But as a “mere” citizen,” I always took an inordinate interest in politics, especially “International Relations.” And never felt at a disadvantage whether collaborating with the Army-Air Force Center for Low-Intensity Conflict on those issues and their PhDs, nor with the people I brought together for different activities, most of whom were PhDs, to include a few people who were associated with the CIA in one way or another. One of whom was in fact a reference for me to Law School.
So I got a late start educationally. But when confronted with the egregious illegality of the CIA at Guantanamo, and the promotion of the fascist thought of Carl Schmitt by Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard professor, and favorite Catholic Integralist of the National Conservatives, like the Carlists of National Review who so favored Franco’s Spain and Trujillo’s D.R. had been previously, I have no illusions that a PhD makes someone knowledgeable, in itself. But my choice to be an anti-fascist was no “choice,” but came with being the son of a fascist victim, my father by the Japanese fascists, as a POW on the Death March of Bataan, and in 3 years as POW until 1945. So I make no apologies for despising the current crop of American fascists, joining forces with other fascist sympathizers, whether Yoram Hazony, Giorgia Meloni, et al.
Trying to tell an American that there can be more than two sides to an issue, or to see what was once called a “Third Force,” in Weimar politics, the “Conservative Revolutionaries,” which was written of here: https://mondoweiss.net/2015/04/conservative-revolutionaries-fascism/, and more in depth by George L. Mosse, whom I consider the only reliable expert on fascism, of those recognized as such, in his book, Germany and the Jews,” is virtually impossible. Which is so in my opinion because dualistic thinking, as Us vs. Them, is so “comforting,” because it doesn’t require “thinking.” Which makes the term “Conservative,” so comforting as it implies we need not “think,” just stay with the status quo. Even when “Conservative” actually means “Right-wing Revolutionary,” as the original “Conservative Movement” in fact was, and patterned after Germany’s Conservative Revolutionary Movement, even if the vast majority of “Conservatives” and "National Conservatives” are either to ignorant, or too witless, to see that in themselves and the “Movements” they’re so eager to join.
That “dualism” is so embedded in our collective consciousness, that it requires a contrarian, “critical,” approach to such phenomena as politics, and its continuation, as “War” (but don’t tell the Conservatives lest they accuse one of being a Marxist, actual proponents of which are also an ideological enemy to “critical thought,” in my experience). But that doesn’t mean “more right than wrong” isn’t worth searching for, and listening to. While I’m not a “Realist,” and have come to see them as too much a “complement” to Conservatives, as well as to the so-called Neoconservatives and Neoliberals, as generally supportive of US wars; that is made evident as we see the so-called “Realism and Restraint” crowd at The American Conservative, with an overflow, unfortunately, now too active at the Quincy Institute, as a recent event there showed. And with it, that panel presented an “alternative” to the “Neo’s,” that the US should only go to war when our “interests are threatened;” a supposed change of pace from previous Republican and Democratic pretexts, but all resulting in the same phenomena: war. Today, against either or both of China and Russia, depending on which tv viewing audiences one seeks to please.
But Prof. Mearsheimer’s and Prof. Walt’s analyses has been consistently clear headed in seeing since the 1990’s the consequences of what was, and is, indisputably an offensive expansionism of US hegemony, just as Chalmers Johnson did. With their work giving the lie to the false statement below that:
"From Giovanni Botero to Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the working assumption was that the 'passions' would dictate policy unless a conscious effort were made to counter their impact. But Mearsheimer, alas, knows nothing of this."
When in fact, the “the working assumption” that the “passions” dictate policy, is inherent to their work in recognizing how the Israel Lobby” works, and how moving NATO on to Russia’s borders would generate negative “passions” against US policy.
Though I do agree with the latter part of Haslam’s quote: "Only an armchair observer, a political scientist, perhaps, at great remove from the exercise of power, would be so foolhardy as to assume rationality, an economistic fallacy in the world of politics.”
