National Security Studies and War Potential of Nations

Through much of the 1800s and into the first half of the 1900s, the security of a state depended heavily on the balance among its own war potential and that of its adversaries and allies. In the second half of the 1900s that relationship weakened in the context of cold war bipolarity and a nuclear standoff between Superpowers. The relationship is changing again in fundamental ways at the start of the twenty-first century. ‘Globalization’ brings an increase in the mobility of goods, ideas, and technologies that multiply the speed with which war potential changes, and erases many of the boundaries that linked security conceptually to the war potential of states . Research aimed at understanding the war potential of situations covers some of these changes but not all. As the ability of diverse political units to produce and deploy organized violence for political ends spreads, behavior that in the past might have been thought of as terrorism, will increasingly become more like war. The goal—realistically—might be to undermine the foundations of a state or bring down a government. In that scenario, each important term in the phrase ‘national security and the war potential of nations’ will have taken on a very different meaning.