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Daniel Ellsberg

Book Review

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, 420 Pages, $30.00 (hardcover).

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud (or: Bigger than the Pentagon Papers)

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

Before many centuries more… science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

-Henry Adams

As it turns out, Stanley Kubrick got it mostly right.

“We came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film [Dr. Strangelove] both agreeing that what we had just seen was essentially  a documentary.  (We didn’t yet know—nor did SAC—that existing strategic operational plans, whether for first strike or retaliation, constituted a literal Doomsday Machine, as in the film.)”  Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, p. 65.

You should read this book, but not at bedtime.

As a nuclear strategist in the late 1950s and 1960s, this was the story Daniel Ellsberg wanted to tell, but that fact that “Vietnam is where the bombs are falling right now [1969]” forced his hand and diverted his attention elsewhere.  The overarching theme of his recent book—the overwhelming feeling one comes away with—is that it is a miracle or a fortuitous aberration of probability that the United States and Soviet Union did not blow up the world during the Cold War.  What is more is that the risk is still in place and that the threat of a nuclear war is greater than ever.  A moral of the book is that wholesale war against civilians characterized by strategic terror bombing and which reached its apex in the omnicidal possibilities of nuclear war is not only immoral and a dubious means of winning wars.  It is likely the grandest expression of the irrationality of war and of our aggressiveness as an animal.

In a sense, Ellsberg is a latter-day Siegfried Sassoon—the true believer-turned-apostate in the name of humanity, the patriot with a greater commitment to the truth, the man who saw insanity and folly and chose sense and sanity.  Of course his name will always be associated with the Pentagon Papers that exposed the true motives of the war in Vietnam—a rivulet font that contributed to the deluge that eventually forced President Nixon from office.  He is arguably the prototype of the modern whistle-blower.  The present book tells an even bigger story and one that its author has waited a half-century to tell.

Ellsberg came close to telling this story at the time, but the thousands of pages he copied on nuclear strategy were lost in an almost comical sequence of events including the intervention of a tropical storm, and which by his own admission, likely spared him decades of hard prison time.  He can now rely on his own memory corroborated by material declassified over the years without fear of breaking the law.  Although much of the material here was previously known by historians of the Cold War, it is still likely to shock when presented so starkly by a person so intimately connected with the topic.

Ellsberg begins by recalling that as a thirteen-year-old, he and his ninth grade friends immediately latched on to the inherently problematic, the unavoidable and insurmountable implications of the mere existence of super-weapons that could destroy entire cities in a single blow, and of nations armed with such technology.  These high school freshmen hit upon conclusions usually associated with physicists working on the Manhattan Project and epitomized with Robert Oppenheimer’s chilling paraphrase of the Bhagavad Gita: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Ellsberg’s social studies instructor, Bradley Patterson, was teaching the concept of “cultural lag,” or the idea that technology runs ahead of the cultural, social, political ability to handle it—i.e. “to control it wisely, ethically, prudently.”  In the fall of 1944, the teacher had his students consider the idea of nuclear weapons (articles on the possibility of a Uranium 235 bomb had already appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines) as a kind of ultimate or paragon example of this concept.  The students were given a week to write an essay on the implications of such a weapon.

“As I remember, everybody in the class had arrived at much the same judgment.  It seemed pretty obvious: the existence of such a bomb would           be bad for humanity.  Mankind could not handle such a destructive force.  It could not be safely controlled.  The power would be “abused”—that is,     used dangerously, with terrible consequences… A bomb like that was just too powerful.”

The first part of this book, “The Bomb and I”, deals with the ins and outs, the subtleties, caveats, conundrums, hypotheticals and counter-hypotheticals of the game theory logic imposed by nuclear weapons on strategists during the Cold War.  It is a personal history of the implementation of nuclear strategy, unsettling breaches in the system, near accidents and potential for global thermonuclear catastrophe in the Manichean world of U.S.-Soviet relations.  It is Ellsberg’s own story as a wiz kid, a consultant for the Air Force’s RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation—its in-house think tank.  As with the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s purpose is to present what he saw versus the official line.

Summarizing in his introduction, Ellsberg states eight realities of American nuclear strategy that set the theme of the book.  These are:

  1. “The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian targets” and that “the declared official rational” is to deter “an aggressive Russian first strike” is a “deliberate deception.”  According to Ellsberg, “[d]eterring a surprise nuclear attack has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our plans and preparations.”  Rather, “[t]he nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped around the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia.  This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of ‘first use’—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.”
  2. “The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force,” neither a surprise attack nor one “with an aim of striking ‘second’ under any circumstances, if that could ne avoided by preemption.”  In other worlds, [t]hough officially denied, preemptive ‘launch on warning’ (LOW)—either on tactical warning of an incoming attack or a strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending—has always been at the heart of our strategic alert.”
  3. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons have been used “dozens of times in ‘crises’ since their actual combat use over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This has been done “mostly in secret from the American people (though not from adversaries).  They have used them in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled. To get one’s way without pulling the trigger is a major purpose for owning a gun.”
  4. “Posing as it does the threat of nuclear attack by the United States to every state that might potentially be in conflict with us (like North Korea), this persistent rejection by the United States of a no-first-use commitment has always precluded an effective nonproliferation campaign. “
  5. “With respect to deliberate, authorized U.S. strategic attacks, the system has always been designed to be triggered by a far wider range of events than the public has ever imagined.  Moreover, the hand authorized to pull the trigger on nuclear forces has never been exclusively limited to the president, nor even his highest military officials.”  “Dead hand” systems of delegation of nuclear launch authority probably exist in the systems of all nuclear powers, most likely including North Korea.
  6. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, “events spiraled out of control, coming within a handbreadth of triggering our plans for general nuclear war”  (and we should bear in mind that this was a crisis presided over by two rational leaders looking for a way out of the standoff).
  7. “The strategic nuclear system is more prone to false alarms, accidents, and unauthorized launches than the public (and even most high officials) as ever been aware.”  Ellsberg notes that false alarms did in fact occur in 1970, 1980, 1983, and 1995.
  8. “Potentially catastrophic dangers such as these have been systematically concealed from the public.”  Not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff realized until 1983 that the nuclear winter that followed a general nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would probably kill every person on the planet.

