Conclusion: Application and Mitigation

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1950s when introducing the security dilemma, Herbert Butterfield and John Herz noted that because humans need to cooperate they cannot avoid the threat they pose to one another by living in isolation. Butterfield called it the ‘absolute predicament’ or ‘irreducible dilemma’ that lay at the heart of all human conflict.² Herz referred to it as man’s inhumanity to man and called it a primary fact in human social life.³ This need for interaction, coupled with the knowledge that the other might intend harm, creates uncertainty in statesmen’s minds about the other’s intentions. It is this uncertainty which Nicholas Wheeler and Ken Booth see as the defining feature of the security dilemma, hence their assertion that a ‘security dilemma exists when the military preparations of one state create an unresolvable uncertainty in the mind of another as to whether those preparations are for “defensive” purposes only (to enhance its security in an uncertain world) or whether they are for offensive purposes (to change the status quo to its advantage)’.⁴

The nature of the international system is of course such that states are constantly faced with dilemmas of one sort or another, and some can no doubt be avoided. There is, however, at least one which no states can wholly escape. This is the contradiction between the need for, and the pursuit of, friendship with at least some states, and the ultimate necessity, for reasons of national interest and survival, to be on guard against all states; to retain, as it were, a residual scepticism about intentions, even of those whose friendships are being sought, which is grounded on the general belief that all states will seek to protect their own interests first, and in so doing will, or may, sacrifice those of others.¹