The original impetus for this series was to follow up the previous series arguing that the advantage in war is shifting from the offensive to the defensive. Appropriate seemed some thoughts about American strategy in the coming defensive era. Naturally such essays would be concerned mostly with military strategy, technology, and tactics.
Yet as soon as one sits down to describe possible military strategies, as opposed to strategies in the process of becoming impossible, one is stopped, or at least I was stopped, by the question: ‘strategies toward what end?’ And as soon as one asks that question one, or at least I, finds oneself on the path to what is often called “grand strategy” the overarching goal a nation pursues with respect to other nations and its place in the world.
There are great strategic thinkers—Edward Luttwak preeminent among contemporaries—who argue that defining grand strategy is primarily a job for historians, not normative but descriptive.
An accomplished historian himself, Luttwak’s first book, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, was criticized ferociously on the grounds that there is no documentary evidence that any leader of Rome ever articulated the strategy Luttwak calls the basis of empire from the first to the third centuries. Luttwak, actually surprised by the criticism, responded, more or less, “well of course they didn’t, no empire knows its strategy while executing it and of course contemporary documents claiming to lay out strategies, especially grand strategy, are usually fanciful nonsense.” As with Socrates’ poets who could not explain their own texts, asking the people who make war and peace how they do what they do is an invitation for great men to speak nonsense.
Heraclitus and Don Corleone Agree
As much as I admire Luttwak, I think his dismissal of normative descriptions—or prescriptions—of strategy does elide an important point, especially for America. If the purpose of grand strategy is for a nation to get what it wants—even if neither the strategy nor the desires are clearly articulated or perhaps even denied—then the crucial prior question is “what is this nation?” What a nation is will define what it wants. Heraclitus and Don Corleone agree: character is destiny.
Because the United States, to a greater degree than just about any nation, except perhaps Israel, was a conscious creation the question “what is the United States” is more capable of a coherent answer than say, what is France or China or Russia, how ever clearly all three are different from each other. And because it is more possible to say what we are, it is more possible to say what we want, or at least what choices are open to us. The answers to those questions do not yield unanswerable or unarguable strategic prescriptions, but they seem a reasonable starting point.
The United States was founded and thrived as a commercial republic. As republican America cherished not only the political and legal equality of citizens but to an amazing extent their social equality. This egalitarianism, an egalitarianism of merit, in turn forms and is formed by the nation’s commercial character. Commerce is exchange. America preeminently has been a place where people can change places. It is not the least bit surprising that how a people makes its living biases their political institutions and vice versa. Commerce both establishes and requires a preference for liberty and equality, at least in the equal application of the rules of the game.
At this point, however, wary readers may not unreasonably suspect my motives for beginning a discussion of strategy by defining America in this way. Am I not being tendentious, sneakily premising a discussion of strategy on first selling my own political preferences? Richard, these suspicious readers might say, we all know you like the idea of America as a commercial republic. Now you are just trying to sneak it in as a hidden premise.
I could respond that the evidence that we did consciously chose to be a commercial republic is overwhelming. The best defense, though, against the charge of tendentiousness is that, excluding the choice to be poor and weak, history gives us only two tendencies to choose from. Between the two my choice is uncontroversial.
To be rich and powerful
A nation can become rich and powerful as a militarily aggressive tyranny, conquering territory, and looting and enslaving the conquered. Contrary to the wishful thinking of some American abolitionists prior to the Civil War, slavery was and typically is enormously profitable to the slavers. By some measures, Charleston, South Carolina was the richest city in America before the Revolution. Not coincidentally, slaves working the Carolina rice plantations had the shortest lifespan of any slaves in the colonies, by some estimates as little as five years. Working slaves to death paid well.
The other way a nation can become rich and powerful is by free commerce, understood to mean not only “trade” but all productive enterprise. Almost inevitably such nations will acknowledge the source of their wealth by sharing power with those who create it, though the forms of power, like the forms of slavery, may be more or less explicit.
These really are the only two choices. Once we see that, it is impossible to deny which choice we made or even when we made it.