He concludes the introduction by observing that “[i]n sum, most aspects of U.S. nuclear planning and force readiness that became known to me half a century ago still exist today as prone to catastrophe as ever but on a scale, as known to environmental scientists, looming vastly larger than was understood then” and more economically, “[t]ragically, I believe that nothing has fundamentally changed.”

It is hard to know where to begin with this book (the eight points above should give the reader a fair, generalized sample to chew on).  It is fascinating history, and, like a hero of fiction, the young Ellsberg, always seems to be in the center of things.  Following Harvard and a three-year hitch as a Marine Corps infantry officer, he is thrown in as a consultant with a brilliant generation of wiz kinds at RAND.  From there he recounts episodes including an eye-opening interview a squadron leader of nuclear-armed aircraft on the front lines of the Cold War, hearing a confession of alleged pre-appointed nuclear authority by an Air Force theater commander, and discussions with other high-level generals including the cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay himself.  He writes a speech intended for President Kennedy that meets with McNamara’s approval but which is given by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatrick instead.  He warns the haughty incoming National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy about the numerous lapses in the system, including the usurpation of the chain of command and undermining of civilian control.

With academic and military credentials, Ellsberg had a Selig-like knack for being at the right place at the right time.  He was well-qualified to be both a detective of chinks in the system and the deliverer of often shocking messages, but to no avail.  The lesson seems to be that even the planners of nuclear strategy were just as much captive to the self-direct logic of what was seen as a bipolar world as the unsuspecting rest of the nation, and just as helpless to do anything about it.  Although nuclear war is averted by human agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the larger game continues and seems mostly immune from the efforts of people who see the madness.

Although the book is well structured—and it is better to read it for oneself rather than have a reviewer recount it chapter by chapter—one comes away with a myriad of troubling facts and imagery, of things generally unknown at the time (and still unknown by most Americans): drummed-up fictions like the missile gap and bogus theatrical props like the nuclear “football”.  One is initially shocked and then overwhelmed and eventually numbed by a sequence of revelations like the inevitability of pre-approved delegation of nuclear launch authority, the daily breakdown of communications between Washington and bases in the Pacific, how commanders and even pilots circumvented launch codes, how the Chiefs of Staff got around civilian control authority, and how civilian authorities were kept in the dark about nuclear war plans.

One is taken aback at the lack of clarity in the minds of the men who would actually be flying nuclear-armed aircraft and under what circumstances might they launch an unauthorized attack (e.g. if the last plane in a squadron crashed on takeoff, thus detonating a thermonuclear weapon on its own base, would the pilot of an aircraft that had already taken off assume that the base had been attacked by the Soviets or Chinese and proceed with an attack in what was intended only to be a drill?).  It is all a stark reminder of how closely we came to blowing up everything and how a Guns of August sequence of events with greater-than Missiles of October technology is still a very real possibility (his retelling of the now well-known story of how close a Soviet submarine under depth charge attack from a U.S. ship on the blockade line came to launching a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis is particularly harrowing).

Having grown up in a military family during the Cold War, I learned of the nuclear standoff of super powers at the tender age of eight or nine.  I was of a generation, the more sensitive members of whom could imagine the contrails of ICBMs imposed on clear nighttime skies.  While I was working on my doctorate in history, I had read John Lewis Gaddis’s masterful Strategies of Containment, and had come away thinking that both sides had unnecessarily ratcheted-up tensions (first with Nitze’s NSC-68 and later with the “New Look” of the Eisenhower years), that the Cold War was an unnecessarily dangerous and “costly political rivalry.”1  I did not know that, just in surviving the period, the world had in fact won a lengthy sequence of lotteries.

