"One man's prognosis confounds the other man's prescription"
Using a predominantly philosophical perspective, Waltz's discourse spans into the causality of warfare in which he poses a very important question; what makes peace such an unattainable and intangible concept? Drawing tangents from the arguments made by many influential philosophers, Waltz suggests that perhaps the idea that man was born in a state of original sin and the fact that inherent in every man is a selfish desire for power which sets the tone for unattainable peace under most circumstances.
Building on the three images of international relations, Waltz suggests that our evolution is dependent on the past and till today, the dissonance between intentions and actions is what tends to aggravate the underlying tensions, ultimately causing this tension to manifest itself in the form of overt and covert offensives. A pertinent example would be the Cold War in which the rhetorical and the equivocal nature of politics transformed the power dynamics into a covert struggle for hegemony.
Referring to Milton, Rousseau and Spinoza to address the heart of the problem, Waltz says that human agency is conditioned in a way in which there is inevitable dissonance between intentions and actions. The complexity of human nature suggests that war does not occur in a vacuum but is is instigated by a general lack of rationality in man, the presence of a bad state or the agency of statesmen and leaders which gravitates more towards evil. "If violence among states is
caused by the evilness of man, to aim at the internal reform
of states will not do much good."
So then is war inevitable? Even Waltz - later on in his life - said that there are ways to prevent war in spite of "the evilness of man." His solution was to have every country in the world have nuclear weapons. Only through the threat of nuclear holocaust did he think war could be prevented.
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