Interstate Anarchy and the Befuddled Monotheist

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Gallen-Kallela_The_defence_of_the_Sampo

When the subject of International Relations is taught in universities, it often opens up with a discussion of the concept of ‘anarchy’. In this specific subject’s domain, anarchy neither denotes the political philosophy nor one of the rightly less-talked about Batman villains, but rather the classic definition of realm without governance. This may seem a strange topic for a subject/major which is ostensibly about state to state interaction, but what it effectively means is that there is no over-arching governing structure above that of states.

Protestations that this is not the case because of the UN or ‘values and norms’ should always be met with derision. After all, big states don’t have to do anything the UN tells them too, little ones often do depending on their relations with bigger powers.

Despite being an important introductory concept, I tend to find it is one that many people, not just entry-level students, struggle with. In earlier posts I have mentioned how common place but also delusional the Anglo-American view of a progressive international realm moving in a linear direction is, but I have yet to articulate why this is often the case. I can put it simply, believing in one ultimate power is akin to committing intellectual and suicide for the person seeking to understand strategy.

Even before the world was integrated and largely aware of, well, the rest of everyone outside of a particular region’s existence, where a single dominant power form of unipolarity could often rise a la Rome at its height or the Chinese Han or Tang Dynasties, such arrangements were not assumed to be perpetual perfections of humanity. Rather, the security they provided was a fragile construct worth defending…until it wasn’t anymore because the consensus upholding it had broken down. The Han were aware of the Qin before them, the Tang would be aware of the Han, and so on. Confucianism, often a boring conservative philosophy on so many issues, rightly predicted that no order, no matter how perfect, could last forever or be immune to change. The Byzantine Empire certainly recalled its glory days by never giving up the title of Romans even if they had long since left Rome itself behind.

Such unipolar arrangements are rare. Since 1991 we have seen arguably the only one to ever span the entire planet. It will not last forever. It once was taken for granted that it would by the complacent chattering classes of liberalism and conservatism alike, but now enough reality has set in that we face something just as bad-denial giving way to impotent rage and divisive fury. Where did America go wrong? Who is to blame?

Well, America is to blame. Just as the Cold War gave it the spending priorities and mobilization to build a space program and first class infrastructure, so too did unipolarity give it lazy navel-gazing narcissism. This is a process that happens to all powers (sorry, exceptionalists) but can either be delayed or accelerated by a variety of factors. One of them is buying into your own mythology. When your advertising brand becomes your very existential core of existence believed by the governing class itself, you have a problem.

The United States, like Britain before it and other spectacularly insecure powers, viewed itself as apart of history. A moral titan reshaping the world with the righteous energy of Christian values and liberal politics. But as is usual in politics, righteousness is really a code word for ‘strategically toxic and anti-intellectual while still being just as coercive as any other order.’ Herein lies the problem: cultures who believe (either actually or symbolically) in one absolute higher power suffer from massive handicaps to much of the population when it comes to getting the inter-state system and the ever-present anarchy that is an inevitable part of it.

The United States may be the most powerful state which has ever existed in all of human history. For all we know it might continue to be so for decades or even a century if one is being generous. It still does not rule the world. Nor could it. It merely can get away with more for less. That is what power really is in the end, the ability to shift the world’s various circumstances in one way rather than another through intention. It is why it is an invaluable, if incalculable, resource. An invisible resource created only by very real material ones.

And it matters because there is no authority. There is no God here. This is international relations- a realm of little highly specific gods whose fickle natures and epic, tragic feuds are the stuff of legend. As fortune weaves out fate their various importance in the hierarchy rise and fall accordingly. They uphold no values but that which geography and history gave to them, much like representative deities of specific regions, lifestyles, and careers. Or like packs of social and competitive animals. Much like the illusion of order is given by the United Nations, Mount Olympus is an imposing location of projected celestial unity which under closer scrutiny gives way to the back-halls of scheming and backstabbing. Comedy and tragedy abound in equal and intertwined measure.

And yet we treat the act of wishing this away for supernatural or philosophical paternalism as one of principle and heroism. It is anything but. It is in fact cowardice. The fear of the unknown, the fear of not being the good guy. But what we need is exactly people who are willing and able to see themselves as the villains in someone else’s story, and still be willing to carry one regardless. Maybe even revel in it a bit.

This is not a world of universal morality or high ideals. It never could be. It is a state of anarchy, and it is also a state of philosophical and circumstantial polytheism. This means that as far as an intellectual understanding goes, some cultures are better equipped than others to understand the fundamental principles of IR in both theory and practice. Obviously, many great strategists exist in all literate cultures, so its not a supressive effect. We do have Cardinal Richelieu after all. But in the Muslim and especially Christian worlds, those strategists were thinking against the currents of their time and often regarded as highly scandalous, whereas in non-monotheistic cultures such strategists were a utilitarian novelty. This is less an issue about strategists themselves than one of non-strategists learning about or from them. I do not find it a pure accident that the only sane person on foreign policy issues in the US congress right now is a Hindu.

In a world where the public (and often times even more the private) educational system emphasizes the inherited baggage of monotheism and its secular surrogates it risks creating a population of people with absolute opinions and no practical way to achieve them. As it is, most internet political culture in countries like America and those of Western Europe has become one where the greatest posturer is regarded as the default winner, rather than people who actually accomplish things. Specifically on foreign policy it creates a right wing addicted to war and a left wing addicted to war-like things which are not claimed to be wars but rather ‘interventions.’ This is because paying homage to some nonexistent order is regarded as more important than the more morally ambiguous and complicating of simply living the life of a hypersocial and tribal animal. ‘We have to do something’, they say, ‘it is our responsibility to uphold this order.’ They ignore that in domestic politics the state serves as the final arbiter, and their moralism can be translated into legalese and upheld. It is not so in the international realm.

I often make jokes at the expense of conservatives overfond of America/Rome analogies. The two societies are really nothing alike and its mostly a way for BHB’s to pretend to be educated about the past. But if you are going to make one, here it is: It is telling that the Roman Empire adopted Christianity most likely in an attempt to shore up a declining state by having a uniform religion. What actually happened though was that the need for uniform views itself led to internal strife unlike that ever seen in the pagan days, with theologians at each others throats and various factions only happy enough to jump right in, eventually expanding their disputes to competing foreign peoples. It was a conversion whose only real strategic effect was a massive amount of irony. Monotheism cannot even make itself true in a unipolar order. In fact, one could make the case that unipolarity increases the need for a more ‘polytheistic’ approach to strategic thought, as to acknowledge a state of nature beyond human ideals and aspirations is to be on guard against complacency.

