Monthly Archives: April 2024

https://www.cjfp.org/realism-and-regionalism-the-united-states-in-a-multipolar-world

By Michael F. Duggan

Is it just me, or does anybody else find it adorable (and not a little absurd) that a portion of a single, overpopulated species that is destroying the Earth’s biosphere, would dedicate one day out of the year to saving the biosphere from us?

By Michael F. Duggan

When you remove shock from the battlefield, you take away decisiveness and introduce stalemate and attrition.¹ What barbed wire, flat-trajectory bullets, and machine guns were to the battlefields of 1914-18, drones, loitering munitions, and highly-mobile artillery are to the Ukraine War. On its face, the Offensive Revolution that emerged in the final phases of the First World War, which gave the Second World War its dynamic qualities as Blitzkrieg and made generals like Guderian, Patton, Rommel, and Zhukov look like geniuses compared to their chateau-bound counterparts of the Great War, and which has dominated combined arms doctrine ever since, is failing in eastern Ukraine.

As former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has observed, small unit tactics and a decentralized command structure in Ukraine have replaced the “big arrow” offensives typical of the Second World War as fact and the Cold War as theory. As with the failure of the offensive mode of war throughout most of the First World War (cavalry, which had traditionally provided mobile battlefield shock and decisiveness, was rendered useless on the Western Front), strong new defensive weapons have once again bolstered the power of the intrinsically stronger mode of war. If the defensive power of the weaker army is stronger than the offensive capabilities of the stronger army, then stalemate will ensure until attrition once again favors the side stronger in the aggregate. The Russians therefore, have adopted something akin to what historians call the “bite and hold” tactics of the First World War.² The result, since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer (a series of attempted breaching operations without air or artillery superiority), has been a front-wide effort of small gains on the part of the Russians, aimed at grinding down the other side.

Some military pundits and wannabe experts in the corporate media have declared the age of the tank to be over. This may or may not be true. The technological side of war is a contest of measures and countermeasures, innovation and counter-innovation, and it is difficult to know if the stymying of the offensive mode in 21st century combined forces combat is a fleeting phenomenon—it seems likely that effective anti-drone technologies are already in the works—or if the tank is going the way of the mounted lancer, chasseur, dragoon, and hussar.

Notes

1. Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles, the Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) xiv-xv. ↩︎
2. Paddy Griffith, Battlefield Tactics of the Western Front, the British Army’s Art of Attack 1916-1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 32-33. ↩︎

By Michael F. Duggan

Last month was the hottest March on record worldwide. The previous twelve months were also the hottest on record. 2014-2023 was the hottest decade recorded. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now around 424 parts per million, the highest levels since the Pliocene about 3 million years ago. Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to what you were doing.

By Michael F. Duggan

I never put much stock in programs touting the perfectibility of humankind. Consciously or unconsciously, I always subscribed to the sentiment expressed by the late Tony Judt: “If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences.” All utopian revolutions fail, and attempts at sweeping holistic change result in instability and eventually violence. The best we have are piecemeal solutions (Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies).

Two foundational thinkers who I never warmed up to are John Locke and Karl Marx. Locke, in all of his narrow, legalistic glory, believes that people are so rational that we need only a minimal framework of rights and laws to allow them to do the right thing. Anybody who has read history, sociobiology, or a newspaper knows that this is nonsense. I like the idea of rights, but believe that they are enforceable fictions with no independent existence. Marx believes that people (at least the proletariat tribe) are so benevolent, so cooperative, so rational, that they will band together out of historical necessity into a worker’s paradise. It is difficult to know where to begin to criticize such a ridiculously rationalistic outlook.

Before Locke and Marx, there was Thomas Hobbes, the primitive English realist whose life spanned the most tragic period of modern Western history before the World Wars. Hobbes, who lived to be 91 and died peacefully on the magnificent Chatsworth estate, held that in a state of nature, life is “nasty, brutish and short,” and that this state is one of war of all against all. I liked the realism of Hobbes, but thought that he goes too far. If life was a continuous universal struggle reminiscent of a vulgar understanding of the Darwinian jungle, then it seems that we would have all killed each other off by now.

And then there was Hume, who said that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” His outlook is between Locke and Hobbes, but tending toward the latter. Now this was on to something, and a perspective with real nuance: people are capable of reasons but it is not dominant in them. They are not perfectible, but nor are they completely deprived. Throw Montesquieu into the mix and divided government and the balancing of power, and you have something like a modern republican outlook, like that embraced by the Founders and Framers. Jefferson and the antifederalist perspective favored the individualism and right-orientation of Locke, and Hamilton and the Federalists favored the centralization, law and order, and the balancing of power of Hume and Montesquieu. The two views merged powerfully in the modern ideas of social democracy prescribed by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. This, I thought, was the best a nation our size could probably achieve.

As an American and a historian, I embraced the view that combined Lockean idealism and Humean realism. But over the past couple of decades, I have had a sneaking suspicion that the United States that I have known might have been just a fleeting moment, an apex, the moment of zero gravity at the top of a rollercoaster’s highest parabolic curve, and the we are probably on the way down. Throw in some modern sociobiology and Malthus and population theory, and Hobbes might turn out to be right after all.

O.J. Simpson is dead.  He died of prostate cancer in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024. 

When I was a kid and teenager, he was simply “The Juice,” a physical genius who played for the Bills and then the 49ers. In 1973, he carried the ball for 2,003 yards.  He appeared on the large and small screen in productions as different as Roots and The Naked Gun series.  He had the face and physique of a god, the urbane personality of a natural pitchman, good comic timing, and the courtroom luck of Lizzie Borden.  He is probably the man who killed his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994.   And yet so many people still misunderstand the overarching subtext of the “Trial of the Century.”

When Simpson was acquitted, some white Americans, who had apparently never heard of Klaus von Bulow, were incensed at seeing an obvious murderer walk.  The fact that the accused was a black man, and the victim a white woman, certainly had a lot to do with it.  Some African Americans were gleeful at the acquittal, as if Simpson somehow represented the multitudes of innocent black men who were lynched during the Jim Crow era for alleged crimes against whites. Ironically, both perspectives miss the point that the outcome of the case had more to do with wealth than race. 

If O.J. Simpson had been a poor white man or a poor black man relying on appointed counsel (or if he had served out the full sentence for his 2007 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping), he would have likely died in prison rather than in Las Vegas.