Abstract
In 1991 a US-led coalition launched, with the agreement of UN, a wide military operation against the rogue regime of Saddam Hussein that had attempted to invade Kuwait in order to take over its staggering oil resources. George Herbert Bush, at the head of the coalition that was to rescue Kuwait, explained that the "First Gulf War" had been set off by the greediness of a tyrant, but above all by the selfishness of a state that had tried to seek its national interest at the detriment of another state. The operation was named "Desert storm", as if the war was bound to happen, as if its occurrence was as predictable and natural as the sound of thunder during a tempest. Unarguably the Americans reckoned that the war was necessary, and even natural, as Saddam Hussein's Iraq was jeopardizing the "new world order". It is scarcely surprising that G.H.W Bush, 41st president of the United States, had served as vice-president during the two Reagan presidencies, and that he was himself a staunch patron of a realist foreign policy.
These attempts to present war as a natural consequence of human nature and of the structure of the international system seem to be the brand of a realist foreign policy. But, as Kenneth Waltz once put it, "are wars so akin to earthquakes in being natural occurrences whose control or elimination is beyond the wit of man" ? Is it really one of the main features of the realist theory of international relations to analyze war as a phenomenon bound to occur?