And yes, I know about Niebuhr. And yes, I am unimpressed. Because you are still just kicking the can down the road ineffectually if your argument is ‘humanity is just so rotten we can’t see the glorious unity of order and can’t take part in it until we die.’ Because there is nothing rotten about any of this. It is just how it is. People may call my views cynical, but the fact is I accept humanity as it is and don’t pretend it can or even should be something else, here or postmortem. It is what it is, get used to it. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with a multi-polar world, and there is everything right with one when it comes to debate, discussion, and diversity of ideas. But, the unipolar world only works when it acknowledges itself as a freak occurrence or a product of circumstance, not as a harbinger of world order and morality (also somehow conflated with economics by 20th century powers to ridiculous degrees). The more unipolar the world, the greater the necessity for a more diversified understanding of values and politics. It is worth remembering that at the end of the Finnish epic ‘The Kalevala’, Vainamoinen is being banished from the world by the arrival of magical baby (the Christian religion), yet he swears one day his people will need him and he will return.

After all, the trickster, the theme element of this blog, could not exist in a world of black and white and universal order. It would be an irrelevant concept. And yet the people who stand the test of time as thinkers were often those who stood against their own era’s received wisdom. But look around you in both folk legend and real life and you will see tricksters everywhere. Probably having a pretty good time too. And if not, making some over serious person have a bad time, which is just as good. There is a reason the myths and legends from cultures with many gods are always more fun to read anyway, it speaks to our actual multi-faceted experience in the real world.

 

War Criminals and other Mythological Monsters

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arkona album art

Arkona album art from the album Ot Serdca k Nebu.

‘Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal…. Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.’

~Curtis LeMay

Today is probably the last gasp of one of those freak el Nino warm days of this winter on the East Coast of North America. I made sure to enjoy it as fully as possible  by taking a long hike in the woods. As I made it to a high point overlooking a valley and a river I suddenly heard the cawwing of crows all around me. Looking up, I saw that at least five crows were circling directly overhead. Were I the superstitious type, I would have probably taken this as some sort of omen. Though, considering my disposition, almost certainly I would be more likely to view it as positive than negative. As it was, a downpour ensued and I made my way back home, where I am now. It is still warm, and I plan on using the BBQ for dinner. January in a sweatshirt sure is something. Needless to say, updating this blog was the furthest thing from my mind today. Until a certain confluence of events brought it together.

What was on my mind, as I made my way home through a density of trees, was actually the most interesting and unique bird-related memory I have. A year and some change ago I was on the final week before my viva, or oral examination, to determine if I was to be awarded a doctorate or not. I was in my apartment then, which overlooked a small car park tucked between two old narrow strips of buildings in center city Edinburgh. I was cooking and listening to Agalloch (a band I associate both with rainy weather and cooking, for some reason, so a common thing to have on when at home in Scotland) when suddenly I became aware of a a growing cacophony of bird life in the single tree right outside my window.

Going for a look, I saw magpies by the dozens, all perched in the tree and in the buildings all around, cawwing in unison in apparent mourning (or as I would learn later, perhaps after having committed a mob-kill which sometimes happens in that species) for one of their companions who was dead on the ground below.

Suddenly, a raven descended into the middle of this crowd. Ravens are my favorite bird, and while they, unlike their crow brethren, tend to shun cities, you could always find them in Edinburgh. Probably because of the nearby Holyrood Park and green belt around the city. There was at least one that was particularly common in my neighborhood and it enjoyed perching itself above ATMs and making rattling noises at people withdrawing cash as if it was the true owner of the bills inside. I do not know if the raven in this particular instance was that one, but it could have been.

The raven gave the assembled magpies a curious look and then proceeded to approach the corpse of the dead magpie. Quickly, so quickly in fact that one had to do a double-take to even process it, it severed the corpse’s head. Then it proceeded to dance mockingly about the magpie circle until it flew off-with the head still in its beak-to be pursued by the magpies.

I remembered thinking at that time, ‘I wish I was superstitious at times like these, because considering the nature of what I study I would not take that as a bad omen, but a good one.’ This memory, triggered by the circling crows I found myself under just today, was all that was mind as I got home and started to prep my cooking for the evening. Then I turned on the TV and there was Fareed Zakaria interviewing Nial Ferguson about Henry Kissinger’s legacy and his new biography about the former Secretary of State. And that got me thinking about the Celtic legendary figure/goddess The Morrigan, that battlefield wanderer who walks with the crows and ravens. Because as far as I can see it, to traffic in strategy is to risk conflict, and anyone who flirts with conflict flirts with the forces The Morrigan symbolizes. It is no accident that this dark mythological figure represents both sovereignty and death. Those are two forces in a close relationship to each other. Sovereignty is upheld through death, but death perhaps would spiral out of control without sovereignty.

This is a strange segway for sure. But Ferguson made a point I often made myself which I was happy to see on a major news network. War criminals are always a matter of perspective. The Nixon Administration gets unfairly singled out because of the turning over of the white house tapes the ageing hippies being unwilling to acknowledge the realities of the system that enables them to even exist in the first place. Or of leftists who think regime-toppling is something only done by Americans against poor wubbie socialists (though many today are fine with Sissi replacing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, funny that). Ferguson made a very telling point that when it came to ‘illegal’ regime changes and direct military action it was the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who played much nastier, not to mention the later comings of Reagan and Dubya. And that all great powers engage in this behavior against weaker targets (the Soviets certainly did on many occasions). So on something so contextual, how could anyone use a term with universal implications like ‘war criminal?’ What authority are you appealing to which sets these laws and upholds them for all?

Kissinger, as a prime target for the basic leftists and baby boomers alike is often the first living person to be called a ‘war criminal’. Its a bizarre assumption on many levels. And considering the hyper-reactionary pearl clutching political culture that exists in internet politics, I am expecting clickbait lists to start appearing talking about how historical figures from all kinds of eras were actually ‘war criminals’, probably in some misguided attempt to apply humanist morality to an era where it did not even exist. Though I would say it does not even apply to this era or any in realms of strategy and foreign policy making. They are the Realms of The Morrigan.

If I was writing an academic paper I would here cite a long list of actions which have been popularly labeled as war crimes, along side with the political views of the writers in order to point out people others could claim as ‘war criminals’ in turn to argue with them about. The fact is, there is only one tried-and-true method of determining who is a war criminal and who is not:

Losing a war/needing a deal so bad you get your dudes captured and put on trial.

That is it. Victor’s justice is war crime justice. Now, this does not mean that there are people who did heinous things who got away with it who aren’t terrible awful no good very bad people. But really, if you are going to use a legal terminology you have to have the trial. And you are only getting the trial if you have crushed the other side into giving up their military and foreign policy leaders for your justice system.

Personally, I am happy to put people on trial to make examples of them for a variety of reasons. Your own government is removed in a revolution and there are scores to settle, or you defeat someone who was waging genocide and you want to clean house of such odious people. Part of a peace treaty is reparations and that includes turning over people from a former occupation. Of course, if we admit this is what we want to do the trial’s outcomes are predetermined, so once again, why so much emphasis on this faux-legal term.

