Now Is the Time for All Good People to Rally to Each Other

To borrow the classic nautical metaphor, the American ship of state is in distress and facing the direst dangers in my memory.  I have spent a lifetime studying the history and analyzing the politics and projecting the future of nation states.  I have seen and even witnessed the disappearance of governments, regimes, states, and nations.  Yes, this could happen here.  It is already evident that the United States of America that emerges from this crisis will be very different from the United States of America that has reached this point.  The Democratic and Republican parties which have aided and abetted the development of this crisis will either fade into history or emerge dramatically, possibly radically altered.

Specifically, the victorious insurgents have occupied the capital.  Their leader is ensconced in the presidential palace and his minions are trying to settle into their new lives as rulers and adjusting to life in the capital.  They’re finding this harder than they expected.  It seems that actually governing a country requires more than just sitting in an office and writing decrees.  Those who have made the government function are cycling through the fight or flight – or collaborate – reflex.  History tells us that insurgents make lousy bureaucrats (who are the folks you need to run things) but which if any of the bureaucrats they now find around them are friendly?

What do you do after the capital has fallen and you’re out of power?  That’s easy and very hard at the same time.  Clausewitz talked about that, and others talked more precisely about what you do next.  The first step has already begun with the mobilization onto the streets, into the cyber world, to the phones, and to the mailboxes, the new grass roots rebellion against the insurgent regime is already emerging.  This energy needs to be united into the broadest coalition that can gathered together.  Issue by issue, person by person, find out what motivates them, what do they want to change, what do they really want or need, and determine how many people want the same thing or something similar enough that they can work together.  The focus must be on issues and solutions that bring people together rather than drive them apart; disagreements need to be broken down to the smallest working parts and, wherever possible, reassembled into agreement on possible solutions.  This is not work for the capital.  This is work for the “provinces” – street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, and community by community.  Hard, street pounding, shoe leather consuming, face to face work done one on one at first and then group on group, all the time focusing on bringing people together rather than driving them apart.

Among the issues that must be addressed are changes that will take the power away from those with a vested interest in continuing the current political stagnation and back into the hands of an active, committed citizenry.

End Gerrymandering by taking redistricting away from legislators and placing it in the hands of nonpartisan panels, commissions, etc. with access to the best statistical, demographical, and topographical techniques.

Support the greatest possible franchise by protecting access to voter registration and to polling places – fight voter ID laws and other restrictions on voter eligibility and access and where necessary initiate programs to help obtain required IDs for legal voters targeted by restrictive measures.

Campaign finance reform – support measures that curtail or eliminate corporate campaign donations or compel such donations to be identified publicly.

This kind of grass roots mobilization, activism, and organization will take a long time and a sustained effort.  Groups across the country can help each other with ideas, share experiences, coordinate their efforts on specific issues, and share funds and resources.  The Democratic Party is too burdened by old ideas and has been too slow to respond to this altered political scene to be the source of this local activism.  Where it has a presence it can and should be included in the coalitions that need to emerge but the repair, reconstruction, and rescue of that party should not be the first concern of the population – their job is to organize and fight to preserve the nation.

What both the Democratic Party and those Republicans who recognize the danger can do is to be democracy’s rear guard in the capital.  They must resist the ‘new normal’ and the related radical changes in any way they can using the powers of incumbency and their roles as the wheels and gears of representative democracy.  In the capital the Democratic Party will have to carry the banner while the real coalition is being built across the country, to emerge at some point in the future as a cohesive resistance that can point to a proven track record of governance at the village, township, county, district, town, city, and state levels – and present the body of new ideas that have been proven in those locations.  And these local and state governments will represent the growing power and support needed for the final push on the capital and the true taking of the government by and for the greatest number of people.

The people united can never be defeated.

Some Philosophic Remarks for the New President-Elect

Congratulations, President-elect Trump, you are now committed to filling what is arguably the toughest jobs on the planet.