On the one hand, American triumphalists and boosters of their nation’s “victory” in the Cold War (now completely squandered) point to the zero-sum, game theory logic of deterrence, of Mutual Assured Destruction, and how it apparently worked.  The idea, seemingly oxymoronic, is generally attributed to  Bernard Brodie and the view that in order to prevent nuclear war, a nation must “be prepared to resort to atomic war” and to make it too terrible to be a viable option.2  Making nuclear war mutually suicidal seems to have accomplished this to date.  But on the other hand, being in a Mexican standoff with the most destructive weapons ever conceived is hardly an admirable position in which to find oneself, and it is a state of affairs that only has to fail once.  Add to this the fact that human beings are naturally aggressive animals, that unhinged leaders come to power from time-to-time, the role of accidents in history, hair-trigger strategies of first strike, and an ever-increasing nuclear club, and the rational reader of Ellsberg’s book can be excused for wanting to get off of the planet.3

Part II. History of Bombing Civilians

The second part of the book, “The Road to Doomsday” is a history of strategic bombing as the natural predecessor to nuclear war.  This part is obviously less personal but gives an impressive outline about how we got to where we are in terms of not batting an eye at accepting civilian deaths as “collateral damage” and seeing non-combatants as legitimate targets in war.  In some respects, this topic is a later chapter, a continuation of the more general history of the growth of modern total warfare since Napoleon and certainly since the American Civil War.  Even so, it is remarkable to compare the unconcealed disgust of commentators like Theodore Roosevelt at the intentional targeting of a (mostly) civilian liner like the Lusitania in 1915, with the causal acceptance of bombing of entire cities in the Second World War by American political leaders and their constituents.

Indeed, as a child in the 1970s reading of the air campaigns of the Second World War, there was no greater symbol of heroism for me than the gorgeous lines and the all-business armament configuration of the B-17 Flying Fortress (the far more effective and severely aerodynamic B-29 never achieved the same appeal), and the brave men who flew them.  To this day, the sight of a B-17 arouses the child in me, although I am certain that German who were children in 1943 or 1944 in Hamburg, Munich, or Dresden, do not share my affection for this plane.

As a practical matter, it is not clear that wholesale strategic bombing is an effective basis for strategy.  Theorists and planners between the wars, like Giulio Douhet, believed that if total war could be brought on the cities and heartlands of an enemy nation, wars could be brought to a quick and decisive conclusion.

As regards Germany, this does not appear to have been the case as aircraft and tank production continued to increase until the final month or two of the war.  In fact, strategic bombing may have only been successful in Europe against oil production and transportation.  In Japan bombing had turned most of the major cities to ashes, and yet American war planners still feared such fierce resistance by the civilian population that they felt justified in dropping two atomic bombs.  Even here it is not clear whether or not the bombs were the decisive factor in ending the war in the Pacific or whether it was the simultaneous intervention of the USSR in that theater, or both.4  It would seem that Japan was mostly defeated on the great island-dotted battlefield of the South Pacific.

Douhet’s dream of aerial war breaking the will of an enemy people does not have a record of the decisiveness that he sought.  One of the most severe bombings campaigns in history did not break the will North Vietnamese, nor did a similarly impressive campaign over North Korea force a surrender.  Bombing does change people, and the behavior of the North Koreans since 1953 and the genocide in Cambodia during the 1970s are likely attributable in large measure to the strategic bombing campaigns launched against them.

In 1946, George Kennan suggested that the world revert back to the limited Jominian wars5—the “cabinet wars” of the eighteenth-century that followed in the wake of the total wars of seventeenth-century Europe.  His idea was that the purpose of war should be to minimize and not maximize casualties, that “[v]iolence… could not be an objective.”6  Nuclear weapons and the logic of Bernard Brodie to make war too horrible to be tolerated in fact makes it obsolete as a practical matter, and the possibility of a war being launched by accident or miscalculation made it additionally intolerable.  And yet as the Flexible Response to Mutual Assured Destruction has demonstrated time and time again in the many regional wars since the early 1960s, limited military options to keep war alive only make it more likely, if less suicidal.

It would seem that at best humans may be forever damned to a condition in which the possibility of complete destruction by total Clausewitzian war with nuclear weapons and subsequent fallout and nuclear winter, or else to embrace an updated version of Flexible Response—limited war that would “keep the game (and the human race) alive” but which makes conflict so easy that it become all but inevitable.7  The result of this return to limited war seems to be a never-ending, mostly unnecessary series of the “semi-war” that James Forrestal, and more recently, Andrew Bacevich, warned of.8

It seems that the latter is already well upon us and will be until it becomes financially unsustainable.  As with total warfare, limited war has also reached new technical heights with drone technology, allowing for the campaigns of remote video game-like strikes of a character arguably intermediate between war and assassination, while the great majority of our people are as oblivious to it as they were to the fact that they were nearly incinerated on a number of occasions during the Cold war and might still be.  In other words, we now have the worst of both worlds: an ongoing state of never-ending limited wars while the nuclear omnipresence remains and could conceivably be triggered by a limited war, a misunderstanding, accident, or deteriorating relations with our old Cold War foes9 .

Conclusion

Regimes come and go, but The Bomb remains.  The club of nuclear states continues to grow (South Africa being the only nation to have relinquished its nuclear weapons), and now includes nations who dislike and distrust each other perhaps even more than the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.  If cautious, rational, and realistic leaders like John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came within a wild card of blowing up the world in October 1962, what are the odds of intentional or accidental nuclear launches in an age with more fingers on more buttons, the virtually unlimited potential of computer hacking, and leaders of widely varying degrees of stability?

