I've been wanting to blog on a Clausewitzian slept-on gem by Seydlitz89 of MilPub for a while, but haven't been sure (up until now) about how to approach it. Asked to define patriotism, Seydlitz points out that the concept is very complex: as it's something "more in the line of a complex concept/ideal type/'ideal' linked with another complex concept, that of 'community', hence the title." He goes on to make a point about the structure of the making of strategy that is very important:
The first concept is the distinction between individual and plurality. This comes up again and again in strategic theory since from a strategic theory perspective, such terms as "conflict", "war", "force", "coercion", "strategy", "tactics", "operations", "victory", "defeat" and a host of others refer to political communities, not to individuals. Too often students and practitioners think in terms of their own individual interests, but that is not what strategic theory is about, rather exactly what it is NOT about. Instead it is about the actions of political communities, either groups within those communities, or between separate communities. An individual who acts alone against the interests of a community is by definition an outcast, an outlaw or a tyrant.
This is something Machiavelli wrote about quite strongly. The purpose of The Prince was not to enable wannabe manipulators like Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia, it was to offer the Prince (hence the title) a guide to ruling a state justly and effectively. Machiavelli's Prince acts in a manner that will ultimately benefit the polity. There is a moral code the Prince must honor, even if the morality of the state is different from that that governs individual relationships. Seydlitz goes on to talk about the meaning of strategy itself:
The second concept goes back a long way, to ancient Greece, as does the origin of strategy itself. The Greeks were clear that self-interest was the flip side of justice, that is both were two sides of the same coin and required each other to make any sense. It is only in terms of a community that self-interest can be defined and justice is when the community accepts the claims of the individual as being in line with the interests of the group. This system in turn required a language, a means of communication within the group with terms that had distinct meanings which everyone understood. To this it is also necessary to remember that for the Greeks justice was only possible among equals (Nietzsche spoke a lot of this as well in his Genealogy of Morals btw)
Part of the genius of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is how well he describes how this very mechanism that I have described comes apart. Athens no longer considers herself one among equals, but above the rest with the power to do as she pleases. The citizenry starts to quarrel among themselves and to see democracy as a hindrance to the demands of Empire. Language itself starts to lose relevance as terms take on new meanings to cover and legitimize base actions. Individuals each seek their own advantage at the expense of the community, and the community itself eventually collapses into chaos and suffers defeat at the hands of Sparta and her allies.
And this brings us to the ever-running grand strategy debate. What conditions produce good grand strategy? I think Seydlitz89 lays it out very well. You cannot ultimately have good either the ideational (i.e containment) or emergent (i.e a set of practices) variant of grand strategy without a healthy political community. Now, let's take a step back for a minute. If you are a certain man who waxes poetic about McDonalds, Lexuses, and olive trees, you might identify "healthy political community" with "Western democracy." And if you did, you'd be wrong.
Democracy as we understand it is an extremely recent invention in human history. For a good deal of history, alternative forms of government tended to predominate. But yet there were plenty of Chinese and Roman emperors, British kings and queens (not to mention a certain Mongol) who history judges to have ruled in a just and effective manner. There were also political cultures that produced effective grand strategies that we would not want to emulate today (i.e ancient China). You don't need democracy to create good strategy, but I think Machivaelli (a humanist and a supporter of the idea of the Republic) would agree that the investment of the political community is necessary to producing sound strategy and protecting the realm.
And this brings us to the core issue that Bernard Finel, Zenpundit, T. Greer, and Gunslinger are talking about, even if it's not being explicitly addressed: would we meet the standard that Machiavelli lays out in The Prince? The answer to this question tends to break down along partisan, ideological, or policy-fighting lines. I will say, however, that in 200 years the U.S. has done pretty well given our youth and inexperience. We've survived threats that have crushed other revolutionary states--both internal and external--in the bud. We've managed to guide ourselves through the explosive coming of modernity, a process starting in the mid-19th century led to all kinds of horrible things across the world (especially in Europe)--prospering from it and making ourselves a superpower.
And judging from that, I think that the overall mood of declinism inherent in many new books about American power fundamentally misunderstands the resilience of our political system---and our potential for the future.
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