Before the bargaining

Now the American troops will have to do quite a lot of Vietcong fighting, first because there has to be some Southern social structure left to defend, and second because the worse they can hurt the Vietcong the better their ultimate position will be.

It doesn't seem likely that they'll try to beat the Vietcong all by themselves, though nobody knows how a revolutionary war would go against an opponent willing to go on putting in infantry on a scale capable of controlling the whole countryside—because no one era has been willing to go that far.

But in all probability, the American electorate's natural dislike of casualty lists that go above a certain figure—and not one you can accurately predict—will stop them attempting that.

The point is that, although the revolutionary war at the grassroots will continue and be one of the major determinants of the outcome, the American strategists have, by the simpleact of putting in more divisions than the Vietcong can eliminate, escalated the war from the level of revolutionary struggle to the level of international bargaining.

The present exchanges between Washington and Hanoi demonstrate that Hanoi demands that any negotiation involves the Vietcong as parties: the Americans reply that the Vietcong can attend only as part of a North Vietnam delegation. Hanoi refuses.

Now what this means is that the American build-up has been a successful attempt to involve directly in the situation the northern Communist Governments— Hanoi and Peking—who are giving the Vietcong various sorts of backing: it doesn't matter a damn what sorts: and that this policy has taken matters to the point where bargaining—if not what we normally mean by negotiation— has in fact already begun. I want to conclude by saying a word about that.

War has been described as a bargaining process. It can of course be a pure conflict in which each side is trying simply to destroy the other; but short of that, and even to some extent within that definition, it is also a competition in which each side tries to show itself willing to pay a higher price, and to make the other pay a higher price than it is willing to pay, for what each respectively wants.

Looked at in that way, war is a kind of deterrence, and deterrence a kind of negotiation; the difference between the three is not so great, as long as war stays short of a species of insanity called total war.

Nuclear weapons simply serve to underline that point. Any war short of a total war is a process in which each side wheels up its guns and tries to stay in the field until us opponent decides it isn't worth going on; a revolutionary war involving a foreign based third party is no exception.

A nuclear confrontation is exactly the same, with the important exception that the weapons mustn't actually go off. In between the two you find limited wars, in which the fighting is kept within the limits and you try to create situations in which the other side can't get what it wants without going further outside those limits than it's willing to go.

What we have here is a limited war, going on in a revolutionary context.

It follows from this that there are certain words, often used rather loosely, which we have to learn to use much more carefully. One of them is "escalation," another is "negotiation." All war is escalation, but if you will accept the word "negotiation" as equivalent to "bargaining," all war is negotiation.

In a limited war context, the threat to escalate is a form of negotiation. So people who demand negotiation as an alternative to war should be careful to study closely what they are saying. It's easy to imagine that negotiation is simply a display of sweet reason, in which parties abandon conflict and embrace discussion, leading to a rational composition of their differences.

But if you will kindly examine the cause of any negotiation that has ever taken place, you will discover that it isn't like that at all. Nations and so forth negotiate to win, to get what they want; it's a continuation of conflict by other means — not surprising, since if there wasn't any conflict, if they didn't want different things there wouldn't be anything to negotiate about.