Hot shots with cold feet

When the United Nations sanctioned the use of force against Colonel Gaddafi, it could not quite bring itself to use the word force. The word force is, well, forceful. It suggests ruthlessness. Force is something that gets things done, and those in its way tend to get swept aside. The German word is Macht, and we have all heard about that. A powerful waterfall close to where I grew up in the north of England is called ‘High Force’; you only have to go there in springtime to witness the literalness of that name.

The West has never had more force at its disposal, while being oddly squeamish about deploying it. One may wish world affairs to be decided by diplomacy and overseas aid, but as the Libyan episode shows, there are times when there is no substitute for force. For all the theories about ‘soft power’, most force (and power) remains hard, material and, yes, military. The West has always known this. But it goes through phases of being reluctant to admit it.

Using force did not trouble decision-makers of earlier societies, the Persians, the Romans, the Huns, Frederick the Great, the British in India. But just over a century ago, this stern sense of realism began to weaken, becoming softer and conscience-stricken. Liberals like Gladstone and his devoted American follower Woodrow Wilson preached the merits of mutual human tolerance, the abolition of weapons of mass destruction or mass starvation (the blockade, poison gas), the coming together of the nations of the world.

The Wilsonian dream, encapsulated in a League of Nations that America never entered, lasted a mere 12 to 15 years before the dictator-states booted it into the dustbin of history. But when those dictator-states overreached themselves by their fateful aggressions of 1938 to 1941, they were kicked into the same dustbin; and it is hard to find anyone among the policymakers, opinion-writers and general publics of the victor nations of the second world war who did not think that using massive military force — including, more than ever, massive air force on the enemy homelands — was not well justified.