As my friend Tom Pauken has repeatedly told me to read Willmoore Kendall, which I’ve now done, so that I recognize now what he was advocating was a form of what the Germans called for as “Conservative Revolutionaries,” and Yoram Hazony, and TAC do as National Conservates, I’m entitled to refer people to, in the same manner that "Conservatives” here do; to read and listen to Bill Polk! Which he can be found here on YouTube: William R. Polk on “America Confronts the Post-Imperial World,” Lectures 1, 2, and 3
(See 1:00:25 for some wiseacre’s question.)
I know at least one of my Conservative critics, at least until recently, if not still, believes we could have “won” in Vietnam if we had only “pushed a bit deeper” into the war by expanding it more, as I was told, but here is Bill Polk for a counter-narrative to that myth: https://mondediplo.com/2009/11/03vietnam
And here is Bill, who without calling it that, applies Hannah Arendt’s “method of thinking” as looking to the “true origins” of a war to understand it, with this: "From almost the first days that it emerged from under an oppressive French rule (that included artillery barrages on its capital), we have been engaged in subversive actions designed to overthrow its inexperienced leaders and the fragile institutions they represented."
Dear Ray,
I think the author of the passage I quoted (Jonathan Haslam) would agree. He goes on to write:
“John Mearsheimer of Chicago, quondam
soldier, US Air Force officer, and unmasker of the brilliant but flawed
military theorist Sir Basil Liddell Hart – 'the most famous and widely advanced
military historian and theorist in the world' – is himself an enfant terrible. 'I don’t like
authority,' Mearsheimer confesses. An odd remark is this to come from a West
Point graduate: clearly no facile mind; indeed, an engaging intellectual, a
gifted teacher and debater, the genial host, Mearsheimer is also the compulsive
contrarian, courting controversy among liberals while complaining that the
doors of Harvard are closed to him because of their intolerance. The latest example is
an onslaught against the Israeli lobby in US foreign policy, which cuts
directly across Mearsheimer’s extensively articulated notion that domestic
politics play a subordinate if not insubstantial role determining international
relations....” And yet, "From Giovanni Botero to Henry St. John,
Viscount Bolingbroke, the working assumption was that the 'passions' would
dictate policy unless a conscious effort were made to counter their impact. But
Mearsheimer, alas, knows nothing of this. A short spell in Washington, not
merely in government, would cure most of this delusion. Only an armchair
observer, a political scientist, perhaps, at great remove from the exercise of
power, would be so foolhardy as to assume rationality, an economistic fallacy
in the world of politics.”
Ken, the trouble is: John Mearsheimer has been/is right on US culpability for mess in Ukraine. I have little patience with academic theories; was a (Russian) "area studies" person, and an M.A. was enough for me (although I had fellowships taking me through a PhD at both Harvard and Yale, expenses paid. Army commission (1961) -- active duty (and new baby) helped spare me from the likes of Richard Pipes and Walter Rostow back in the day. I learned IR by doing -- day-to-day reporting and analysis for the agency, and not only on Russia. The only thing I found myself in agreement with HAK was that he and Nixon could exploit the very real Sino-Soviet dispute to a fare-thee-well (and our reporting on the Sino-Soviet rift made that optio crystal-clear. I never asked Chas if he considered himself a member of the "realist" school -- didn't have to; it was clear he saw the same thing from a primarily Chinese perspective and played a key role in the tectonic shift of 1972. We are now seeing another tectonic shift (in the opposite direction), with China-Russia entente (watch what comes out of the Xi-Putin discussion today in Samarkand).
In sum, it has been my experience that you learn a lot by virtue of deep first hand involvement in substance, and being responsible for reporting/analysis over several decades. You learn more than a bevy of IR courses, I think. Actually, one becomes a realist (without, in my case at least, even being aware there is any pejorative smuggerie attached to the term in academia). The knowledge/courage generated by that kind of experience empowers folks like Mearsheimer
and Walt to write candidly about realities like the Israel Lobby (without any real
prospect of getting it published in any IR or popular journal). It empowered Chas to take a demotion to the lower (but extremely important post of Director of National Intelligence in 2009. He was in office just a few hours before that same lobby got him. In short, it takes courage to speak out and say the US "started it" in Ukraine -- courage, AND a lot of experience in the real world. Thanks for listening.
