Wanted: A Unified Field Theory for a Third World War

The ongoing conflict with ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State (hereafter called Daesh) has attracted attention and interest around the world.  Pope Francis has weighed in and it is perhaps surprising that he may have come closest to identifying this conflict as the Third World War.  Henry Kissinger reportedly agrees with him.  However, there have been few signs that the US government recognizes this as a single global conflict much less any signs of a coherent coordinated strategy that addresses each local conflict and its links to every other local conflict.

This is a war that is very like wars of the past while yet being something different from what we are accustomed to.  It is the 21st Century under attack by the 15th Century.  It is a war between dogmatic conformity draped in religious trappings claiming for itself the right to impose its beliefs through deadly violence on a modern world that emphasizes diversity, technology, progress, and individual choice.  Like the Seven Years War it is taking place on a global scale in terms of reach with a relatively small and localized geographic context.  It is and will be fought by complex local alliances, marked by competing interests between politics and faith, and religious differences that result in alliance relationships or are overcome in the interests of the nation states participating – a geopolitical stew worthy of The Thirty Years War.

In Nigeria, the enemy calls itself Boko Haram.  Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is active to varying degrees in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, and Tunisia.  Al-Shabaab in Somalia was reportedly responsible for the attack on the Nairobi shopping center.  Al Qaeda in Yemen is losing fighters to Daesh as are the Taliban in Afghanistan and other groups in Pakistan.  The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines is now also reportedly aligning itself with Daesh.  We are confronted simultaneously with disparate enemies at locations spanning half the globe but we appear to be addressing each fight in isolation from the others.

It features full spectrum warfare with combat taking place on open ground, city streets, deep jungles, high mountains, the airspace above all of these places and between them, and in cyberspace.  Do not be fooled into thinking that Daesh’s use of our own technology against us makes them modern thinkers.  Remember, Marx and Lenin promised that they would hang the last capitalist with the rope he sold them.  They doubtless consider it fitting that they will attack us with our own technologies.  As to being professional and sophisticated fighters, if you spend enough time on a battlefield and survive, you get good at it.  This sophistication and professionalism will not necessarily carry over into other parts of their lives, especially where it might clash with their dogma.

This coalition for the 15th Century shares fighters, resources, and know-how in addition to their shared enemy.  They crave for us to identify them as our enemy because it enhances their stature and facilitates their recruiting and fundraising.  Whether of allies or enemies, neither coalition will be in unanimous agreement on many of a whole range of issues relating to why we fight, what we are fighting for, what achievements might cap our respective final victories.  They don’t need to be in agreement on anything other than who is “we” and who is “them”.   As in The Thirty Years War our enemies have in common a number of points of ideological/theological agreement and they agree that we are the enemy, an enemy that must be destroyed even though that is beyond their actual capabilities at the present time.  History shows that we ignore this determined threat at our own risk.

All of that said, we need to understand a number of key things about this Third World War.

We are fighting an idea.  We can kill its adherents but the idea will survive.

We must adapt our approach, our strategy, to each conflict/theater/locality appropriately while not undermining our efforts in other theaters.

We, not just the US but all of our partners, must recognize that it is all one war and we must cooperatively frame a common strategy accordingly.

The US does not need to put its troops, aircraft, etc. into every single one of these fights.

It does, however, need to make sure that one or more of its local allies are in each and every one of these fights with the fullest possible US support.

We also need to understand that whichever of our partners does put boots on the ground, those troops will eventually come to resent taking all of the risks of ground combat while we take none.

If the only tools in our tool box are hammers, all of our problems begin to look like nails.  We need to use resources and take actions beyond the battlefield that will help our local allies shape that battlefield into a desired state.

We need to be able to peel away their supporters by a number of means including seeing that local grievances are addressed.

We need to eliminate (realistically minimize) actions by our own or coalition forces that discourage or drive away our supporters among the populations. 
 
We need to understand and to remember that the war will not end in a way that we can control nor can we dictate the full shape of what comes afterwards.

ADDENDUM:  I wanted to add a short comment after attending two more sessions at The Brookings Institution this week that touched on this conflict.  I've said for sometime that the US is a status quo power, which in part answers the complaint that we have no national strategy, we are defending the status quo and thus reacting to threats against it.  However, while the US sees itself as defending an established international order, there are many nations who see the democratic free market capitalist USA as a revolutionary expansionist power and a threat.  And, the international order which the US is defending is not simply a matter of nation states, international organizations, and international institutions, it is a process for how all of these interact with each other.  Within this process, a referendum in Scotland - however regrettable it might be - is acceptable.  Sending uniformed armed men (and women) onto the territory of an independent sovereign nation in order to overturn the government of that nation or to steal its territory is not acceptable.

Author James Bradley on a Sea Cruise

The Imperial Cruise, A Secret History of Empire and War, James Bradley, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, © 2009 James Bradley ISBN: 978-0-316-01400-7

That handful of people who read my book reviews may have noticed that I frequently make distinctions regarding non-fiction works that are something other than histories, and memoirs that are not autobiographies. James Bradley’s latest book again raises the need to make such a distinction as he presents the reader with a well-researched account of a little known historical episode – the 1905 voyage of the largest official U.S. delegation ever sent abroad (at least before the advent of modern summitry and bilateral joint commissions!).

