Zachary Shirkey and I both stress the failures of military force. However, I am inclined to suggest that this record, combined with the absence of threats requiring a large standing military, justifies a much larger reduction in defense spending than he does. He suggests two other differences between our views, though we are actually fairly close on these, I think.

Concerning a potential Soviet attack on Western Europe, he argues that the fact that NATO could “defend against a Soviet attack or at least make the attack prohibitively expensive, must have factored into the Soviets’ reluctance to contemplate such a war.” I certainly agree, but it seems to me that such Soviet reluctance was already fully in place. Although the Soviets were prepared to defend themselves if attacked, there seems to be no evidence that they ever contemplated or were willing to risk a substantial military incursion to the west—or anything else that might in their wildest imagination come even slightly to resemble the catastrophe they had just suffered through. Even if the United States had withdrawn, NATO had not been created, and nuclear weapons had never been invented, the Soviets faced the prospect of a massive and costly quagmire to which the United States, even if unallied with the attacked, might join as it had twice done earlier in the century. The Soviets were, in that sense, fully deterred.

In addition, the Soviets presided over an extensive empire in Europe’s East that, except for the dismemberment of Germany, even Hitler would have found satisfying. They had a lot to lose. And, of course, they subscribed to an ideology that primarily stressed class and revolutionary warfare, not direct military confrontation with the capitalist world. They were not averse, as Shirkey correctly points out, to military tinkering around the edges. But Lenin’s experience with that, noted by Shirkey, had been largely unsuccessful, and the Soviets were careful, as my book points out, to distance themselves from the North Korean attack on the south in 1950 even as they approved it.

Shirkey’s other concern is about the degree to which the United States was responsible for the post–World War II “liberal international order.” Although I am not always sure how “liberal” that order often is, I do contend that states, beginning with those in the developed world, have increasing come to regard international war as a stupid method for resolving their differences. I agree with Shirkey that the United States has contributed importantly to this order—particularly from an economic perspective—but I also concur with his observation that the United States was, strictly speaking, not necessary to the creation of the order. For example, to the degree that a norm about territorial integrity (first proposed in the wake of World War I) has taken hold, I think it is more nearly the consequence of an aversion to international war than its cause.