It is an open question of whether an accidental or intentional nuclear war is a greater threat to the world than global climate change and the intimately tied issues of human overpopulation and loss of habitat/biodiversity.  The latter is already unfolding and potentially catastrophic climatological changes are already literally in the air and locked-in place.  How fast and how severe these changes will manifest is the great unknowable.  Possibilities between a gradual societal collapse due to environmental catastrophe and nuclear war followed by a nuclear war gives a potential full range of apocalypse from T,S, Eliot’s “bang” to “a whimper,” and Robert Frost’s “fire” to “ice”.10

Regardless, and as with Vietnam in the 1960s, climate change is actually happening while nuclear war remain only a possibility contingent on human folly, stupidity, and irrationality.  As the smartest man who ever lived observed “[t]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,” or in more picturesque terms “I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but Would War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”11

Technology may be lost, at least for a time, but an idea cannot be intentionally destroyed or un-conceived.  A weapon may not be un-invented.  If you live long enough, you will see rival nations and even existential enemies become close allies (a 1970s wisecrack observed that if the U.S. had lost WWII, we would now all be driving German and Japanese cars).  It is clear that The Bomb is a truer and more permanent enemy than any temporal regime.  No conflict is worth destroying the planet over.  Heavy-handed nuclear strategies in a time of declining U.S. economic and military power and an increasing number of nations with nuclear weapons and the rise of China as Eurasian hegemon will likely make the future even more dangerous than the past.  Another negative effect resulting from the end of the Cold War is a sense of complacency that the threat of nuclear war is over.12  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is a singular coincidence that the great physicist, Hugh Everett III was a contemporary of Ellesberg’s and was also a nuclear planner (although he did not work for RAND and is not mentioned in the book).  Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests the possibility of many parallel universes, each one splitting off as the result probabilistic events.  If his model is correct, one can only wonder how many parallel tracks include worlds that were destroyed by nuclear war.  To date this one has been lucky, but my experience in life has been that luck does not hold out in human events, not over the long run.  Cue Vera Lynn?

In my opinion, this is a book that Americans should read, including young people when they are able to handle the gravity of the subject.  Ellsberg writes in a strong, unpretentious style, but his book is best read closely and carefully from to beginning to end.  It does not skim well.

One should consider reading this book in conjunction with Andrew Bacevich’s history of the Cold War and the rise of the national security deep state, Washington Rules, Stephen F. Cohen’s Soviet Fates, and John Lewis Gaddis’s more conventional history of Cold War strategy, Strategies of Containment. 

Notes

  1. Kennan, “Republicans won the Cold War?”, At a Century’s Ending; Reflections, 1982-1995, New York: W.W. Norton & Company 186, 1996.
  2. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, an American Life, 233-234, 614. See also Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon, Atomic Power and World Order, 1946, as well as his later Strategy in the Missile Age, Princeton University Press, 1959.
  3. See Edward O. Wilson, “Aggression,” On Human Nature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 99-120, 1978.
  4. As regards the origins of modern total warfare, see Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler’s On the Road to Total War, and David Bell’s The First Total War.  As with the Japanese 80 years later, it has been argued that many Southerners would have willingly continued to fight even after the “hard war” campaigns of Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman that prefigure the total wars of the twentieth-century.  See generally Jay Wink, April 1865, the Month that Saved America, New York: HarperCollins, Inc., 2001.
  5. Gaddis, George F. Kennan. 234-235.
  6. Gaddis, George F. Kennan,235.
  7. In a sense, nuclear war—although obviously a form of total warfare—is actually antithetical to Clausewitz.  War is policy “by other means” in Clausewitz’s formulation, but the complete mutual destruction of nuclear war would preclude the achievement of all policy goals.  See John Keegan, A History of Warfare, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 381.
  8. Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 27-28, 57-58, 2010.
  9. On the reviving of Cold War tensions with Russia, see Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: from Stalinism to the New Cold War, New York: Columbia Press, 2009, 2011.  On the rise of China and the decline of the United States, see Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Book, 2017.
  10. T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men, V,” Collected Poems 1909-1962, 92.  Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice,: The Poems of Robert Frost, 232.
  11. Ralph E. Lapp, “The Einstein Letter that Started it All,” The New  York Times Magazine, August 2, 54, 1984.
  12. Such major players of the Cold War as George Kennan, and Robert McNamara became supporters of the antinuclear movement during the 1980s.  The end of the Cold War took much of the wind out of the sails of this effort.  See generally, George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion, New York, Random House, 1983.  See also Robert S. McNamara, “The Nuclear Risks of the 1960s and their Lesson for the Twenty-first Century” In Retrospect, New York: Random House, 337-346, 1995.

New Article: The Open Hand: Moderate Realism and the Rule of Law

My new article “The Open Hand: Moderate Realism and the Rule of Law” just came out in the Howard Law Journal (Vol. 61 Issue 2).  The hard copy is out, but I am not sure it is available online yet.

The overarching thesis is that if other nations wish to emulate the American legal and judicial systems, the United States should help them, but that we should not aggressively proselytize or foist our system on others.  I also discuss the fact that although rule of law initiatives are seen by some to be idealistic ventures, they are often neoliberal policies used to leverage economic or strategic advantage in the developing world.