No country in the twentieth century suffered as much at the hands of the United States than Vietnam. Yet it is telling in the Vietnam of today, a country where most people were born long after the war, the cultural zeitgeist is less hung up about US actions there than the American one is. One thing I was struck by when visiting the War Museum in Saigon (yes, most locals still call it that) was that while there were some older people who understandably gave us the evil eye, the kids and young adults were mostly just curious and interested in us Americans, even happy that we where there to see their side of the story. I cannot imagine Americans of any ideological persuasion acting with such magnanimity even though we were never occupied or our cities bombed. People with little perspective only get worse with age. Wisdom, apparently, is only something which can grow with time if you had it in the first place. Naturally a part of this attitude is that hostilities with China broke out shortly after America left, and ever since then for obvious geographic reasons, China has been viewed as Vietnam’s primary security threat, so they can’t really afford to dwell. So it was before their various revolutions, and so it is again. Vo Nguyen Giap himself implied it to Americans after the war when he asked them incredulously if they really believed the war was about communism, and stated that of course he knew they could win, they had outlasted the Chinese for thousands of years, what more would 10 years of Americans be?

But in an America pillaged from the inside from a demographic with a total power-lock, the past is something to provide moral instruction, rather than strategic instruction. And this is a problem. Because there is no morality play going on in history. Even the winners and losers, the closest one can come to setting ‘norms’ are but temporary arrangements. To learn from history is a strategic and/or self-improvement exercise. It is not a narrative of linear progress or universal rights. And thus, there are no war criminals. There are certainly villains, but the only way to hold them to account is to be villainous in turn to them and their supporters. And even the worst villains aren’t villains to everyone. They couldn’t have gotten far enough in life to be a threat if they were since they would have no support base. And since humanity has (thankfully) never had a single culture or political system, there will never be total consensus on what a villain makes. It is a cryptozoological entity, something rumored to exist but which can never be proven. Like Bigfoot, or the Flatwoods Monster. Maybe there is some reality to the claim, but probably not.

So what we have left is the contexts of our conflicts. If someone fighting Daesh did something even beyond Daesh’s level of brutality but it hastened the end of the war and the destruction of Daesh I would be in support of it. This is a problem we often get with American and European coverage of the Syrian Civil War. We have long since crossed the point of even being able to pretend there is a ‘moderate opposition’, and yet CNN and their ilk pearl clutch about barrel bombs while conveniently ignoring that they cause the same effect of many pricey munitions in NATO arsenals.

I have made a point previously to really excoriate the naive nature of much western European criticism of America, as they are if anything even more delusional on how foreign policy works and where their nice societies actually come from. But when it comes to inserting universal morality into conflict, America becomes the worse of the two. There is a tendency, reinforced by the public education system and popular entertainment, to view conflict as a chance for reenact good vs evil, Hollywood style. Just look at how certain people deal with the legacy of one America’s greatest generals, William Tecumseh Sherman.

In the rest of the world, civil wars are known to be the worst kinds of wars. People are more passionate, the front line is always in the home country, the stakes are viewed by most as higher. Internal norms break down. This leads to the weary acceptance that civil wars will be in fact more brutal than foreign wars, rather than less.

In the United States, and with neoconfederate apologists in particular, this is not the case. Instead there is some kind of expectation of gentlemanly behavior. That as a common people, there were rules about how to fight the family feud. It is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Sherman understood that war is always won or lost through logistics, and also that in an era of increasing industry, war must target the heart of society itself. It must attack the civilian population to break the lines of supply that enable the enemy front to stay in the field.

His masterful invasion of first Georgia, and then the Carolinas, brought America’s deadliest war to its conclusion faster, and therefore probably with less bloodshed overall. He strengthened himself while weakening the enemy as he lived off the land. The terror he sowed caused desertion in the armies in the field and panic throughout states previously barely touched by conflict. He was, by a modern liberal’s definition, a war criminal.

And this brings us to the most dangerous aspect of fetishizing legal language when talking about conflict, or bemoaning double standards between victors and vanquished (this is the point of war on some level, to establish a double standard between nations, or to prevent such an establishment on oneself) and that is that losers of all kinds of varieties are attracted to the game of ‘calling out’ war criminals.

As with all simplistic ideas pioneered on the left, its adoption by the far right is now an inevitability. The European far right equates ‘Bomber’ Harris with Heinrich Himmler, American reactionaries see Sherman and Sheridan as a North American form of oppression. This is just whining of course, and if one is sympathetic to those regimes it is predictable behavior- but its whining that bounces back and resonates with the very liberal simpletons who first decided to make ‘war criminal’ a common phrase they used against anyone they didn’t like. Since war presupposes multiple sides, and multiple sides have different objectives, I maintain that there is no common law system which makes one more criminal than the other. The only way to change this is to win a victory so decisive that one can absorb another into their laws. So, it is victor’s justice after all. For the most part, such lopsided victories do not happen in large proportion.

If that gives you pause …it should. It means if the odds are against you but the enemy is odious you should fight on anyway. If the enemy is strong but not odious, perhaps its not worth fighting. It also means if you can, you should avoid war whenever possible. Though of course, the avoidance of war also means the increasing of espionage in diplomacy. Nobody is a hero in this trap. But we don’t need heroes, we need strategists with long term views. And the better diplomatic strategy is, the less major wars there should be.

But of course, there are still plenty of people who benefit from war all around, for economic or psychological reasons. So once again, there is no universal standard. So please, for the sake of honest and frank policy and historical discussions everywhere, let us scrap the term ‘war criminal’. I prefer ‘Villain’ as it admits up front the subjectivity of the topic. And of course, many people’s villains are other’s heroes. Sometimes you care in neither direction but are fascinated by ruthless strategy, either its execution or its failure. Either way, in an anarchic international world, all ‘criminals’ are is strategists you don’t like. The real discussion is about if they were good at it or not. And that not a topic of morality.

When I saw that raven troll those magpies, I laughed. It was funny. I prefer ravens to magpies. They are smarter and their mythological connotations are cooler. These arbitrary factors which did nothing to change the fact that by typical human logic the raven was being mean, the magpies, perhaps victims. And yet, what if the magpies did a mob-kill as they sometimes do? What if that flock of magpies had once stolen something from the raven or even assaulted it and I was witnessing revenge? Even in the avian life of the city of Edinburgh, it gets hard to cast a judgement on a vicious action. Now the more information you have, the easier it becomes to do so, but someone else still might well reach a different conclusion. I am sure somewhere out there is a person who just loves magpies, and now sees me as a proxy foe. Well, there you have it. To have a mature discussion of foreign policy or war we must all traffic with The Morrigan on some level.

‘Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.’