Ray
S. Walt's latest on NATO -- a version of what he's been saying since the 1990s -- brings to mind this passage about one of his occasional co-authors:
“What has driven [John] Mearsheimer’s search for simplistic
interpretations of world politics? Academic work, including choice of
discipline, is arguably a vocation. A discipline, which Political Science could
just about claim to be but International Relations self-evidently is not (in spite
of the long search for legitimacy), defines itself by method as well as subject
matter. A given method unquestionably holds special appeal to a particular cast
of mind. Mearsheimer readily concurs. He believes 'I[nternational] R[elations]
theorists are born, not created. I think you either have an instinct for
creating theories or you don’t.' He has accordingly expressed an insatiable
appetite for 'simple theories that address important issues.' By the same token
and from the absence of any archival research in The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics, we can assume that Mearsheimer is not interested in historical
accuracy for its own sake.... The urge to simplify irrevocably highlights
differences even with fellow thinkers rather than shading alternatives into
mere nuance. Mearsheimer is proud to call himself 'a realist.' But this realism
is sui generis.”
from Jonathan Haslam, “John Mearsheimer’s ‘elementary geometry of
power’: Euclidean moment or an intellectual blind alley?” In History and
Neorealism, edited by Ernest R. May, Richard Rosecrance, and Zara Steiner,
Cambridge UP, 2010.
Which NATO Do We Need?
Four possible futures for the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20
Stephen M. Walt
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
September 14, 2022
In a world of constant change, the endurance of the
trans-Atlantic partnership stands out. NATO is older than I am, and I’m
no youngster. It has been around even longer than Queen Elizabeth II
reigned in Britain. Its original rationale—to “keep
the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”—is less
relevant than it used to be (Russia’s war in Ukraine notwithstanding),
yet it still commands reflexive reverence on both sides of the Atlantic.
If you’re an aspiring policy wonk hoping to make your mark in
Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, etc., learning to praise NATO’s
enduring virtues is still the smart career move. This longevity is especially remarkable when one considers how much
has changed since NATO was formed and the idea of a “trans-Atlantic
community” began to take shape. The Warsaw Pact is gone, and the Soviet
Union has collapsed. The United States has spent 20-plus years fighting
costly and unsuccessful wars in the greater Middle East.
China has risen from an impoverished nation with little global clout to
the world’s second-most-powerful country, and its leaders aspire to an
even greater global role in the future. Europe itself has experienced
profound shifts as well: changing demographics, repeated economic
crises, civil wars in the Balkans, and, in 2022, a destructive war that
seems likely to continue for some time. To be sure, the “trans-Atlantic partnership” hasn’t been entirely
static. NATO has added new members throughout its history, beginning
with Greece and Turkey in 1952, followed by Spain in 1982, then a flurry
of former Soviet allies beginning in 1999, and most recently Sweden and
Finland. The distribution of burdens within the alliance has fluctuated
as well, with most of Europe cutting their defense contributions
drastically after the end of the Cold War. NATO has also gone through
various doctrinal shifts, some of them more consequential than others. It is therefore worth asking what form the trans-Atlantic partnership
should take in the future. How should it define its mission and
distribute its responsibilities? As with a mutual fund, past success is
no guarantee of future performance, which is why smart portfolio
managers seeking the best returns will adjust a fund’s assets as
conditions change. Given past changes, current events, and likely future
circumstances, what broad vision should shape the trans-Atlantic
partnership in the future, assuming it continues to exist at all? I can think of at least four distinct models going forward.
