Air Power Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Air Power - Essay Example Realists of all varieties heed Machiavelli's caution that "security for gentleman is impossible if not it be conjoined with power." (18) Leaders wishing to defend their condition from assault must learn to master the planned application of power and act therefore in all situation and against all competitors. Clausewitz's dictum that war is a continuance of strategy by additional means (the sword in its place of the pen) suggests its reverse that "statecraft" is at its spirit war by political means: Why use a sword when a ballpoint will be sufficient But stay your sword sharp in the occasion negotiated agreements in the end fail. Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, refugees from Nazi Germany who become key information in the American realist tradition, witness in the barbarity of European totalitarianism a warped moral fervor adversative to the fundamental person security upon which self-governing following systems depend. Failing to be familiar with the reality of Hitler's increasing armed power, deplete their arsenals, relying on treaties and declarations to remain the calm, open-minded democracies shaped the conditions under which the worldwide murder of World War II might no longer be banned. For Morgenthau and Kissinger, the ignominious breakdown of the West's following "idealism" from Versailles to Hitler's attack of Poland is summed up in a solitary image of humiliation: Neville Chamberlain, winning his return as of Munich to London on September 30, 1938 following handing the Sudetenland to Hitler, wave a text before soothing crowds: "[H]ere is the document which bears his person's name upon it as we ll as pit." Instead of achieve "peace in our time" as Chamberlain proclaim, the Munich treaty fatally shifted the European equilibrium of power in Hitler's favor, igniting the global disaster Churchill called "the Unnecessary War." Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations remains the determining American employment of realism in the "traditional" tradition. Morgenthau's understanding of "the move violently for power and calm"--shaped by his own knowledge of the victory of totalitarianism and antisemitism in his inhabitant Germany--carries over pessimistic assumptions about person psychology, and the force for power, reflected in the worldview communal by Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. (22) Morgenthau follows Spinoza's attack winning philosophers who "imagine man not as they are but as they would like them to be." So Morgenthau's