Before Thomas Schelling wrote his new preface for 2008 edition of Arms and Influence, he of course wrote the original preface:
One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create. A house that takes several man-years to build can be burned in an hour by any young delinquent who has the price of a box of matches. Poisoning dogs is cheaper than raising them. And a country can destroy more with twenty billion dollars of nuclear armament than it can create with twenty billion dollars of foreign investment. The harm that people can do, or that nations can do, is impressive. And it is often used to impress.
The power to hurt—the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief—is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. In the underworld it is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping, in the commercial world for boycotts, strikes, and lockouts. In some countries it is regularly used to coerce voters, bureaucrats, even the police; and it underlies the humane as well as the corporal punishments that society uses to deter crime and delinquency. It has its nonviolent forms like the sit-ins that cause nuisance or loss of income, and its subtle forms like the self-inflicted violence that sheds guilt or shame on others. Even the law itself can be exploited: since the days of early Athens, people have threatened lawsuits to extort money, owed them or not. It is often the basis for discipline, civilian and military; and gods use it to exact obedience.
The bargaining power that comes from the physical harm a nation can do to another nation is reflected in notions like deterrence, retaliation and reprisal, terrorism and wars of nerve, nuclear blackmail, armistice and surrender, as well as in reciprocal efforts to restrain that harm in the treatment of prisoners, in the limitation of war, and in the regulation of armaments. Military force can sometimes be used to achieve an objective forcibly, without persuasion or intimidation; usually, though—throughout history but particularly now—military potential is used to influence other countries, their government or their people, by the harm it could do to them. It may be used skillfully or clumsily, and it can be used for evil or in self protection, even in the pursuit of peace; but used as bargaining power it is part of diplomacy—the uglier, more negative, less civilized part of diplomacy—nevertheless, diplomacy.
There is no traditional name for this kind of diplomacy. It is not “military strategy,” which has usually meant the art or science of military victory; and while the object of victory has traditionally been described as “imposing one’s will on the enemy,” how to do that has typically received less attention than the conduct of campaigns and wars. It is a part of diplomacy that, at least in this country, was abnormal and episodic, not central and continuous, and that was often abdicated to the military when war was imminent or in progress. For the last two decades, though, this part of diplomacy has been central and continuous; in the United States there has been a revolution in the relation of military to foreign policy at the same time as the revolution in explosive power.
I have tried in this book to discern a few of the principles that underlie this diplomacy of violence.