~Sun Tzu

Nothing about legalism or morality in that, is there? And yet it remains a true quote to this day. Anyway, this seems fitting:

Ibn Khaldun vs Washington DC

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ibn khaldun

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a historian and social science theorist from Tunis most famous for writing the Muqaddimah, a work of historical theory which sought to explain the cyclic nature of politics, its benefits and drawbacks, and how best to ride these changes for certain fields like medicine and scientific exploration to keep growing even while the regimes they required to support themselves kept inevitably declining and/or collapsing. He traveled widely, found employment in many places, and even directly discussed Emir Timur’s role in history with Timur himself during the siege of Damascus. There are few examples of primary source research so direct and enviable as that.

He was a bit of Gray and a bit of Marx and a bit of Smith and a bit of Diamond and even a bit of the contemporary IR theories of both neoclassical realism and world systems theory long before any of those things existed. He pioneered materialism in historical research and advocated political policies ahead of their time for his context. His work is widely available and translated in many languages so I need not go over it in detail. It merely needs to be stated that he is probably the single most important social theorist in my life. No one individual has ever, to me, made more sense of history and politics on the macro scale. I read and cited him extensively while I was working on my doctoral thesis.

For the sake of this post we need now only deal with one of his thesis, perhaps his most famous. That all regimes and governments become corrupted with incompetence, nepotism, and laziness with time. The longer they are around, the worse it becomes. They lose all their ‘asibyyah’ (group-feeling) while forces opposed to them will unite and therefore gain asibiyyah. In Khaldun’s world these were nomadic and tribal people, be it Bedouin, Turks, or Mongols. They had the practical skills and solidarity enough to eventually capitalize on the rotten empires, come in, and take over. For a few generations the new ruling class would re-invigorate society combining the best of the outsider’s abilities with the resources and learning of the establishment. Then, they too would begin to be subsumed into the conventions, rote thinking, and petty factionalism of the society to which they had integrated into to rule. Then the cycle would begin again.

Demographic changes over centuries ending in the industrial revolution abolished the power of nomadic societies but kept the privateering naval oriented ones going strong in this way, though states that survived industrialization became too strong to fall to outsiders so easily unless said outsiders were more powerful established states themselves or were internal mass revolutions. This in no way invalidates Khaldun’s thesis to be a relic of the medieval past, however. I would argue it merely shifted who the outsiders were. One could bring in Marx here and say it was the working classes who could play this role now. Mao would say it was the rural peasants. Marxism, however, at its core remains an often Hegelian and almost always eurocentric philosophy (particularly when discussing history-just look at the farce of Hobsbawm being taken as a great insightful thinker for a more modern example) in both theory and historical assumption. Perhaps Marx’s theories would have been better off at the bat had he been able to  engage with figures like Khaldun. As it is, the promise in Marxist theory has yet to be fully realized and work there still has to be done by those so inclined. Still, the fact remains that the ‘lower orders’ of society might very well be the invigorating invaders we need to topple the status quo.

Or just as easily, perhaps not. Perhaps the people who have the luxury to not have direct regional attachments will be such a force, or perhaps disaffected and disillusioned former establishment operators will be it. Or an alliance of some or all of the above. Perhaps an anti-populist reaction against purist movements will one day grow and demand to seize the power from the complacent classes which in America have certainly built around them webs of true believers and ideologues capable of nothing but posturing their supposed purity in front on each other like Calvinists and Wahhabis at a theological convention.

Edward Gibbon once theorized that Christianity itself was the root cause of the decline of Rome (at least in the west). While I am far too much a materialist to agree entirely, I would say a values system that prioritizes feelings over action and moral posturing over civic duty is surely no positive introduction to society. We have seen waves of this moral absolutism and internal purge-culture throughout societies since that time, and now in the form of faith based economic models and appeals to identity politics of all stripes it still rides a high horse through the land, motivating politicians obsessed with election cycles to harness this ignorant mass in order to ensure little gets done while their positions (and book deals) are secure. It is a government by the elect, for the true believers. Thus, it is really no government at all.

One of the many disturbing things I have learned since I moved to DC is that the more insider to DC culture one is and the more educated they are, the more likely they are to adopt rote thinking on major issues since they have lost the ability to see any issue as anything but a well-oiled cog in the machine which is exposed to a very small array of mandatory socially acceptable opinions. Most of these people are liberals and centrists and feel that merely by being more intelligent or well read than a Trump supporter or a Tea Party fanatic means they are in fact extremely enlightened and virtuous guardians of rationality. It would be much the same as an uncoordinatated dweebus such as myself who has no aptitude for sports claiming to be a better basketball player than Stephen Hawking. I mean, yes, it is technically true, but it effectively says nothing of substance or offers an interesting comparison.
 
It must be apparent to an outsider that this limited multiple choice test of right-on opinions as the baseline of public discussion is increasingly the problem rather than the solution, the defensive entrenched class circles the wagons even further. They admonish us to be ‘centrist’, ‘sensible’ and ‘not to rock the boat.’ Of course, they never say that to the far right, useful idiots and all, but now they have let the asp into the bed and cannot control it. But we should still trust them to be ‘sensible’ anyway.
 
Leaving aside for now the quite obvious counter-point of pointing out what a thin substance-free gruel ‘centrism’ and ‘sensibility’really is by merely asking them questions like ‘what is a sensible centrist in Saudi Arabia?’ ‘What is a sensible centrist in Iran?’ ‘What is a sensible centrist in North Korea?’ And ‘What was a sensible centrist in the Axis Powers of World War II or during the times of the Inquisition?’ ‘What was a sensible centrist in the vote to invade Iraq?’ We should move on to another point-why are you all so short cited? The obvious answer is addiction to fashion and the need to posture rather than to act. Needless to say, these are all symptoms of a regime in decline which-technology adjusted-Ibn Khaldun would have recognized in a heartbeat.

It is the shame of the legislative branch of the United States that so many people can be part of such a powerful institution with access to so many resources-including intellectual ones, I became an official card carrying ‘Reader’ at the Library of Congress just last week-is so short term and factionally driven. Much like the nonprofit sector which grows around the establishment and feeds off of its divisions, petty media-driven battles are considered good politics in America rather than the act of actual governing or planning beyond an electoral cycle. Otherwise thoughtful people tow the line on ideological package deals when cherry picking would be more admirable and honest of a course to take.

Just take one sad, sorry, drawn out example is that of the US response to the Syrian Civil War, to look at how much nonsense such a dysfunctional regime can produce. In a zealous quest to overthrow a government of the country where Khaldun once met Timur the establishment found itself arming effectively Al Qaeda affiliated rebel groups and even ‘moderate’ rebels who have no room for sectarian and ethnic minorities in their new order. This toxic combination helped lead to the rise of Daesh, which now is every (sane) person’s enemy. And yet, an accommodation with the (relatively secular and multicultural) regime is still avoided because the Washington Consensus from congress to its mindless town criers and prophets by the names of Dowd, Friedman, Kristol, and Will somehow believes the fundamental values of not rocking the boat of the establishment is worth upholding. Indeed, even extolling in moral terms.