Model 1: Business as Usual One obvious approach—and given bureaucratic rigidity and political
caution, perhaps the most likely one—is to keep the present arrangements
more or less intact and change as little as possible. In this model,
NATO would remain primarily focused on European security (as the phrase
“North Atlantic” in its name implies). The United States would remain
Europe’s “first responder” and unchallenged alliance leader, as it has
been during the Ukraine crisis. Burden-sharing would still be skewed:
America’s military capabilities would continue to dwarf Europe’s
military forces, and the U.S. nuclear umbrella would still cover the
other members of the alliance. “Out-of-area” mission would be
deemphasized in favor of a renewed focus on Europe itself, a decision
that makes sense in light of the disappointing results of NATO’s past
adventures in Afghanistan, Libya, and the Balkans. To be fair, this model has some obvious virtues. It’s familiar, and it keeps Europe’s “American pacifier”
in place. European states won’t have to worry about conflicts arising
between them as long as Uncle Sam is still there to blow the whistle and
break up quarrels. European governments that don’t want to trim their
generous welfare states to pay the costs of rearmament will be happy to
let Uncle Sam bear a disproportionate share of the burden, and countries
closest to Russia will be especially desirous of a strong U.S. security
guarantee. Having a clear alliance leader with disproportionate
capabilities will facilitate more rapid and consistent decision-making
within what might otherwise be an unwieldly coalition. Thus, there are
good reasons why die-hard Atlanticists sound the alarm whenever someone
proposes tampering with this formula. Yet the business-as-usual model has some serious downsides as well.
The most obvious is opportunity cost: keeping the United States as
Europe’s first responder makes it hard for the Washington to devote
sufficient time, attention, and resources to Asia, where threats to the
balance of power are significantly greater and the diplomatic environment is especially complicated.
A strong U.S. commitment to Europe may dampen certain potential causes
of conflict there, but it didn’t prevent the Balkan wars in the 1990s,
and the U.S.-led effort to bring Ukraine into the Western security orbit
helped provoke
the current war. This is not what anyone in the West intended, of
course, but results are what matters. Ukraine’s recent successes on the
battlefield are extremely gratifying, and I hope they continue, but it
would have been far better for all concerned had the war not occurred at
all. Moreover, the business-as-usual model encourages Europe to remain
dependent on European protection and contributes to a general
complacency and lack of realism in the conduct of European foreign
policy. If you’re confident the world’s mightiest power will leap to
your side as soon as trouble starts, it’s easier to ignore the risks of
being overly dependent on foreign energy supplies and overly tolerant of
creeping authoritarianism closer to home. And though hardly anybody
wants to admit this, this model has the potential to drag the United
States into peripheral conflicts that may not always be vital to the
security or prosperity of the United States itself. At the very least,
business as usual is no longer an approach we should endorse
uncritically. Model 2: Democracy International A second model for trans-Atlantic security cooperation highlights the
shared democratic character of (most of) NATO’s members and the growing
divide between democracies and autocracies (and especially Russia and
China). This vision lies behind the Biden administration’s efforts to
emphasize shared democratic values and its openly stated desire
to prove that democracy can still outperform autocracy on the global
stage. Former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Alliance of Democracies Foundation reflects a similar conception. Unlike the business-as-usual model, which is focused primarily on
European security, this conception of the trans-Atlantic partnership
embraces a broader global agenda. It conceives of contemporary world
politics as an ideological contest between democracy and autocracy and
believes this struggle must be waged on a global scale. If the United
States is “pivoting” to Asia, then its European partners need to do so
as well, but for the broader purpose of defending and promotive
democratic systems. Consistent with that vision, Germany’s new Indo-Pacific strategy calls for strengthening ties with that region’s democracies, and the German defense minister recently announced an expanded naval presence there in 2024 as well.
This
vision has the merit of simplicity—democracy good, autocracy bad—but
its flaws far outweigh its virtues. For starters, such a framework will
inevitably complicate relations with autocracies that the United States
and/or Europe have chosen to support (such as Saudi Arabia or the other
Gulf monarchies, or potential Asian partners such as Vietnam), and
expose the trans-Atlantic partnership to a charge of rampant hypocrisy.
