Military conflicts are considered, with all due grounds, among the most dangerous and intractable types of conflicts.
We should remind ourselves that the possibility of using destructive weapons in such conflicts, inflicting human sacrifice, and destroying property and natural values tells enough of the bitterness and antagonism of these conflicts and of the hardships of their conduct.
Usually, they can be either lost or won; other solutions so far were hardly attainable. Of course, there are political systems and political cultures which worship the use of violence and weapons and for them any military conflict is something “regular” and agreeable; but they are not what we consider a “normal” actor in international affairs. Even in the current highly controversial world, they are more an exclusion than a rule. But the most “normal” and “civilized” actors are also very often engaged in military conflicts and that raises an important question of how to solve them without necessarily going to war. If nations go to war, then the solution to the conflict is decided by the results of the military showdown rather than by the considerations of reason and justice. And that is what is demanded by the current political imperative (Zartman and Kremenyuk, 2005).International relations are full of military confrontations and military conflicts. Nations both go to war and prepare to do that, they either fight each other or threaten to do so (Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer, 2003). The difference between “conflicts” and “confrontations” is rather conditional: in this chapter, “conflicts” are treated as open hostilities (“hot wars”) while “confrontations” as military conflicts short of direct showdown (“cold wars”). Both exist in contemporary international relations, though it is fair to acknowledge that the ratio is generally in favor of the cold wars. In each case, the major elements are practically the same: hostility, use of coercion, arms race and desire to achieve a position of power in order to impose a unilateral solution of the conflict, high instability and low predictability.
At the same time, there is of course a difference: open hostilities are a major threat to world peace and the intervention of the UN is unavoidable with all the consequences, while confrontation short of war is considered a “private affair” which does not preclude any active outside intervention.The real difference between the two is in the use of organized violence. In the case of confrontations, the use of military force is a political weapon strongly limited by the international law, rational considerations of security (avoidance of the retaliatory blow) and ethics (threat of unacceptable collateral damage). As a result, the cases of military confrontations are accompanied by strong written or unwritten “rules of prudence” (Allison, 1989) which prescribe a certain code of conduct of the adversaries which permits them to confront each other endlessly without a direct clash. In military conflicts, the use of force is going at full swing and the means which may limit its scope are the capabilities of economy, support of the population, availability of military reserves. The law of war and the position of the world community also play a role (Franck, 2007).
What makes both cases very similar is the use of violence and coercion as a means of the solution of the conflict (George, 1971). In the cases of hot wars, as well as in the cases of cold wars, the conflict develops not so much as a competition of different positions on the subject of the argument but mainly as a function of force capabilities and projection. No matter what the initial cause for the conflict (ideology, religion, borders, distribution of resources), the essence of it concentrates on the matters of the rivalry of military capabilities and all the aspects of it: arms race, military balance, ability to use force. The importance of the military component overshadows all other aspects and determines the state and the evolution of the conflict. And when the task of resolution is set, mostly it means the necessity to go back to the origins of the conflict where a bifurcation (to use force or not) happened and to look there for a possible change of the strategy and other alternatives which may help either to avoid a conflict or to make it less destructive. Theoretically, it sounds simple but in practice it is almost impossible (Xenias, 2005).