To say that the building forces of accumulated history which may as well be the ghost of Ibn Khladun himself will one day lay down the vengeance on this order is to be as polite as humanely possible. And not just the United States. I feel like we are living in a collection of powerful societies unwittingly and even proudly reenacting the death throws of Late Imperial Russia.

But even within this sad state of affairs, one heroic figure has emerged from the most unlikely place-inside of congress. Outside of shunted aside realist academic thinkers and a kooky quixotic Rand Paul presidential campaign, no one has come from the inside to really challenge the ossified orthodoxy on foreign policy-until Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard that is.

From challenging the internal incompetence of the Democratic Party (currently seeming to be throwing away all its collective advantages and surrendering all power locally simply to hold on to the presidency-a bad long term strategy if ever there was one) to the inability of people to state that radical Islam itself is a problem, to the neocon establishment that lurks in both parties, she takes them all on. Here is someone who made it to the inside but retained the more sober and less fashion-prone perspective of the outsider. If Americans do not make a concerted effort to support people like her in government they may as well give up on retaining opinions or participation with the government as it is in any shape or form. People like her are our last best hope in the system as it presently is.

The question is, where do we find our own new outsider-based regime? This is ‘The outsiders guide to geopolitics’ as a blog after all, but I am still trying to figure this out. We need more tricksters. We need an Age of Tricksters. And not just hovering outside poking fun-though that is always necessary-but inside. We have to figure out how to remake governments with those immune to its faddish complacent tendencies directly in power. Inevitably, over time, they will integrate and the process will has to be repeated of course, just as Khaldun said. But only fools think history progresses along a linear path to a predetermined end point after all.
That is the challenge to ponder for the future.

 

 

 

Two Reluctant Cheers for Authority

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hadrian

In today’s discourse you will almost never come across someone self-identifying as ‘authoritarian.’ In fact, the word seems merely to exist as a straw man for half baked and childish libertarian ‘political tests’ which are superficial and designed to make literally everyone on the planet think they are secretly libertarian. Of course, my own test based on the same axis is much better as it captures the essence of everyone and everything in all times and places which ever once had a political opinion of any kind.

But maybe the term authoritarian requires at least a partial resurrection. Coming off of the heels of a century of unprecedented state-directed terror this may seem odd, but that was also then, and this is now. As John Gray so accurately points out in The New Statesman, it is the stateless parts of the world which are the problems now more than the overly-governed.

This is not to say we need an overreaction which apologizes for the excesses of the NSA or admires the more terrifyingly over-regimented societies on the planet. As Gray reminds us, this is not a question of good and evil and freedom versus slavery. All political stances are in fact the decision of who to regulate and who not to, rather than some simplistic quest for freedom for beautiful caged birds who write poetry standing at odds against regimented hordes of riding crop wielding jackbooted thugs. A regime which is free to one kind of person can be unfree to another and vice-versa. So if merely to call for a recognition that the state is still the best form of self-organization we have, and that we should not be so quick to topple those of others lest we threaten backlashes which can make our own less free is to be authoritarian, by all means, let us be ‘authoritarian.’

Personally, I fear the political backlash to terrorism more than the acts themselves. They are far more likely, proportionally, to affect me directly. But it also means we have to be serious about what kinds of freedoms we want and don’t want. And we also have to acknowledge that most likely we will not be the ones to decide. What is relevant right now is that authoritarianism may very well make a come back, and that doesn’t have to be *all* bad. And no, I don’t even think terrorism will be the main reason it comes back, but rather ecological catastrophe. Whatever terrorism brings us now in debates on state power is merely the prelude to a greater debate on responding to a rapidly changing planet.

And this is where authoritarianism might be selectively helpful. We have already seen how some kinds of regimes in sectarian-divided countries keep minorities safer than they would be otherwise by being undemocratic. We also know that authoritarian states have a pretty good record at crisis response. Particularly on environmental issues. The world’s largest polluter and most rapidly developing country, China, is also the one going through a crash course in large scale sustainable energy which puts its rivals and some developed countries to shame in ambition and hopefully effect. But let us go further.

When Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse’ came out in 2005 I was a sophomore history major in college and a fan of all things Diamond (in many ways I still am-this post was originally going to be ‘Hooray for Determinism’ after all before recent events changed its nature when I got around to it-though I might still write such a thing)  and also a libertarian. Having that simple (and oh so American) world view, I found myself invigorated by the challenge he presented. The two large scale examples he presented of a state successfully responding to ecological crisis were both very authoritarian states. One, the Dominican Republic, a blatantly racist and fascistic government under Raphael Trujillo, and the other, the mega-centralizing hyper-bureaucratic Tokugawa Shogunate. These were the states which he lauded for foresight. Two opposite poles of me were in a delicious conflict over what position to take on this issue.

Well, in about three years I made a full recovery from libertarianism and I knew the answer. Though to be fair, the materialist always lurking inside me probably made this inevitable. Libertarianism is, at its core, a type of Taliban-style liberalism of just taking one non-material ideology and ramping up it to 11 with philosophical purity as its key point. With this discarded, I could acknowledge that Trujillo may have been one of the biggest dicks to ever live, but a broken clock and all that. One doesn’t have to endorse a Shogunate as an ideal type of government to acknowledge there are many things that particular one did right, from public health administration to education and infrastructure. And of course, a national forestry system with an eye on conservation-in the 17th Century no less!

Weak states and loose confederacies are better at doing many things than stronger more centralized states. And I will always defend federal style systems as ideal for learning about the divergences in policy execution in the laboratories of regions and adapting accordingly. But crisis response is not one of them. Terrorism is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the less media sexy but slow burning fuse of ecological collapse which will drive state reaction in the long term. And we might just find certain types of authority useful.

After all, many of the greatest periods of multicultural cohesion have been under monarchies and pre-victorian empires. Many on the far right betray their true colors when they imply that a society which can accommodate many kinds of people is a threat to the social cohesion of democracy. Maybe they are right in some instances, but the Roman Republic appeals much less to me than the Roman Empire does. I would give up the vote before I would give my access to material goods of diverse origin and interaction with people of greater backgrounds. I doubt there will ever be such a dramatic either/or choice and I am largely playing devil’s advocate here, but should such a turn come, I will chose multicultural authority over monolithic democracy. History makes a better case for it in terms of overall case studies. Sure, one can always say most people are political idiots in any context, as it is I have already railed against the naive cosmopolitanism of liberalism on this very blog. But as a lesser of evils, wouldn’t you rather have a variety of idiots than the same kind repeated over and over again? Awash in a sea of vatniks or their American or whatever equivalent is a future far too boring and horrible for any type of interesting person to even fathom.