Mike Duggan

Alfred W. McCoy

Book Review

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century, the Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, 359 pages. $18.00 (quality paper)

Successful imperialism wins wealth. Yet, historically, successful empires such as Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, have not remained rich.  Indeed, it seems to be the fate of empires to become too poor to sustain the very cost of empires.  The longer an empire holds together, the poorer and more economically backward it tends to  become.1  

 -Jane Jacobs

The curtain is now falling on the American Century.

-Andrew J. Bacevich

All empires come to an end.

-Napoleon

The Tides of Empire

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

Not every historian can make a career by speaking inconvenient truths to power, but Alfred W. McCoy has done it for nearly five decades.  McCoy, the J.R.W. Short Professor in History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, made his reputation as a young scholar by shining light on the politics and policy of heroin in Southeast Asia during the late 1960s and early ‘70s.  With a strong claim to the title of American Dean of Southeast Asian History, his latest book looks at the decline of the American Empire and the rise of China.2

The book is a warning that traces the rise of the United States from an emerging world power, to a superpower following WWII (the term “American Century” was coined by Henry Luce in 1941) until the end of the Cold War, to its current role as the “sole remaining superpower,” the hitherto unchallenged world economic and military hegemon.  As such, the American Empire is the liberal, English-speaking heir to the British Empire that dominated the nineteenth-century.

If McCoy is correct, the days of United States military and economic hegemony are numbered and likely to end sometime between 2020 and 2040—and the question is whether its decline will be controlled and managed, or if the denial of or resistance to changing geopolitical realities will lead to an uncontrolled collapse; will the American empire end with a sensible post-globalist grand strategy of consolidation, or will it end with a bang or fizzle?  Denial and rationalization are the twin pillars of human psychology, and the willful or unconscious ignoring of hard facts that are now coming into sharp focus could lead to a catastrophic collapse or else a dismal but more gradual decline and end to the American Century a few years shy of an even hundred.

Do the facts support McCoy’s premise?  With a rapidly mounting national debt and a shrinking tax base, it is increasingly likely that by 2030, the United States will experience economic crisis and paralysis.  It is becoming more and more apparent that with a $22 trillion debt, a collapse is all but inevitable as the U.S. government begins to look more and more like a giant scheme that exhales more than it inhales and that it will never be able to pay off its debt.  A Cold War-size military to police the world—military predominance generally—and the de facto imperialism of neoliberal globalization will soon become as unsustainable as they are already undesirable.  If current trends continue, the Chinese will likely, sometime during the same period, be in a position to supplant the Dollar with the Yuan as the basis for the world reserve currency.

Unchecked power brings with it the potential for corruption, hubris, and an unselfcritical sense of entitlement in terms of intervening in the domestic affairs of other nations.  The role of the world’s policeman in furtherance of an activist neoliberal worldview by neoconservative means and the misleading designation of humanitarian interventions, have sullied rather than strengthen the reputation of the United States as a force for good in the world, a reputation increasingly seen by others as honored in the breach.

Similarly, an entire generation of Americans has grown up to see no anomaly, no abnormally in their nation bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, killing tens and even hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Several generations have witnessed their nation increasingly use undeclared wars as a basis for policy.  The unintended consequence of this is an inversion of Clauzwitz’s “war is an extension of policy” to a situation where policy has become a justification for military budgets and a seemingly limitless gravy train for the burgeoning defense industries.  Budgets may inadvertently become a driver of policy.  Undeclared foreign wars and a never-ending state of semi-war can be used, not only to justify new weapons systems, but some commentators have suggested that they also provide convenient venues to test them under battlefield conditions.3  As the demise of the Soviet Union well illustrates, economies typified by little growth and which rely on a manufacturing sector based on military production are both artificial and symptomatic of decline.

MacKinder’s “World Island” and the Rise of China

In the Shadows of the American Century makes a compelling case that China is poised to become the dominant Eurasian hegemon.  The argument goes like this: China has emerged beyond the parameters of a rising regional power and is embarking on a massive infrastructure program that will link it throughout Eurasia.4  This, combined with technological advances, improved manufactured goods, and a rapidly expanding military, will secure its predominance on the world’s largest continent in the near future.  McCoy believes that China’s strategy is analogous to the 1904 “World Island” model of Halford MacKinder asserting that the power that controls Eurasia will effectively control the world.5  Part and parcel with this view is the observation that the United States is likely entering a state of permanent and irreversible decline not unlike that of the British Empire a century before and perhaps worse.

The dominant historical/geopolitical outlook of MacKinder’s time was navalism and included such theorists as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett, and imperialist acolytes like John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Elihu Root.  MacKinder believed that it was possible to manage the World Island through naval power along the Eurasian littoral regions, the maritime periphery.  Indeed, the Royal Navy maintained Britain’s massive maritime empire and exerted influence over portions of the World Island with small constabularies and friendly local regimes.  On this point, McCoy understands the mechanics of empire as well as any American historian.

