On the basis of legal advice sketchy enough to be put on one side of a sheet of A4, and from a single lawyer who was also a cabinet minister, Blair f… - Correlli Barnett

There was yet another powerful element in British public opinion in 1933 which made a return to the balance of power and the line-up of 1918 wholly out of the question. Despite the failure of the League of Nations over the Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the faith of internationalists in the future of the new world order remained undiminished. That the general situation in the world had so much worsened since the happy days of 1929, with the rise of Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan, only stimulated the internationalists into even greater activity; the more disquieting the facts, the more faith must conquer them. The rather smug optimism evinced by internationalists in the 1920s, when they thought war and aggression had been banished for ever, gave way to a somewhat hysterical eagerness to explain away the inherent impotence and fallaciousness of the League and its Covenant so brutally exposed by the Manchurian affair, and prove how the League nevertheless could and would prevail.

That Clausewitz lives, and will live, is equally shown in such cases as the former Yugoslavia, where Nato has simply frozen a war which will certainly break out again if and when the intervention forces leave; or Israel–Palestine, where the political relations between Jew and Arab reflect the military outcome of past wars, where the conflict of interest is essentially irreconcilable, and where therefore policy and violence will continue to go hand in hand.
What may therefore be safely predicted is that over the next 170 years the world will continue to be an arena of complex rivalries and direct collisions of interest rather than a "world order" or a "world community", and that human groups engaged in such rivalries will from time to time resort to force as an instrument of their politics. What weapons will be then available, and what tactics will consequently be employed, only a fool would pretend to guess. It will be remarked that so far I have not mentioned the United Nations Organisation, that expensive figment of liberal wishful thinking. I have done so now.

[G]iven that we are today a country that would be as bankrupt as British Steel if it were not for the lucky strike of North Sea oil, and that our gross national product is only half West Germany's, the attempt to maintain "balanced" forces plus a nuclear deterrent constitutes an exercise in nostalgic unrealism. We are like an impoverished aristocratic family who, by petty economies, struggles to go on living in the gradually decaying ancestral mansion rather than live comfortable within their means in a bungalow. Thirty-five years after the Second World War it really is time that we faced the reality of our true status as a nation and adopted a defence policy appropriate to it.