The Revolution began in Boston, then our most commercial city, and was sparked by arguments over trade. Tory sentiment tended to be greatest in the places most enthusiastic for slavery. (This included New York City with its huge stake in the finance of southern plantations finance and where the Tory population was swelled by out-of-staters flocking to a British controlled city.) It was in the South that the war had its last gasp because the Brits imagined those relatively friendly environs to be their best hope of hanging on to some of the colonies.
The Constitution, odd enough for being written down, was odder yet in its evident concern for commerce. Magna Carta, if I remember correctly, sadly neglected trade policy. In the U.S. version, free trade among the states was guaranteed. Patents were raised to a constitutional level. Contracts and property were guaranteed, as if centuries of Common Law had somehow neglected those subjects.
A close call
Our final decision was not made until 1865, though the lines had become all too clear two decades earlier. The Mexican-American War was the first, last and only major war the U.S. ever waged specifically for the acquisition of new territory. It was waged by a pro-slavery President and supported by the slave states for the very purpose of extending slavery. Before the Civil War southern voices had already been heard advocating the conquest of Cuba. In the North anti-slavery voices, including Lincoln, who would be the most ardent advocate of commerce yet raised to the Presidency, called out the war as a slave-state power grab.
Lincoln is sometimes criticized for putting saving the Union ahead of destroying slavery as if saving the Union were an amoral purpose. But Lincoln knew there was never any prospect of “allowing our errant brethren to depart in peace.” The result of secession would not have been peace but the erection of a great, hostile, and militaristic slave power on our continent, inevitably drawn to conquest: the rest of Mexico, Cuba, California.
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union industrialized by slave labor. It largely financed WWII on theft from the nations it conquered. (Lend-Lease did the rest.) The Nazis thieved on a grand scale. They did enslave Jews and other alleged inferiors but being Nazis they killed their slaves rather than continue profiting from them. Lose, lose.
Rome was a Republic for as long as most of its citizen soldiers were free farmers. The Republic, already endangered was lost finally when Caesar, with debts no honest man could pay, doubled the size of the empire, looting city after city and enslaving (as he claimed) a million Gauls in order to satisfy his creditors.
China hangs in the balance.
Slavery, wars of conquest, and tyranny are as inseparable as are commerce and freedom. It’s a commercial republic or nothing else we would want. And history makes clear our choice. (Hmmm, I seem to have made Luttwak’s point about discovering strategy rather than prescribing it.)
What is it that a commercial republic wants beyond its borders? The apparently simple answer is peace and free trade, that is, trade on terms not dictated by others.
For the U.S. history has vastly complicated that simple answer.
It is not the usual thing for any commercial republic to become the leader of the free world (all those other commercial republics) or the globe’s only undisputed superpower. In Luttwak’s “paradoxical logic of strategy” every success of a nation impels forces threatening the reversal of that success, the greater the success the greater those forces. Our successes have placed us in a position simultaneously advantageous and perilous. Any attempt on our part to shed our history by retreating to the status of just another commercial republic would put at grave risk the peace and freedom of trade we must have to thrive.
No, there are no actual photographs of the British burning the White House in 1812
If we fail to make a second American Century the enmities and rivalries inevitably attracted by the paradoxical logic of strategy could thrust us into an inferior position more analogous to 1812 than 1917. Yet maintaining our position inevitably will continue to attract and intensify those enmities and rivalries. Managing those thus becomes the essence of U.S. strategy.
If that seems breathtakingly obvious, why is it that our leaders seem so unconscious of this, so intent on either denying that we have serious rivals or raging against their very existence?
Where is the national discussion on how to manage those rivalries while maintaining our position?
Why do we appear not to have any strategy at all, waging wars or not, forging alliances or not on so ad hoc a basis?
Why for that matter are we once again staging an utterly unserious presidential election, in which neither candidate nor party addresses these issues and the entire nation while fraught with anxiety nevertheless acts as if we haven’t a care in the world?
Above all, what is to be done?
We will attempt some answers next time.
Because this may end up being a book, I can’t write it straight through. Henceforth I will alternate irregularly between serial installments on these topics and other concerns. I hope to finish before using up more Roman numerals than the Super Bowl.
AN APPEAL: I follow many writers on strategy, tactics, and military technology. Still, it is a great help to me when readers suggest other publications or people I should be reading, or whose work I should be sharing with the rest of our readers. So please do. Comment away!