Raymond Aron on War and Strategy: A Framework for Conceptualizing International Relations Today

Abstract

Are Raymond Aron’s views on war and strategy still relevant to twenty-first-century scholars who try to think about war?¹ Many scholars doubt this, suggesting that the analyses of Aron belong to the bygone age of twentieth-century wars.² A child during the event in Sarajevo that triggered the Great War in 1914, Aron died a mere six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the event that brought the Soviet Union’s confrontation with the United States to an end. Since then, international relations have significantly changed: the USSR has disappeared, making way for liberal democracy and the dynamics of globalization; interstate wars have gradually been replaced by internal wars and irregular conflicts that pit regular armies against actors who are subnational (“insurgents,” “rebels,” guerrilla fighters) or transnational (terrorist groups, mafias).³