Previously, I waxed poetic about my love of the Heavy Gear setting for looking an a non-utopian science fiction of international relations. One thing I always really liked about the setting is that the Southern Republic was the best representation of a complicated authoritarian order. It was a zero tolerance regime for criticizing the government, but in exchange it was a patron of the arts and a subsidizer of the common citizen. It also allowed social libertinism unseen in other competing states of the setting. This reminds me of the Tang Dynasty, the early Mongol Empire, High Rome or any other period of effective cultural flowering. Of course, being able to the criticize the government is a right I would loathe to lose, but let us be honest-for most people food, sex, and housing matters most. If one can’t have it all one can get their priorities in a proper hierarchy. Principles be damned in the face of impoverishment or even in compromising the epicure.

As I stated at the start, this isn’t a post glorifying state power. It is a post building upon Gray’s call for a mature discussion of what freedom and authority really are without devolving into enlightenment baggage of good and evil and free and unfree. The world moves fast and change is constant. State collapse increases the negatives of this and as our biodiversity collapsed and our rapacious need for resources grows unchecked, its time to move beyond lame establishment narratives of NGOS and hippie activists saving the planet through fundraising and talk about what might be necessary for states to do.

And not to do.

P.S.: I love the Shadowrun games and find them (and the original rpg setting) a pretty brutal look at what a technological yet stateless society would look like. It aint pretty, even with all the cool magic and creatures. Its a setting which is clearly influencing one of my present creative projects in fact so it is on my mind. So, I leave you with the most recent (and best) entry in the series very good soundtrack. It gets much better in the second half by the way.

 

A helpful reminder of history

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Its nice to see establishment publications running articles on this topic-the very cause of this blog. Nial Ferguson is a historian I can have a complicated relationship with, but I love his writing and his deep perspective. He, and also Graham Allison who wrote this article, have a true understanding behind why Kissinger was so unique in American foreign policy and in so being so much more effective than any other Secretary of State in history. It is why this blog holds Kissinger up as one of the archetype trickster-trolls (in the best sense) of foreign policy.

Americans, are by and large, shockingly ignorant of history and philosophy. The fetishization of the short-term practical has made a nation of boring technocrats in policy circles whose knowledge base could fit in a watercolor set. This comes from a preference for immediate fads over deep temporal understanding. This is also a problem in contemporary European philosophy as well, at least since the 80s.

Well, I guess I know what book I am getting for Christmas. It is interesting of all the biographies I have read I have never done a Kissinger one.

I know my posts have been short lately compared to before, but I have a pretty cool idea for something upcoming which will be one of my longer and weirder posts. I have really come to like taking various IR theories to fictional settings and so far have done it twice for science fiction settings here and here. I was thinking it was time to give fantasy a turn. And no, it will not be Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. Much less expected than that. There are two different ones I wish to do actually, so we will see what comes first, but stay tuned.

Just a brief thought on the Russo-Turkish Fiasco

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I’m kind of thinking two things which are not exclusive:

Turkey shoots down Russian plane to sabotage greater Franco-Russian collaboration in Syria, which undermines their little shitshow on the ground with the terrori-I mean rebels.

Russia intentionally violates Turkish airspace in order to force some kind of rupture in the already crumbling NATO over this issue and the fact that Turkey’s popularity in the alliance is plummeting largely over Syria-Iraq issues.

Both could be wrong, but one or both could be right.

The biggest problem is that the most powerful individuals in each of these nations are both clever but also dangerously ambitious and beholden to terrifying domestic (and in Turkey’s case international) constituencies. A crisis which takes a life of its own is the last thing anyone wants even if the cause is simple pilot error. It probably was, but considering the convoluted nature of everything going on there now, let’s keep our eyes open.

One does wonder what the South Caucasus equivalent to Plevna would be…

The White Girl’s Burden

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Take up the White Girl’s Burden,
Send your kids to Africa to serve their social media needs,
To build without skill and instruct without knowledge,
To complain of local food and send forth tweets of their deeds.

Take up the White Boy’s Burden,
A school roof fixed for proof of gain,
Give logo shirts of your mission trip,
And for every retweet, a Kony slain.

 

Multipolarity or Unipolarity for Eurasia’s Future?

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russia-china-bears

Answer: I don’t know. Let’s dig deeper! Here is a good article from The New Statesman. I have a few additional points I would like to add to it.

Moscow is only going to take expanding Chinese influence in the region for so long without some sort of give and take, especially as they have potentially more to offer. Its hard to see the ultranationalist and increasingly xenophobic Russian state asserting itself towards the west and giving up in the east. Of course, that might also be the idea. Secretly Moscow might see such a bend as inevitable and thus the immense pride and low risk force projection towards geriatric Europe and world-hated ISIS is the cover for a massive but calculated preparation to take junior status to China in all but name on the world stage.

Either way, the United States and its allies are doing everything they possibly can to shoot themselves in the foot right now as a big part of what draws these powers together is the scheming of Atlantic nations who have little strategic gain in the region but at least superficially and sometimes directly support opposition movements anyway. It is fascinating to watch American grand strategy drive two natural rivals closer together based on nothing but overconfidence and overreach. We don’t just have a military-industrial complex, we have a liberal-humanitarian NGO complex too. Both influence strategic decision making in often unwise directions.

I would be willing to bet that the Sino-Russian relationship would have already started breaking down by now if not for the complacent imperial overreach and narcissistic Wilsonianism of the US and its allies. And if they keep pushing they risk making this otherwise temporary arrangement of convenience a permanent one, locking them out of the region entirely for sure.

But no matter what happens in this arrangement Russia might still be the loser. A rivalry with the US is much less dangerous than a rivalry with China for them, whereas a rivalry with Russia is significantly less dangerous for China. Expanding influence into Central Asia seems a much less risky move than the South Pacific on the part of Beijing. Any such action could be more exploited by the US to divide the powers. Of course, if these countries do hold onto a Eurasian lock together against the odds long term they really would have made the first large scale and successful multi-regional check on US ambitions…well, possibly ever.

It is a fascinating time for grand strategy, that is for sure. There is nothing else (contemporary, anyway) I would rather study.

The Coming Multipolarity, or, ‘Damn it Feels Good to be a Horder’

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Yes, I meant ‘Horder’ as in Horde and not ‘Hoarder’.

So in my last post I mentioned in passing how freakish unipolarity actually is as a part of talking about how the people in American foreign policy circles who advocate constant interventions, lest they confront a decline, are actually the ones causing said decline. The once and future restoration of multipolarity, whether it comes in a decade or a century-I know not the time scale- is actually a subject that interests me even more than what I wrote about last time. To talk about it, I am going to do something a bit dangerous in IR-if only because there is a sad lack of historical knowledge in many quarters of the discipline-I am going to make a historical analogy to what I think approximates the future of return to multipolarity and great power behavior. I am going to talk about the Golden Horde.