From July to September 1905, then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft led seven (of 90) senators and twenty-three (of 386) congressman (plus presidential wild child Alice Roosevelt) on a trans-Pacific tour, stopping in the new U.S. territories of Hawaii and the Philippines, in addition to Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. The author’s principal purpose is to explore how President Roosevelt’s actions with regard to the Pacific Ocean and the Far Eastern countries set into motion events that would led to the climactic battle of Iwo Jima between the forces of the United States and Imperial Japan (the subject of the author’s first book, Flags of Our Fathers).

However, this is not a history, having more the tone of an expose, especially given the author’s criticism of a number of TR’s biographers. It could be argued, in fact, that in this book Bradley was channeling a 19th Century muck-racking journalist, a type with whom the principal subject of his book, Theodore Roosevelt, would have been very familiar. The author’s TR only superficially resembles that figure normally depicted and recognizable in other histories and biographies as well as, for example, in films such as “The Wind and the Lion” and “Newsies”, or even as parodied in the “Night at the Museum” films or the play/film “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

This is evidently the very point that Bradley wants to make, Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t necessarily so. Much of what Bradley presents here with regard to Roosevelt’s ties to Japan and his racial attitudes is not new, at least not to academic historians nor even to a number of his contemporary critics, but much of it is likely to surprise the general reader. Theodore Roosevelt was very much a product of his times and even more so of his family and upbringing, as the author makes amply clear in his early chapters. The first part of the book also makes evident the degree to which Roosevelt could claim to be a self-made man in both person and reputation. Bradley’s Teddy comes across as every bit as image conscious as his younger cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though the older Roosevelt did not face the technological challenges of radio and film that confronted FDR.

The fact that Roosevelt shared the racial attitudes of many of his peers is not news, especially to the historians who have explored his punitive decisions against Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment after they clashed in a racially charged atmosphere with the white sheriff and other residents of Brownsville, Texas in the summer of 1906. [I can only conclude that the author deliberately skipped over Taft’s infamous turn of phrase when as Governor of the Philippines he referred to “our little brown brothers” in assuring then President McKinley that they would not be ready for self-government in 150 years.] Nor is it likely to surprise the more attentive readers to find that the United States government in this period (and not uniquely in its history) often said one thing and then did something other than what it had previously committed itself to do. Today one can read these attitudes expressed in Theodore Roosevelt’s own words by looking up his works accessible via Google Books. (Those interested in TR’s Japanese friend, Baron Kentaro Kaneko, will also find many of whose writings available for reading today via Google Books, among other resources.)

Unfortunately, Bradley keeps stumbling over bad history. It may be that in his apparent determination to deliver a black and white case he has skipped over the reality that most historically controversial episodes come in shades of grey rather than stark black and white, or in the recent catchphrase, “it’s complicated.” In one example he states that President Polk decided that the Rio Grande marked the border between Mexico and Texas, as the latter became the newest state in the United States, instead of “the internationally recognized border between Mexico and the United States…the Nueces River.”

The reality is more complicated. After his defeat at San Jacinto by Sam Houston’s army, Mexico’s dictator General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco which recognized the independence of Texas and placed the border between Mexico and the new Republic of Texas on the Rio Grande River. However, a new government in Mexico rejected this treaty because it was signed while Santa Anna was being held captive and because he had been deposed while absent from Mexico City pursuing his war in Texas. With the border thus in dispute in the absence of any agreement between Mexico City and what it considered a rebellious province, the issue is further complicated by the fact that Britain, France, and the United States recognized the newly independent Republic of Texas, such action at the very least implying recognition of the claimed border along the Rio Grande River. Most historians today would at the very least the situation with the words “it’s complicated.”

In a second example, Bradley recounts how the United States came to liberate the Philippines only to keep it as a U.S. governed territory in the far Pacific Ocean. He summarizes the Battle of Manila Bay as a turkey shoot between the modern steel ships of Admiral Dewey’s U.S. Asiatic squadron and “Spain’s creaky, wooden ships conveniently tied up in a row” to be smashed “into kindling.” Again, the reality is “complicated” since while the U.S. force was clearly superior, five of the six Spanish ships lost were in fact steel hulled vessels. Furthermore, the two protected (armored) cruisers Isla de Cuba and Isla de Luzon were scuttled by the Spanish as it became clear that there was no escaping defeat at the hands of a larger and more capable American force.

Despite some passing moments of historical weakness, James Bradley has presented us with an interesting and challenging rebuff of some American historical myths, and may spark some profitable debate among historians as well as his general readership. His account of how during this period the U.S. and the American people related to Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States, as well as how the governments of the US, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Cuba, among others, interacted with each other offers some useful insights for today as Americans adapt themselves to the continuing rise of China in a rapidly changing Far East and Pacific community.