But MacKinder was not a navalist.  He believed in control of landmass over sea lanes and that the heartland of Eurasia was “nothing less than the Archimedean fulcrum for world power. ‘Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island… Who rules the World Island rules the world.’”  McCoy continues,

“Beyond the vast mass of that island which made up nearly 60 percent of the Earth’s landmass, lay a less consequential hemisphere covered with broad ocean and a few ‘smaller islands’.  He meant, of course, Australia, Greenland, and the Americas.” [McCoy, p. 29]

This is a bold geopolitical vision or assertion, but how does it apply to the modern world?  In the tradition of the British Empire, the United States has maintained its ability to project power through an elaborate system of far flung bases in various regions designated as strategic commands.  The aircraft carrier is the new capital ship, and the carrier group is the regional squadron.  But “[w]hile the U.S. military was mired in the Middle East, Beijing began to unify that vast ‘middle space of Eurasia and preparing to neutralize America’s ‘offshore bases.’”  McCoy believes that China’s rising land-based MacKinderism will likely trump American navalism.

But the power dynamics do not stop there, and ultimately military power rests on sustainable economic strength. China’s economic rise since 1989, and especially in the twenty-first century, has been spectacular and perhaps unprecedented.  As McCoy observes,

“From 1820 to 1870, Britain increased its share of global gross domestic product by 1% per decade; the United States raised its share by 2% during its half-century ascent, 1900 to 1950; at a parallel pace, Japan’s grew about 1.5% during its postwar resurgence, from 1950 to 1980. China, however, raised its slice of the world pie by an extraordinary 5% from 2000 to 2010 and is on course to do so again in the decade ending in 2020, with Indian not far behind.  Even if China’s growth slows, by he 2020s, U.S. economic leadership is expected to be decisively ‘overtaken by China.'” [McCoy, p. 193]

One possible outcome of this trend is the proffering and perhaps supplanting of a democratic—if increasingly plutocratic-republican—form of capitalism embodied by the United States by an authoritarian state-based capitalism as an emerging alternative.  In a more value-neutral sense, this would a local, land-based empire replacing a declining and remote maritime empire.

China’s next (i.e. current) phase of economic development, a great infrastructure project designed to link greater Eurasia though massive capital projects will dwarf the United States Interstate Highway system.  This and declining economic prospects for the U.S. will likely hasten the transfer in global standing and economic status.  Even so, how realistic is the World Island as a sustainable economic model?

It is notable that nobody—not even the Mongols, who briefly dominated the massive territory from the Sea of Japan to Hungary and Poland—ever completely controlled the entire Eurasian landmass (and they, having little if any culture, were quickly assimilated in the areas they conquered, something that should give all military imperialists pause).  Similarly, from the west, neither the adventures of Napoleon or Hitler made it beyond Moscow, their armies reduced to inglorious defeat and retreat, their regimes doomed.  Of course China would not attempt to dominate Eurasia by force of arms, but rather through the soft power of economics and massive capital projects that would integrate land transportation throughout Eurasia.

On this point, regardless of whether the application of power is soft or hard, the dictum of British navalist, Julian Corbett, that it is impossible to conquer the ocean would seem to apply in modified form to Eurasia.  This is not because its affinity to the unique characteristics of water as territory, but rather in the geographical sense that Eurasia/Africa is the only physical feature on the surface of the Earth that compares with the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in terms of pure scale.  Indeed invaders of the past sometimes compared the seemingly endless undulating steppes and shallow valleys of Russia to the open expanses of the rolling sea.

In addition to the massive, ocean-like expanses of the Eurasian continent, there are also cultural-historical facts that would work against such a project. It seems unlikely that a greater Eurasian prosperity sphere including China, Iran, perhaps Pakistan, perhaps India, and Russia, would hold together for any period of time (although the baffling renewal of U.S. tensions with Russia is likely to drive them closer to China for a while thus extending the prospects for a united Eurasia longer than it might have been otherwise).

Although economic prosperity can make up for a multitude of historical grievances and perhaps even smooth-over national pride and interest-based tensions for short periods, over the long term this would be an economic sphere in which the constituent parts would act like mutually-repelling magnets.  By way of another metaphor, trying to dominate Eurasia is like trying to stabilize an inverted pyramid: it is inherently unstable as any number of other regional power jostle for influence and in doing so throw it off balance.

But even if such a top-down plan built on a scale necessary to integrate all or most of Eurasia is bound to fail over the long run, it is likely to succeed long enough to displace U.S. primacy in the world along with its currency, especially if the United States foolishly—insanely—chooses to actively challenge or confront China as the result of a misconceived “pivot to the Pacific” policy.  Given that all military issues are ultimately economic issues, the United States could conceivably collapse virtually overnight, like the USSR during the late 1980s-early 1990s.  Otherwise, it might follow a path of more protracted decline into a second or third-tier status like Britain during the last century, or Spain a couple of centuries before that.

Although the rise of China as characterized by McCoy is alarming, he does not think it likely that the Chinese will be able to fully replace or come to occupy the role United States as global hegemon. He rightly notes that China has less to offer the world than the liberal West:

“Every sustainable modern empire has had some source of universal appeal, Britain had free markets and fair play, and the United States democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.  Searching for successors, both China and Russia have inward-looking, self-referential cultures, recondite non-Roman scripts, nondemocratic political structures, and underdeveloped legal systems that will deny them key instruments for global domination.”  [pp. 232-233]

Indeed, China has little in terms of transplantable cultural advantages to offer other nations relative to those of the British and American empires that preceded it.  The spoken and written languages of the Chinese are difficult and difficult to export and present an obstacle; they seem unlikely to become global languages of business or diplomacy.  Overall, China’s advantages/disadvantages seem fairly evenly split, and this is to say nothing about China’s considerable internal problems.

