who provided the most pervasive justification for war of any type, and who the romanticized concept of a just war for a just cause. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he said that "a good war hallows every cause." American historians often cite Nietzsche as the philosophical guru for the Nazis in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s; however, Americans have justified their own wars right down through Vietnam and the Gulf War, along with the actions of seemingly countless American surrogates, such as the Contras and the Israelis, in Nietzchiest terms.
The resort to war, or to the threat of war, is closely associated with the theory of relative power among national states. In international relations, such relationships are defined in the context of superpowers, great powers, and so forth. Michael Handel stated that the behavior of states in the international system is largely determined by the power relations and differentials among them. Order within the system is continually threatened by the possibility that some states will resort to force or war in order to improve their relative positions.
The most typically used classification system categorizes states according to five gradationsùsuperpowers, great powers, middle powers, small states, and mini-states. In this context, the superpowers classification becomes a segment of the great powers classification. The superpowers, as a consequence of their control of essential natural resources, and the strength of their economic development are able to protect themselves and their interests against any other power. Some have gone further and held that a superpower is one over which the joint military efforts of all non superpowers would be unable to achieve a military victory. By either definition, the number of superpowers in the world at any particular time necessarily will be limited. A definition of a great power is that it is a state which is capable of securing its own existenc...