As you obviously understand, the President’s most important function is to make decisions.  You will be inundated by matters to be decided by you usually accompanied by recommendations from advisors, counselors, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, et al, but you will be the actual decision maker.  Also, as important as many of your past decisions were in business, your decisions as President may literally decide between war and peace, life and death for Americans and others.   Although the Federal Government will not function if you try to make all of the decisions yourself, it’s just too big and complex and there are too many things going on every day, you should resist as much as possible any thought of delegating the big war and peace decisions that will define your presidency. 

  

War is the organized use or threatened use of violence in conflicts between two or more states or proto-states.  Warfare is the collective human activity of conducting a war.  War is universal but warfare reflects culture, history, social organization, technology, personality, inspiration, etc. and will always be different each time a war breaks out even as parties to the conflict try to refight their last war.  Peace is generally but inaccurately considered to be the absence of war.  A lifetime studying history, war, warfare, military affairs long ago convinced me that "if you want peace, prepare for war" (from Epitoma Rei Militaris, by the Roman Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus).  To appear unprepared to go to war even in your own defense is the surest way for a nation to invite war.

 

That said, the most important lesson I have derived from the reading of Clausewitz is that war and the use of military force to resolve a dispute or conflict is almost always the worst possible tool for solving a problem or resolving a dispute (except in cases of national survival).  Murphy’s Law applies to war because in war whatever can go wrong probably will go wrong.  The military set great store in having plans because a plan let’s everyone know what they’re deviating from.  The Law of Unintended Consequences equally dictates that for every anticipated result of a war, there will be multiple events that were not intended almost none of them good for you.  Edward Luttwak, a very smart guy even when I disagree with him, wrote a whole book on how the logic ofwar and conflict is the opposite of what applies outside of war. 

 

The first decision you have to make – because if you wait until a crisis to decide it may be too late – is whether you accept the reality that nuclear weapons are not for fighting wars but for preventing anyone else from using their nuclear weapons against the US or its friends or allies.  Deterrence is the name of the game and in order for it to work, the US invests effort and resources in to preparing to use them.  (See above re the logic of war).

Another important idea for both decision making in general and for war and warfare in particular is to understand that ‘speed is essential, haste harmful’ –Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov.  Our own John Boyd took this idea a step further with his OODA Loop, which emphasized the cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act – and doing it faster than your opponent so that he is reacting to what you do rather than initiating his own plans.  Many observers note that in today’s cyber-world, the available time to complete this cycle is under incredible pressure.

There are also some important concepts used in discussing warfare - 

Surprise – doing anything that your opponent did not expect, i.e. attacking in a place, at a time, or with a capability that wasn’t expected.  This is one of the oldest force multipliers giving the attacker the initiative.

Mass and/or Unity of Effort – making sure that enough friendly force is concentrated at the right place and time to assure victory – but not too much force – and that few if any friendly forces are needlessly left out of the fight.

Simplicity – “keep it simple, stupid”.  Combat is a multiple body problem (a phrase coined by astrophysicists to describe really hard and complicated interactions between many objects moving through space over the same time period).  The more bodies you have in motion, the harder it is to know who’s doing what much less control them as they do it.   Napoleon, Robert E Lee, Ulysses S Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower all ran into this challenge.

You never want to pit your strength directly against an opponent’s strength.  You commit your strength against weakness – never fight fair.  All properly executed warfare is Asymmetric.

You have seen along with all of us how in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the US failed in its efforts to rebuild and reshape those nations, societies, and cultures.  The US Armed Forces and the Department of State are not constituted, equipped, manned, or supported for such missions.  Ultimately, only Iraqis and Afghans can rebuild.  Our best role is to help and support them with aid and sometimes by fielding military forces to secure space in both time and geography in which our local friends and allies can do that rebuilding.   We are also not constituted politically and socially to support seemingly open ended deployments of our military forces for anything other than a major conflict.

Finally and most importantly, holding the Moral High Ground in conducting military combat operations is as critically important to long term mission success as holding the tactical high ground on the battlefield.  We have to reserve the use of lethal military force for those situations in which it is truly warranted, will be most effective, and can be used with the minimum – preferably zero – damage or casualties to civilians/non-combatants.  And we have to be seen to be acting with restraint and limited aims because as the old cliche reminds us, "with great power comes great responsibility."  As you may have observed, many Americans are not happy with the USA acting as the world's policeman, but they are even more unhappy when anyone else does it.