What China lacks in terms of cultural and political offerings it makes up in regard to economic realism. China has a lighter touch than either the United States or British in regard to the technical appeal of infrastructure, funds, and political non-interference.  On this score, the Chinese want to do business and tend to avoid the meddlesome judgment and moralizing of the liberal West.

China also has a strong geographical advantage.  The “One Road, One Belt” or “New Silk Road” is a series infrastructure projects, overland routes amounting to the internal lines of an economic struggle, and will likely work better than the far-flung empires of the Americans and British that required lengthy supply lines over the oceans of the world.  Even given the ocean-like distances of the Eurasian continent, it would be more effective to try to manage a landmass over land routes than along its maritime periphery—people live on land, and as a military matter, the air and maritime domains—even when they are decisive—are necessarily adjunct.  Geography may or may not be destiny, but even with strong geographical advantages the Chinese will likely experience trouble.

McCoy’s Scenarios

In my experience, many, perhaps most historians despise counterfactuals and the game of “what if?”  That said, a primary purpose of history is to inform policy decisions, and these necessarily depend on hypothetical scenarios analyzed with knowledge of the past.  McCoy concludes his book with his “Five Scenarios for the End of the American Century”—i.e. five possible courses United States-Chinese relations might take, none of which play out happily for the United States.

Here his fluency in the relative strengths and shifting advantages shines and he writes with the powerful insight and analysis of a master historian (he observes that the fastest, most powerful computers in the world are now Chinese and are made of Chinese components, something that should be keeping policymakers in the West up at night).  Although counterfactual historical fiction raises my blood pressure as much as it does for most histroians, this intelligent and insightful use of possible historical tracks is constructive and very useful to show how events might devolve.  At the very least, they powerfully underscore the inadequacies of current American policies.

Given the fundamental unpredictability of geopolitics, it would not be surprising if China failed to live up to McCoy’s predictions over the next 10-20 years.  The combination of lopsided economies and an increasing drag from climate change combined and potentially devastating human migrations could easily upend the best laid plans and optimistic forecasts (from the Chinese perspective) of even the most sensitive observers.

Of course the backdrop to this great drama is an even greater one, the unfolding environmental crises. Even if China’s plans have the potential to succeed and to sustain themselves for a few decades, such a massive infrastructure project would likely be coming to fruition conterminously with increasingly severe and fearful feedback of the emerging global environmental crises.  It is all beginning to read like a great Shakespearean tragedy in which the machinations of human intrigue are about to be permanently upset by a far greater external tragedy.  It is like watching a powerful play in a theater that is on fire.

A Proposed Solution: The “Other Island”

When reading McCoy’s book, I tried to devise a realistic U.S. policy in response to the scenario(s) he was depicting.  On page 235, at the end of one of his scenarios, he writes “While [United States] global power would diminish, Washington would still have considerable influence as a regional hegemon for North America and an arbiter of the residual international order.”

Immediately before this however, McCoy decries the possibility of the world order reverting to a new Westphalian paradigm with regional hegemons, spheres of influence, a range of lesser sovereign states, and the balancing of power (I would argue that the original Westphalia paradigm is still mostly intact and that its lingering death has been greatly exaggerated by advocates of neoliberal globalization).  While this would not be an optimal state of affairs, it would seem to be preferable to global empires and super-powerful world hegemons, and the increased possibility of war between great nations.  We must accept the fact that as long as there are powerful nations, there will be spheres of influence, and that if any country would benefit from gracefully embracing the role of a regional world power, it is the United States.6

In December 2015, I presented a paper at a conference on land force strategy at the Army War College in Carlisle outlining an American regional policy for the Near East that was situated within a grand strategy calling for a more limited form of internationalism.  This is based on the idea that the United States should be involved in the world only so far as necessary with a well-defined sphere of interest and demonstrable vital interests as a sustainable status as a world and regional power.  Although this idea was geared toward addressing the eschatology that underlies terrorism, it dovetails seamlessly with McCoy’s characterization of a Chinese-dominated World Island of Eurasia.

What then is the best course of action for the United States to follow in an age of an ascending China?  The problem with the Great Game is the game itself: it is a rotten, egotistical, and ultimately self-destructive game, and the United States should frankly and willingly relinquish its status of dominance—leave the Great Game insofar as possible—as a matter of mature and considered policy.  Quite simply, the role of the superpower is fundamentally undesirable.  It begs rational understanding why military, foreign, or economic policymakers would want to sustain it, given its costly liabilities and diminishing returns.  A nation’s military should reflect its size and resources, rather than pride, ambition, and the realities of the past.

The desirability of consolidation into a more manageable status of a regional world power is quite simple and based on singular, self-evident fact: the United States occupies the best real estate on the planet; it is large enough to be self-sustaining and has relatively unproblematic neighbors.  Defending North America would be like defending an actual island, rather than attempting to diminish China’s power by attempting to manage the littoral and maritime regions of the World Island in a provocative posture of forward presence in somebody else’s neighborhood.