Second, dividing the world into friendly democracies and hostile
dictatorships is bound to reinforce ties among the latter and discourage
the former from playing divide-and-rule. From this perspective, we
should be glad that then-U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisor
Henry Kissinger did not adopt this framework in 1971, when their
rapprochement with Maoist China gave the Kremlin a new headache to worry
about. Finally, putting democratic values front and center risks turning the
trans-Atlantic partnership into a crusading organization seeking to
plant democracy wherever it can. However desirable that goal might be in
the abstract, the past 30 years should show that no member of the
alliance knows how to do this effectively. Exporting democracy is
exceedingly hard to do and usually fails, especially when outsiders try
to impose
it by force. And given the parlous state of democracy in some of NATO’s
current members, to adopt this as the alliance’s primary raison d’être
seems quixotic in the extreme. Model 3: Going Global vs. China Model 3 is a close cousin of Model 2, but instead of organizing
trans-Atlantic relations around democracy and other liberal values, it
seeks to enlist Europe in the broader U.S. effort to contain a rising
China. In effect, it seeks to unite America’s multilateral European
partners with the bilateral hub-and-spoke arrangements that already
exist in Asia, and bring Europe’s power potential to bear against the
only serious peer competitor that the United States is likely to face
for many years to come. At first glance, this is an appealing vision, and one could point to the AUKUS agreement
between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia as an early
manifestation of it. As Michael Mazarr of the Rand Corp. recently observed,
there is growing evidence that Europe no longer views China as simply a
lucrative market and valuable investment partner, and is beginning to “soft balance”
against it. From a purely American perspective, it would be highly
desirable to have Europe’s economic and military potential lined up
against its primary challenger. But there are two obvious problems with this model. First, states balance not against power alone but against threats,
and geography plays a critical role in those assessments. China may be
increasingly powerful and ambitious, but its army is not going to march
across Asia and strike at Europe, and its navy isn’t going to sail
around the world and blockade European ports. Russia is far weaker than
China but a whole lot closer, and its recent behavior is worrisome even
if its actions have unwittingly revealed its military limitations. One
should therefore expect the softest of soft balancing from Europe and
not a serious effort to counter China’s capabilities. NATO’s European members do not have the military capacity to affect
the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region in any significant way,
and they are unlikely to acquire it any time soon. The war in Ukraine
may lead European states to get serious about rebuilding their military
forces—finally—but most of their efforts will go to acquiring ground,
air, and surveillance capabilities designed to defend against and deter
Russia. That makes good sense from Europe’s perspective, but most of
these forces would be irrelevant to any conflict involving China.
Sending a few German frigates to the Indo-Pacific region may be a nice
way to signal Germany’s stated interest in the evolving security
environment there, but it is not going to alter the regional balance of
power or make much difference in China’s calculations. Europe can help balance China in other ways, of course—helping train
foreign military forces, selling weapons, participating in regional
security forums, etc.—and the United States should welcome such efforts.
But nobody should count on Europe to do much hard balancing in the
Indo-Pacific theater. Trying to put this model into place is a recipe
for disappointment and increased trans-Atlantic rancor.
Model 4: A New Division of Labor You knew this was coming: the model I think is the right one. As I’ve argued before (including most recently here in Foreign Policy),
the optimal future model for the trans-Atlantic partnership is a new
division of labor, with Europe taking primary responsibility for its own
security and the United States devoting much greater attention to the
Indo-Pacific region. The United States would remain a formal member of
NATO, but instead of being Europe’s first responder, it would become its
ally of last resort. Henceforth, the United States would plan to go
back onshore in Europe only if the regional balance of power eroded
dramatically, but not otherwise. This model cannot be implemented overnight and should be negotiated
in a cooperative spirit, with the United States helping its European
partners design and acquire the capabilities they need. Because many of
these states will do everything in their power to convince Uncle Sam to
stay, however, Washington will have to make it crystal clear that this
is the only model it will support going forward. Unless and until NATO’s
European members really believe they are going to be mostly on their
own, their resolve to take the necessary steps will remain fragile, and
backsliding on their pledges is to be expected. Unlike Donald Trump, whose bluster and bombast during his time as
U.S. president annoyed allies to no good purpose, his successor Joe
Biden is in an ideal position to start this process. He has a
well-earned reputation as a dedicated Atlanticist, so pushing for a new
division of labor wouldn’t be seen as a sign of resentment or pique. He
and his team are uniquely positioned to tell our European partners that
this step is in everyone’s long-term interest. Mind you, I don’t really
expect Biden & Co. to take this step—for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere—but they should.
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
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