If, as we have argued above, the democracies' knowledge of instances of deadly conflict, and capacity to prevent conflict, greatly exceed their willingness to act, what more can be said about the question of "political will"? Of all the potential research questions identified in this essay, this is, in our judgment, the most important and most promising for further research. Our reflection on successes, as well as failures, of recent experience suggests several clues as points of departure.
First, most analyses that identify major new challenges and prescribe ambitious agendas for action conclude with a resounding call for "leadership." We agree, but note, however, that leadership is not enough. More attention must be given to systems and circumstances in which leadership is more likely to be taken and to be sustained.
Second, the most reliable basis for sustained action in international affairs to prevent deadly conflict, or do virtually anything else, is as we have suggested above: perceived national interests. As traditionally defined and understood, these are a state's survival; the well-being of its own citizens; and factors that bear on survival and well-being. Advocates of more robust programs of international engagement in preventing deadly conflict must therefore make more persuasive connections between the conflicts they wish to mobilize action to prevent, on the one hand, and currently perceived national interests of major states, on the other. In the period after World War II, Americans' perceptions of their vital interests were widened to include defense of Europe and Japan. Violating the founding fathers' injunctions against entangling alliances, and a century and a half of established practice, NATO and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty committed Americans to respond to an attack on Europe or Japan. The concept of "enlightened" self-interest permits interest-grounded recognition of longer-term and less direct impacts of events elsewhere on a state's interests. Thus analyses are needed to raise governments' and citizens' consciousness about threats to traditional interests posed by seemingly distant conflicts and to tighten connections between those conflicts and currently appreciated interests of states.
Third, moral claims can move states to action, especially in cases where for limited costs great harm to others can be prevented. If the "civilized" international community had perceived more vividly the proposition that 5,000 modestly armed troops could have prevented the genocide of 500,000 Rwandans at modest cost and risk to the lives of those intervening, action would have been much more likely. Thus, evidence and analyses that heighten citizens' awareness that their governments have the capacity and competence to prevent genocide, for example, can bolster the will to lead.
Finally, the establishment of institutions with capabilities that, in effect, pay large fixed costs in advance, and thus make possible actions for modest marginal costs, increases the likelihood of such actions. States' will to act is significantly affected by the existence of such established capabilities whose competence for doing the job is clear, and who can be sent into action at smaller incremental costs. Consider the prospect of peacekeeping in the recent case of Bosnia, for example, had NATO not existed. In creating IFOR and SFOR, the nations of NATO had already paid the fixed cost of these troops and capabilities. Their capacity for acting decisively was increased substantially. Thus the marginal costs both in dollars and in risks to lives for member states of NATO, and NATO partners, permitted an intervention that would otherwise have been highly unlikely.
To make the point more vivid, consider the question of peacekeeping in Bosnia if states had been forced to create such organizational capacity from scratch, or even to assemble it from units that had not previously been established in their own states or learned to work together in the NATO context. A similar, unheralded, but, in our view, extremely instructive example of capability affecting will is provided by the IMF. Had the IMF not existed with its established mission and capabilities to assist nations in macroeconomic stabilization, would the United States, Western Europe, or Japan have provided the level of assistance they have to stabilization programs in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, or Latin America? Thus the more subtle relationships between organized capabilities, prior payment of fixed costs, and more abstract questions of "leadership" and "political will" deserve careful exploration.33