Mongol warrior rearing

If anyone knows the artist please let me know so I can give credit and find more of their work! It is just such a cool image.

Now studying this topic is kind of my bread and butter, I did write a book on the influence of nomadic people in Eurasian geopolitics after all. It is, however, a niche topic and after dealing with it explicitly in graduate school and in book adaptation form you are only going to get the summary here. But I have to say that I think the strategies enacted by nomadic people are an interesting pre-modern analogy to what we might see in the future, albeit in an obviously different form.

Previously on this blog I have talked on multiple occasions about my affinity for Neoclassical Realism and regime survival theory. According to scholars such as Beckwith the primary political arrangement of the Eurasian steppes was a type of enlightened despotism with high levels of mutuality and dependency of the ruler with his in-group elite. Depending on the example, this in-group could be anything from family members, military leaders, adopted foreign administrators, and in some cases all of the above. The Mongol Empire was one of those ‘all of the aboves’. More importantly to the theme we will be examining here though, is how it viewed self/other relations on the international stage. In other words, their approach to International Relations. Now, the Empire was large and diverse, and after a couple of generations it split into several increasingly different kingdoms. Though all of these states shared many attributes we will be looking over, it is ideal for brevity to pick the best successor state for looking at the messy world of multipolar relations. This is the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate and the Ulus of Jochi.

When the Mongols invaded Russia to stay they broke all that Basic History Bro received wisdom of never attacking Russia in winter. In a large land filled with poor-to-nonexistent roads which was often forested or swampy in much of the year and where cities lied almost exclusively upon rivers, this made sense. The cold-adapted Mongols used the frozen rivers as highways to hit city after city, which fell to their rapid mobile horseback armies backed by the new acquisitions of Chinese siege techniques and the new (to Russia) technology of gunpowder explosive. It was a remarkable campaign which further added to the laurels of the general Subotai Bahadur’s already amazing reputation, and ensured that Batu, son of Jochi, would have an impressive inheritance.

But Batu Khan was not just some spoiled scion of the Mongol royal family riding the coattails of their greatest general, but rather a keen politician. This was good, for his domain of the empire began with unique challenges and required more autonomy than was yet normal due to its distance and remoteness to Mongol power bases. A small number of nomads now had to control a territory that did not always favor them as well as greatly larger numbers of subject people. Their advantages were in speed and intelligence, not numbers, and their distance from the Mongolian core (and integration already of many other Turkic people into their system as they moved west) meant their position was different.

Batu, like other Mongols, believed in the efficiency of indirect rule. But he would take it further then the rest of them yet had. He allowed all Russian princes who surrendered to keep their lands, and those who never fought against him in the first place could get elevated positions in his hierarchy. Rather than stretch his forces out or occupy places, he relied on the threat of his rapidly moving horsemen to serve as the stick to the carrot that was being integrated into the booming Mongolian trade network. To top it all off the Mongol Empire gave freedom of religion and tax exempted clergy as well as administered a postal service. It offered an attractive package especially when the alternative was punishment expeditions which could result in enslavement or utter destruction.

The Horde constructed a wall of these buffers, many of them willing, to bolster its frontier with the large and then very powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Reaping the taxes of its subjects without the costs of occupation and even being able to ‘offshore’ some of the fighting was a good deal. An empire made by sudden conquest essentially turned to become a remarkably defensive player. Attacks served only to weaken foes or secure pasturage. To put it in World Systems Theory terms, the core exploited the periphery due to their unique military and trade managing advantages. Only in this case the core were the smaller amounts of ‘less advanced’ (by settled societies’ standards) nomadic people and the periphery were the cities and farmers.

Batu and his descendants spend most of their time on the steppe, they even built what became two of the wealthiest cities in the world for that era off of the Volga. Cities of which little remains due to the later campaigns of Timur, though which many records of travelers speak of their immense multicultural settings and wealth.

So why is this relevant to the future of multi-polarity? Well, for one thing since at least the Second World War if not the rise of steam powered naval vessels, speed and rapid deployment of multi-functional forces has returned to world political and military calculations in ways not seen since the impressive medieval armies of Inner Eurasia. Indeed, it now far surpasses them. Another factor is the rise of transnational trade and resource extraction networks, which pillage on a scale Chinggis Khan could never have dreamed of, but remain vulnerable to geopolitical breakup just as his did. If Mongolian trade networks suffered with the collapse of the empire, then they must have been partly a product of unipolarity. So too are the shipping lanes and grand trade deals of the United States no- doubt temporary artifacts of its own power. Like the Mongols, the United States uses a smallish elite military capable of immense speed of deployment to keep such a system open. Like anyone, past present or future, this system cannot last forever.

In a non-unipolar world all powers must tread lightly with each other but also have the luxury of being quite brutal with smaller powers in their respective zones of influence. Repeated failures and some extremely expensive successes with things like peacekeeping and anti-guerrilla warfare was made most leery of directly occupying places. And yet in a world with several competing power-poles there will be no one else to do the dirty work of securing economic hegemony for powers towards their own periphery. They will have their own markets, their own needs, and wildly divergent internal structures. Rather than seek to impose these structures on each other or even their ‘vassals’ they will simply seek to support their own regimes however they can at home while getting what they can abroad. When two power-poles enter conflict it might be over proxies or even entirely *through* proxies. Either way, the wonders of modern technology enable plausibly deniable warfare to be fought abroad without necessarily increasing war fatigue at home.

All of this means that special forces and elite columns will matter more than mass armies-at least as long as the conflict remains peripheral and doesn’t break out in total war (always a possibility in any multi-state system). But even a big breakdown bringing back conventional war using today’s (or the future’s) technology would be one prioritizing speed and firepower over numbers, as things currently stand anyway. A Subotaiian force deployment, if I can coin an awkward new phrase, adds on to this levels of utilizing organized crime backchannels and cyber warfare and you have yourself a 21st Century recipe for whatever the new equivalent is of ‘Golden Hordeing’ by living large on the steppe with occasional shows of force abroad.

If this does come to pass, and it already seems to be manifesting in the early stages in regards to Russian policy towards Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan, you might see more of the continuation or exploitation of frozen conflicts so that larger powers can project their influence without directly invading anyone. Although increasingly a specialty of the Kremlin, this is hardly unique to Russia these days. From South Pacific islands and Taiwan between the US and China to France in many parts of western Africa and increasingly other powers there as well, it seems the best way of building a protection network is for technologically or logistically advanced nations to insert themselves as arbiters in perpetual conflict zones. Now imagine that without a stabilizing power. So, the princely states between Lithuania and the Golden Horde in the 13th Century seem suddenly relevant.

