A while ago, Joseph Fouche of Committee of Public Safety had a very thoughtful post about the "tragedy of the geopolitical nerd." Fouche argued that the titular individual suffers from an acute (and rare) vexation:
"He suffers from a contradiction: he can see the narrow slices of reality that he specializes in exquisite and even excruciating detail. Unfortunately, he sees the world outside as a mixture of his tiny area of expertise writ large and a land populated by large bright shiny ideals that he can see in all of its fine shades. Based on this perception, he can formulate responses perfectly calibrated to exploit his unique domain knowledge to remake the world in the image of his vision. However, the nerd’s intentions suffer from a major defect: they are usually fatally out of sync with the means available to achieve that vision."
Fouche offered as an example George Kennan, who formulated an elaborate design for confronting Soviet power only to become embittered over what he viewed as an inadequate execution. Fouche's point was that grand strategies have to be tailored to realities of American politics - e.g they cannot be overly complex or nuanced.
I propose a corollary to this metaphor: Pinky and the Brain.
At first blush, a Saturday morning cartoon show involving two scheming laboratory mice would not have much relevance to strategy. However, the show is a very apt metaphor for strategy. Brain constantly generates complex plans for taking over the world. Unfortunately, these plans must be executed by Pinky, a hyperactive mouse with a Cockney accent. Needles to say, the plans always go awry. It isn't entirely Pinky's fault, however. The plans Brains generates are too complex to be implemented (sometimes hilariously so) and usually contain a single point of failure. He also fails to take into account Pinky's role in the actual implementation of the plans.
The point here is not necessarily that Brain would have been better off designing simpler plans. The real lesson is that Brain's model of planning is an ideal one. He resolutely refuses to accept the strategic conditions he must work with. So what's the link for today?
After 9/11, it was hard not to go to the Current Affairs section of one's local Barnes and Noble or turn on CNN without seeing an earnest exposition of the need for the United States to embrace some favored aspect of Cold War strategy. Peter Beinart's 2006 book The Good Fight, for example, explicitly tries to weave a grand strategy out of the unraveled threads of early Cold War liberalism. But no amount of well-wishing will bring Harry Truman back to life. Harkening back to a supposed halycon era of the Eisenhower National Security Council (NSC), the firmness of the Berlin Airlift, or ping-pong diplomacy in Mao's China is not practically useful.
And as Max Hastings notes in his latest biography of Winston Churchill, many revered historical leaders were not as strategically sound as we popularly believed. Churchill was wedded to the often simplistic Basil Liddell-Hart-induced vision of a "British Way in Warfare" based on indirect strategy. This resulted in Britain committing itself (and its allies) to a variety of strategically peripheral battles of little direct benefit. Churchill offered the moral backbone to oppose Hitler where little existed otherwise, but that alone was not sufficient to win the war.
It's not that past experience can't offer us perspective, point out errors in our present approach, or even point the ways to the future. It is that grand strategy based on nostalgia for the past and a conscious desire to replicate the success of an oft-mythologized hero is symptomatic of a refusal to engage with the present. And that's just as sensible as trusting your plans for world domination over to a hyperactive lab mouse.
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