What Is To Be Done?

As we begin the year 2015, we are hearing echoes of a century ago.  Many people are asking themselves why we should concern ourselves with “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing” – and I will discuss that further in a future posting.

But what is actually at stake here right now?

Obviously, the future of a free, independent, and democratic Ukraine;

As well as the future of a still hoped for free, democratic, and independent Russia;

And probably the as yet unsought future of Belarus;

And quite possibly the freedom, independence, and peaceful future of small states in the Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Easternmost Europe, and the Baltic Littoral.

When I left Russia in 2000, after four years of living and working there – as I later came to put it, in the late-Yeltsin/early Putin years – Russian friends explained that ‘we’ll get another chance at democracy in 20 years.  For some time now I’ve consoled myself with that thought, but it’s a comforting thought that has now worn thin and threadbare.

Putin’s actions in Russia’s near-abroad and his domination of the various media in Russia have created a situation in which a besieged Russian population sees itself surrounded by enemies frequently acting at the behest of a hegemonic United States.  We are now the wolf howling at their door for many Russians who know little or nothing of anything beyond this narrative.  Even if we are able to peacefully resolve our conflicting ambitions on behalf of Ukraine and its people, we may well lose at least another generation of Russians who will buy in to Putin’s narrative.

Putin must be intelligent enough to realize that in an actual war with a US-led Western coalition, Russia would lose much of its hard won restored military might (such as it is) and quite possibly Putin would lose power.  It is hard to be certain exactly what his generals and intelligence chiefs are telling him, though it is worth remembering that many of them are graduates of the same schools who turned out a group of general officers who told Brezhnev that they could easily take control of Afghanistan.  It would be a costly and bloody victory for the West regardless and it would cement Russia’s position in impoverished opposition for a century and devastate Ukraine and any other country that ‘hosted’ such a conflict.

So for the best interests of the West, Ukraine, and that still hoped for democratic Russia and its many neighbors – how do resolve this ongoing dispute?

The answer given to us by history is that we convince Putin, his generals, and his intelligence chiefs, that the US and the West will fight them for the future of Ukraine.  We need to make it clear that collectively, including Ukraine, are willing to risk just as much and probably more than Putin is willing to risk – and he appears in fact to be risking almost everything – in order to prevent Putin from achieving his goal of blocking the emergence of a free, independent, democratic Ukraine integrated into Europe.

Whether we end up in actual conflict with Putin’s Russia, this contest will one way or the other define the 21^st Century for much if not all of the world – whether shaped once again by a ‘far away quarrel” or shaped by a peacefully resolved contest of wills in which ‘the West’ awoke and demonstrated its resolve.

Which of these things is not like the other? America’s Future, The Thirty Years War, and today’s Islamic World

“History is a cruel step-mother, and when it retaliates, it stops at nothing.” Lenin

History is huge, given that by definition it encompasses the story of the human race going back to before the existence of written records.  We grapple with the challenge of history by parsing it into digestible lumps on the basis of time periods, geographic location, linguistic communities, etc.  In order to understand it as something more involved than the simple accretion of facts in sedimentary layers, we use metaphors, such as the turning of a wheel or the flowing of water in a river, my own preferred image.  The message in the metaphor is that change is the singular constant across history even as it may slow down or speed up.

“History is written for schoolmasters and armchair strategists.  Statesmen and warriors pick their war through the dark.” Lord Esher Journal, 15 March 1915

Given the time spanned by human history, it is not surprising that people have long debated, and still do, whether or not history repeats itself.  The English historian G M Trevelyan summed up the debate this way:  ‘‘History repeats itself!’ and ‘History never repeats itself’ are about equally true… We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.”  However, George Bernard Shaw offered an interesting observation when he pointed out that “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!”  For me personally, the debate is moot because whether or not history repeats itself, it is more than evident from history that people clearly do.  Nations are often seen to behave like people, which might be at least in part attributed to the reality that they are made up of people and are governed or led by people.  Thus nations, like individuals, can be perceived to be engaging in bad behavior which others then try to adjust through punishments and/or rewards.

