The Guarded Peace

Abstract

The relationship between a nation's military and the peace it professes to seek is among the oldest and least settled questions in the study of statecraft. This article examines that relationship across three analytically distinct functions: the defense apparatus as a standing institution of peace, military deterrence as a mechanism of peacekeeping, and the direct use of military force in the creation of peace. Drawing on the classical canon from Vegetius, Kant, and Clausewitz through the deterrence theory of Schelling and Jervis, and on the contemporary quantitative literature on peace operations, the article argues that military power and peace are neither opposites nor equivalents but are structurally interdependent. A professional, civilian-controlled defense apparatus stabilizes the state that maintains it, credible deterrence raises the expected cost of aggression and thereby preserves a negative peace, and force applied under legitimate mandate can create the security conditions in which a positive peace becomes possible. Each function, however, carries a corresponding pathology: militarization, the security dilemma, and the conflation of military victory with political settlement. The article concludes that the military instrument is a necessary but insufficient condition of peace, and that its contribution depends on its subordination to diplomacy, law, and sustained civilizational dialogue.

Keywords: deterrence, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, civil-military relations, defense diplomacy, security dilemma, use of force