, even though under hated foreign rule. Princip's act was therefore directed also against his own fellow revolutionaries and sympathizers; it was intended to force them to do what they were as yet unwilling to do--follow the ideology of pan-Serbism and the slogan of "Union or Death"--to its logical, mad conclusion.

Finally, the crowning irony in this ghastly scenario is this: though Princip deliberately tried to start a great war, his terrorist action, which succeeded only by luck, could not in itself produce that war. Only Austria-Hungary could do that by its response, and it did. Yet of all the participants great and small in the 1914 crisis, none more deeply and genuinely feared a great war than the government of Austria-Hungary, or had better reasons to do so. Time and again previously (1904-05, 1908-09, 1912-13) it had considered the war option and rejected it, even when the chances for military victory looked good. One can show that in July 1914, too, though it undoubtedly wanted and aimed for a local war against Serbia, its larger aim was general peace. Its forlorn hope was that Russia would accept a punishment of Serbia for the sake of ending the terrorist-revolutionary threat to all thrones, including Russia's, and that then Austria and Russia could settle their other differences (above all the Ruthenian quest ion) and restore both good relations and the old Dreikaiserbund (the "Three Emperors' League") as well.

In other words, the terrorists whose action triggered the great war wanted a war but could not start it by themselves; those who helped them prepare the action did not want the war but were to varying degrees dragged into it; and the terrorists' worst enemy, which had the greatest reasons to avoid war, supplied the war the terrorists wanted.

Anyone can see the parallels suggested here, however imperfect they may be. Bin Laden is Princip, and the countries that abet Al-Qaeda's terrorism compose the conspiracy. Only bin Laden and his chief lieutenants plotted and knew about the attacks of September 11 in advance, not the Taliban leadership or the leadership of any other state or sympathetic Muslim group, particularly Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Only bin Laden wanted to touch off a war involving the United States; other fundamentalist groups, the Taliban, the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Sudanese and Libyan governments surely did not. The U.S. government knew plenty about bin Laden and the network of state support for his activities; it had been attacked by bin Laden before, the World Trade Center had been a target, it knew of the existence of Al-Qaeda cells in the United States, and airline hijackings have long been part of the terrorist repertoire--and yet it did little to prevent the terrorist act, which led it in turn t o fight a war that it would otherwise not have sought.

But if the analogy is easy to follow, at least in its broad stripes, anyone can also see that it is nonsense to imply that the two situations are exactly alike and that the present one could lead to World War III. 1914 and 2001 are entirely different. Austria-Hungary was weak, almost isolated, surrounded by enemies and opponents, internally divided, and therefore prone to commit a suicidal blunder. Europe was then a tinderbox, locked in hostile alliances and bitter rivalries and caught in a spiraling arms race. The United States today is...