Power, Realism, and Romanticism
Niall Ferguson, in a (paywalled) piece, argues we need to relearn the lost arts of war and strategy. Readers may find this line of reasoning similar to that of my own here. I will dissent, however. There is a recent piece in Jacobin that I (for the first time) will recommend that you read about the difference between Henry Kissinger and Daniel Ellsberg:
Kissinger was much more aware of the philosophical foundation of his positions than most other postwar defense intellectuals. Yet, what is more important, at least in terms of understanding the evolution of the national security state, is how his critique reflects a deeper current in American history.
The idea that spirit and intuition need to be restored to a society that had become “overcivilized” and “overrationalized,” too dependent on logic, instruments, information, and mathematics, has a pedigree reaching back at least to the late 1800s. “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a 1911 Harvard address (quoted by Kissinger in his undergraduate thesis).
Throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, every generation seemed to throw up a new cohort of “declinists,” militarists who warn about the establishment’s supposed overreliance on data and expertise, complain about the caution generated by too much bureaucracy, protest the enervation that results from too much information. The solution to such lassitude is, inevitably, more war, or at least more of a willingness to wage war, which often leads to war.
I think that there is a distinction between noting that we seem to be uncomfortable about the brute fact of violence and making this argument seen in the Ferguson piece:
The west had its peace dividend after 1991. We blew it in a two-decade party of consumption, leverage and speculation. First came the financial hangover; now comes the geopolitical reckoning. Dealing with it will mean relearning the arts of grand strategy and war. I shall miss the better angels of our nature. But, throughout the short peace, I always had the sneaking suspicion Dostoevsky’s demons would be back.
It is impossible to argue with this because it is rooted in an essentially Splengerian image of a decadent, corrupt, and impotent West that is soon reckoning with the savage and virile foe emerging from the “heart of darkness.” He is strong, tireless, and bold — we are soft, faithless, and timid. He only understands the language of force — we are too rich and fat to dare risking anything to combat. He is full of passionate conviction and vigor — we believe in nothing and lack energy and drive. Or, in other words, as Walter Sobchack famously said in The Big Lebowski: “say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” Of course, the irony of this is that the National Socialists (Nazis) themselves — along with every other enemy of the West — would agree . The criticism of a soft, weak, spiritually empty and martially inferior West was a key aspect of the jury-rigged mixture of Social Darwinism and blood-and-soil mysticism that underpinned fascist ideology.
Does Ferguson buy into such ideology? Who knows, but I will give him, a historian, the benefit of a doubt. Op-ed writing is hard. Perhaps he has accidentally mimicked this trope, as there is something to the notion that liberal status quo powers can grow complacent and forget the bloody talents and skills that brought them to prominence in the first place. However, regardless of his intent, I think he has nonetheless misdiagnosed the problem. E.g, the issue is not that we have somehow “forgotten” some eternal corpus of Strategic Wisdom (TM). That is also too close to a kind of “let’s take a bunch of dead old heterosexual white men and call their writing the wisdom of the ages” logic for me. Rather, it is that we are structurally denying the reality of tradeoffs.
In James Burnham’s classic The Machiavellians, Burnham observes that the so-called “Machiavellian tradition” in politics aimed to lay bare the mechanisms of power and contestation. The reason why the subtitle of his book is titled the “the defenders of freedom” is that Burnham observed that by explaining in a matter-of-fact manner how the sausage was made, the Machiavellians made democracy possible. We should not idealize power or its usage. Power, hierarchy, and coercion are brutal, terrifying, and highly problematic things. But if they are going to remain a feature of our world, we might as well understand them to the best degree we can, much in the same way we justify studying the biology of cancer and the psychology of serial killers.
The study of power has room for both what we might consider to be “classical” realism as well as modern ideas about rational choice and game theory. Burnham nods to both in his book, which is an interesting and rare bridge between the two traditions. What the study and practice of power, however, ought not to be is romantic . It should not be couched in the idea of revitalizing the Western spirit in a decadent time. That way, as the Jacobin story I quoted argues, leads to disaster.
