"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace"
About this Quote
War, in Jeane Kirkpatrick's formulation, isn’t a tragic accident; it’s a preference revealed under pressure. The line is a cold rebuke to the comforting idea that conflict persists because “both sides are trapped” or because history simply lurches toward violence. She reduces war to an asymmetry of desire: peace can be offered, pleaded for, even engineered on paper, but it can’t compete with an actor who values conquest, revenge, regime survival, or ideological victory more.
That’s the subtext: negotiations fail less from misunderstanding than from mismatched incentives. Kirkpatrick, a diplomat shaped by the late Cold War, is implicitly arguing against the romanticism of détente-at-any-price and the moral habit of distributing blame evenly. If one side wants “something more,” then calls for compromise can become a kind of self-soothing theater - especially for democracies eager to believe that reasonable terms will tame unreasonable aims.
The quote also smuggles in a hard-edged theory of leverage. If peace is not the highest good for at least one party, then diplomacy alone is insufficient; you must change what that party wants, or change the costs of wanting it. That’s the practical intent behind the aphorism: a warning that peace processes collapse when they treat willpower as a shared baseline.
It works because it’s mercilessly simple. One clause (“at least one”) punctures a whole vocabulary of “cycles of violence” and “both-sides” fatalism, replacing it with agency - and, uncomfortably, responsibility.
That’s the subtext: negotiations fail less from misunderstanding than from mismatched incentives. Kirkpatrick, a diplomat shaped by the late Cold War, is implicitly arguing against the romanticism of détente-at-any-price and the moral habit of distributing blame evenly. If one side wants “something more,” then calls for compromise can become a kind of self-soothing theater - especially for democracies eager to believe that reasonable terms will tame unreasonable aims.
The quote also smuggles in a hard-edged theory of leverage. If peace is not the highest good for at least one party, then diplomacy alone is insufficient; you must change what that party wants, or change the costs of wanting it. That’s the practical intent behind the aphorism: a warning that peace processes collapse when they treat willpower as a shared baseline.
It works because it’s mercilessly simple. One clause (“at least one”) punctures a whole vocabulary of “cycles of violence” and “both-sides” fatalism, replacing it with agency - and, uncomfortably, responsibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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