War in International Relations Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The keyed code is Both (A) and (R) are correct, but (R) is not always a rationale of (A).

The assertion is correct: balance of power reasoning can justify a preventive war, fought to stop a rising rival before it becomes strong enough to upset the balance. The reason is also correct: the same reasoning, once accepted, could justify going to war whenever a rival's power grows, which is the standard objection to it.

But the reason describes a danger that follows from the logic, not the ground on which preventive war is justified, so it does not explain the assertion. That rules out the codes calling either statement incorrect.

Answer: A

The statement is attributed to Goebbels (spelt 'Gobbles' in the paper).

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, is the figure to whom this description of the 'big lie' is popularly credited, and it is quoted under his name in textbooks on propaganda and psychological warfare. No exact source for the wording has been found in his own writings, but the attribution is the conventional one.

John Foster Dulles was the American Secretary of State associated with brinkmanship, Anthony Eden the British Prime Minister at the time of Suez, and 'Andrew Gramico' is not a recognised figure.

Answer: D

This is a general war.

A general war is fought between major powers with many participants, aims at the defeat and occupation of the enemy, and uses all available weapons against both military and civilian targets. The two World Wars are the standard examples, and a general nuclear war would be the extreme case.

A limited war restricts its aims, its area or its weapons, as in Korea or Kargil. A civil war is fought within one state, and an asymmetric war is between sides of very unequal strength using different methods, neither of which matches the description.

Answer: A

The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best example of brinkmanship.

Brinkmanship is the practice of pushing a confrontation to the edge of war to make the other side back down. In October 1962 the United States imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to force the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles, and for thirteen days both superpowers stood at the brink of nuclear war before Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.

No fighting broke out, so it was not a limited war, and it involved no guerrilla war or insurgency.

Answer: D

The one not a principle of guerrilla warfare is deep penetration into the enemy's front.

Guerrilla warfare, as described by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, relies on surprise and deception, mobility, and the initiative of offensive action at times and places of the guerrilla's choosing: strike where the enemy is weak, then disperse.

A deep thrust through the enemy's front line is a principle of conventional, especially mechanised, warfare. Guerrillas avoid the enemy's front and its main forces, operating instead in its rear and on its lines of communication.

Answer: C

The definition is Hedley Bull's (printed 'Headly Bull').

In The Anarchical Society (1977), Bull defines war as 'organised violence carried on by political units against each other'. Violence is war only if it is organised, official (carried out in the name of a political unit) and directed against another political unit.

Quincy Wright, in A Study of War, defined war as a legal condition permitting hostilities by armed force; Clausewitz called war an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will, and the continuation of policy by other means; Raymond Aron wrote on peace and war between nations.

Answer: D

The statement is Mao Tse-tung's.

In 'On Protracted War' (1938), Mao wrote that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed, developing Clausewitz's idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

The phrasing, with its symmetry of bloodshed, is Mao's, not Clausewitz's own. Quincy Wright and Evan Luard studied war and international society but are not the authors of this saying.

Answer: B

It was Hegel who held that war preserves the ethical health of nations.

In the Philosophy of Right (para 324), Hegel argues that war preserves the ethical health of peoples, as the movement of the winds keeps the sea from the stagnation a lasting calm would produce. War reminds citizens of the finitude of particular interests and binds them to the state.

Mackinder was a geographer, Hobbes saw war as the natural condition to be escaped through the sovereign, and Marx saw wars as products of class society, not as morally healthy.

Answer: D

A Study of War was written by Quincy Wright.

Quincy Wright's two-volume A Study of War (1942) was a landmark interdisciplinary study of the causes and history of war, drawing on law, history, sociology and psychology.

Marx did not write a work of this title; Mao's military writings include 'On Protracted War' and 'Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War'; and Ho Chi Minh was a revolutionary leader rather than a theorist of war in this sense.

Answer: D

The correct order is (III), (II), (I), (IV).

• Operation Anthropoid: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, 1942.
• Operation Magic Carpet: the return of American servicemen after the Second World War (1945-46); the name was used again for the airlift of Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949-50.
• Operation Rolling Thunder: the US bombing campaign against North Vietnam, 1965-68.
• Operation Wrath of God: Israel's covert campaign after the 1972 Munich massacre.

On either reading of Magic Carpet the order is the same, which rules out the other codes.