I do not know if this arrangement, should it come to pass, will be an overall improvement or a downgrade. I can see certain issues and peoples losing out and others gaining. As typical in the humanities it would most likely be a mixed bag with people’s reactions coming from where they are geographically and in terms of economic station. The good news is that there won’t be a drive to impose a uniform socio-economic vision on everyone else (always a quixotic and ultimately disastrous cause which the Mongols were astute enough to avoid except in rhetoric). But, the bad news is of course that there could be more conflict, and that with looming ecological disaster waiting in the wings such division might finally occur right when we need collective policies the most. Of course, one look at human history shows that when the chips are down people turn against each other when resources are on the line most of the time. So one could always hold out hope that the divergence of geopolitical blocs beyond what we have now might create new creative policy dynamism to confront ecological degradation, leading ultimately to a type of ‘survival of the greenest’ which in the end might help in dealing with the problem.

But if history has any lesson-a statement one should always be dubious to make-it is that history has no linear path like the hard sciences. Politics and philosophy is basically the response to conditions which arise from resources, conflicts and deals struck about them and the physical world we live in. It is adaptation, and like natural selection while all branches might die in the end, some will fair better than others in particular moments of crisis. Whatever those adaptations may be, any breakdown in multipolarity is going to go through a phase which is at least Golden Horde-like for the more powerful countries which may exist at that time.

And even in the unlikely event of one unipolarity giving way directly to another through unexpected catastrophic collapse concurrent with canny rise (say USA to China) this has just delayed the inevitable. Unipolarity, as I said, is a freakish occurrence. And much like a supercontinent, it is a temporary arrangement between cycles of greater division. One day great powers (whoever they may be) will find themselves hoarding smaller countries to create their own little NATOs all over the world. Some arrangements may be nice to their clients, others cruel, most a mix of the two, but in a world so used to only one or two true superpowers it is good to occasionally remind people that you can look at Imperial Rome all you want as a glorified example of past and present analogy, but its the various Hordes who people might be studying in the transitional future. It sounds apocalyptic, but for all we know it might be awesome. Or both, whatever. The tides of history know no morality either way. And I just want to examine as many strategically relevant things in the past and present as possible. And listen to Tengger Cavalry of course.

For further reading on these specific topics I recommend Dilip Hiro’s ‘After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World’ and Charles J Halperin’s ‘Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History.’

Nation Building Sucks and the United States is Particularly Bad At It.

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afghan kunduz

In Max Hasting’s massive book ‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-5’ he makes numerous observations comparing the Allied armies in the later stages of the war with each other. The hard lessons learned by the post-purge USSR in combating the German army are contrasted with the bungling and occasionally disastrous performance of the British anywhere outside of North Africa and the overly cautious hyper casualty-conscious strategies of the Americans. Though he hardly judges it as it makes sound strategic sense when one has the luxury of a much larger and more ruthless ally to do much of the heavy lifting, it is a worthwhile point you will not hear much of in the triumphalist Atlantic oriented popular history of the Second World War.

Eisenhower quite correctly saw how adverse to mass casualties the United States was in the immediate post-isolationism era. But catering to this need would not have been a remote possibility had the USSR either not been a participant in the war or had been knocked out of it by the time the USA was in full force. While it is undeniable that the United States played the most decisive role in supply, logistics, and defeating Japan in a largely naval and limited amphibian war(those tend to have smaller amounts of overall casualties than big pitched land battles even if they are economically more challenging to sustain in many cases) the amount of sacrifice it would have taken to have gotten unconditional surrender from Germany (or to conventionally invade Japan) would have necessitated a negotiated peace or the mass deployment of nuclear weapons again and again on most of the cities of both countries.

Debacle in Vietnam reinforced this trend right when it was starting to expire. Multiple wars of choice since the 90s were conducted in such a way as to minimize American casualties as the first priority and securing objectives a second. This is a problem, and not because these luxury wars of choice need to be fought better-but rather because they are totally unnecessary.

With the renewed and potentially perpetual US commitment to Afghanistan coming at the same time NATO countries are doing everything in their power to unseat the Assad regime while seemingly either oblivious or indifferent that such actions may create a new safe haven for radicals perhaps it is time to re-examine America’s greatest weakness as a tool which could be its greatest strength: adversity to sanguinary military operations. If one thing is going to re-align a fundamentally moribund foreign policy strategy it could be this.

There was only once as a fully independent and established nation that the United States both mobilized for total war and was willing to accept truly enormous open ended sacrifices with seemingly no limit to bring a war to a decisive end and that was the Civil War. The partially botched nature of Reconstruction and the truly appreciable percentage of the nation’s populace killed or wounded produced a souring which meant that a single year in the trenches of WWI reinforced quite the fear of mass casualties…and the further from home they were the more suspicious they could be. One could imagine that in an alternative Second World War where the United States gets involved reluctantly to shore up the Allies against the Axis without a Pearl Harbor to inspire a desire for revenge as one of being careful and fearful to deploy forces in the decisive quantity. Though as a naval power in two oceans, it would retain great defensive bonuses and initiative.

But despite constant fearmongering over China’s rise, there is no power which on its own or even in a league with another power could challenge the current status of the United States unless it gets perpetually overextended and bogged down. Its offensive actions in the Second World War and its simply holding out and assisting the collapse of the USSR indirectly ensured the closest approximation to a unipolar world order since the Mongol Empire-and a much more global one that even that was.

Even the most paranoid of security fiends should realize, looking beyond instinctual and trained reactions of pride and ‘sending messages’, that there is no need for the United States to take the offensive. Indeed, doing so overburdens its resources and will and risks an isolationist backlash. Using naval power to secure and control trade routes and economic power to guarantee central airline links as well as supplying a defensive reserve to allies is all that is really needed. And no, it is not ‘defeatist’ but merely a good cost/benefit ratio. After all, history is full of examples of people who declined not because they ceased by somehow ‘vital’ (as is commonly supposed by bitter old men and Basic History Bros alike) but rather due to overextention. As it is, the United States is an overindulgent ally, and in its mad quest to re-make the world in its own image, often a full blooded ally to some when mere friendliness would suffice. Coupled with the lack of understanding to other contexts this means not only are nation building efforts done with money and air power over real on the ground results, but more importantly, the nations in question are not being built to be their best as they are, but their best as America wishes them to be.

If steps are not taken to change strategic course some spirally over-indulgent intervention somewhere will make the people demand it. No one but the neocons is going to be able to tolerate the bumbling id-cop routine much longer. Lest we be subjected to a fate where the United States literally becomes the nation-state variant of ‘Mitchell.’

The fundamental problem is that the United States sees itself as the sole unique nation. The one who can remake history to suit its own domestic mythology. This has never been true of any nation and it is not true now.

There will one day come a world which is again multipolar. It will come sooner if the United States is too ambitious and too over-active in non-critical regions to its interests, not later. And the nature of that multipolar future will have no room for world-changing universalist creeds. In fact, in my next post I will discuss the closest historical analog to what I think great power politics will be like. So stay tuned.