 “What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”  GWF Hegel

The violence engulfing the Islamic world over the past decade or more, with growing conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis, long ago brought to mind the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when the emerging  Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church confronted each other across the courts, cathedrals, and battlefields of Europe.  General Sir John Hackett, in “The Profession of Arms”, described the Thirty Years War as “A period in which fervent Christians were prepared to hang, burn, torture, shoot or poison other fervent Christians with whom they happened to disagree upon the correct approach to eternal life.”  To me the parallel of a religiously fueled, politically complex expanding conflict is self-evident.

As Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus observed of Europe’s version, “all the wars that are on foot in Europe have been fused together and have become a single war.”  A parallel conflict in the Islamic world today might reach from the Atlantic Coast of West Africa to the islands of Indonesia or the Philippines, and from Central Asia to the deep Indian Ocean.

Much has been made of the failure of the United States to show evidence of national strategy in recent decades, and I have been among those critics.  A speaker at the Army War College earlier this year rightly corrected us by pointing out that the US today is a status quo power – and preserving that status quo has been our strategy.  Unfortunately, such an approach places the US in the position of King Canute telling the tide to go out when it’s coming in – both are doomed to failure.

I bought a copy of Peter H. Wilson’s “The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy” to refresh my knowledge of that conflict.  Wilson offers a thorough examination of the Thirty Years War, with excellent elaboration of its background and preliminaries.  He promises to tell the whole story of the war right down to its ending (often only summarized).  With some 850 pages of text plus some 75 pages of notes, I believe he will fulfill that promise.

Whatever happens today need not be an Islamic reenactment of the Thirty Years War, but the complexities of that past conflict resonate in the one potentially confronting us.  They both reflect a complex interaction of religious and geo-political motivations for conflict.  They are contests between both state and non-state actors. Individuals from around the world choose to join the conflict in service of one side or the other, often in contradiction of their own nation’s stance on the war.  Co-religionists end up in conflict with each other for political and geo-political reasons even as they also fight others because they were not of the same faith.

The principal players in Europe’s war were Spain, Holland, France, the German principalities, the Holy Roman Empire and its Electors (both Protestants and Catholics), and Sweden – with Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all pitted against each other in various and changing combinations.  Many soldiers became mercenaries and fought for pay over religion or country.   How might we look for lessons from their experience to determine which nations might possibly play which original roles?  Is the USA in the role of France or Spain?  Is Russia or China the Ottoman Empire?  There is no papal style structure in the Islamic world, but perhaps Saudi control of the holy places of Mecca and Medina brings them close to such a role.

Reading Wilson’s chapter Pax Hispanica, it quickly becomes evident that Spain was then, as the United States is today, the principal status quo power – and almost the sole superpower by wealth and military capabilities, attempting to keep things the way they are.  The challenges facing Spain then echo those facing us today.  Both countries are the economic top dogs because of global reach and, for Spain, the influx of silver from the mines in its American colonies.  But this wealth led Spain to neglect development of a balanced economy that promoted both manufacturing and agriculture, and it contributed to inflation.

The US is struggling to deal with economic challenges intertwined with philosophical battles over its social, economic, and even political future.  These ongoing contests are preventing it from effectively applying almost any remedies at the present time.  Both Spain and the US were also spending massive amounts on defense, fighting extended foreign wars, and debates over perceived threats and responses dominated each nation’s strategic thinking.  And both countries were suspected by other nations of ambitious and expansionist intentions as they sought to shape the world into the desired form.  However, the mere hypothesis that the US now is playing a role similar to Spain during the Thirty Years War must be tested against events in the real world and measured against the events of some 600 years ago played out for Spain.  Spain began its decline as it failed to maintain the world order which it had come to dominate and failed to adapt to the new emerging world order.

The hard reality is that the American people have one choice to make (among many decisions facing them):

Will the United States remain the sole superpower and by definition the world’s policeman in pursuit of this imperial role as it seeks to shape the world in its own image?

Or, will the US concede sufficient authority and capability and autonomy to a supranational body that could act around the world without the US or US forces and with the inevitable result of shaping a world to some greater or lesser degree different from what the US might prefer?

“The future is hidden even from the men who made it.”  Anatole France