Rather than continue to embrace the problematic role of the world’s military and naval hegemon, the United States should adopt an outlook where it could operate more effectively as a robust regional world power with capable land, air, and sea forces to match.  Such a status would allow the U.S. to protect its vital interests and meet its treaty obligations while still acting as a world leader in international coalitions to preserve peace and order and to restore the status quo in instances where the territorial sovereignty of a nation has been violated by another.  Such a role would also be an effective means for assuring the international cooperation necessary to address the unfolding world environmental crises.  As an example of benevolence in the world, when the United States helps itself, it helps the world, and if it cannot lead by example, it has no basis for telling others how to live or act.

One of the intrinsic problems with attempts to “control” Eurasia other than its sheer size, is the fact that there a numerous old and proud nations—civilizations in addition to China, that are constantly jostling for local and regional dominance.  The United States does not have to trouble itself with this dangerous and distracting jockeying for power and control.  A return to the Westphalian paradigm may not be a perfect solution, but it is better than what we have and likely to be far more desirable than anything that would follow an all-out American collapse.

The strategy would be as follows: the United States would unofficially cede local influence of Asia to China while continuing to trade and do business with East Asia—frankly there is little other choice in the matter and it in no way furthers American interests to aggressively oppose China, further bankrupting ourselves and risking catastrophic war in the process.  As George Kennan and others have observed, no single regime will ever control the entire world, and the “World Island” geopolitical model—the control of Eurasia by a single power—is only slightly more modest than grandiose schemes of actual world domination.  My reading of McKinder’s World Island is that it is likely a model for exerting influence over much of the globe de facto, and not actually dictating the local or proximate administration for all parts of the entire planet.  It would seem that the planet is big enough for more than one island, even an archipelago.

As for the Far East and Eastern Pacific, the U.S. should play the situation by ear and continue to do business rather than risk conflict as the result of its own insecurity and subsequent overreaction, and we must become acclimated to certain stark realities: the U.S. will no longer be the dominant power in the South China Sea—a quick glance to its proximity relative to China on a map or a globe instantly forces the question: by what geographical logic should the U.S. be dominant here any more than the Chinese should control the Gulf of Mexico?  If you will excuse the mixed metaphor, it is unlikely that China will threaten the Golden Geese that are the Asian Tigers, or commerce related to it traversing international waters.  They will likely not risk invading Taiwan, given the likely cost versus benefits of not invading.  Even with all of the wealth of the Orient, there is nothing so valuable there that would justify a conflict between the United States and China that would likely to end with nuclear weapons.

Within our own sphere we would likely be the regional hegemon, unless unforeseen or underestimated domestic realities resulted in the breakup of the United States into smaller regions.  If the U.S. does hold together, it would serve our interests to act in a “good neighbor” way rather than return to the policies of regional imperialism of the past.  Under this plan the United States would chart a middle course between imperial overreach and “Fortress America” autarchy and isolation.  It would allow the U.S. to pursue vital interests in its own sphere and would not relinquish vital relations with Western Europe and Australia.

In an age where conventional, cyber, and nuclear weapons can deter any conventional attack on the American homeland by another great power, our goal should no longer be predominance, but rather the sustenance and protection of an impressive mean standard of living in a multi-polar world—the pursuit of the optimal rather than the maximal. If the U.S. consolidates, preserves its strength through consolidation, it can take care of an increasing host of domestic and economic problems in an increasingly chaotic world.

 

Conclusion

Alfred McCoy may be a controversial figure in some circles, but he need not be.  Those in the halls of power may or may not like McCoy or his works for whatever reason.  He upsets in a way that all frank honesty is likely to upset.  But this is a courageous man who has “walked the walk” for no apparent reason other than to tell the truth, often unpleasant truths, and the facing of unpleasant truths is a cornerstone of realism and necessary to sustain the health of a liberal republic.  He is a historian of the front rank, and his book is both a serious academic work and readable for a general audience.  There are things in this book with which I do not agree (I do not see President Obama as a “Grandmaster of the Great Game” and am skeptical about the idea that the TPP was a masterstroke designed primarily to poach potential regional customers away from the expanding Chinese economic sphere), but even these interpretations made me think, and if history shows McCoy to be correct, I will gladly concede the points.  I rate this book very highly and believe it is one that should be read by every American with an interest foreign affairs or economic, military/naval, policy, current events, and history.  It is a book that should be read by all people who care about the future of this country.

Finally, for those who are interested, I would also recommend that this book be read back-to-back or simultaneously with Stephen Cohen’s 2008/2012 masterwork on the end of the Cold War and the dangerous and unnecessary rekindling of tensions with Russia, Soviet Choices and Lost Alternatives.  This is because, as Alfred McCoy masterfully demonstrates, China is likely a far greater potential threat than Putin’s Russia.

Notes

  1. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, New York: Random House, p. 182, 1984.
  2. See generally Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Empire, Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2017.
  3. Regarding the term “semi-war”—originally coined by James Forrestal—see Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules, New York, Henry Hold and Company, pp. 27-28, 57-58. See also Bachevich’s article “Ending Endless War, A Pragmatic Military Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016, pp. 36-44.
  4. See, for example Gal Luft, “China’s Infrastructure Play”, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016, pp. 68-75. See also Pepe Escobar, “The New Silk Road will go through Syria”, Asia Times, July 13, 2017.
  5. See generally in McCoy. MacKinder is often regarded as not only the father of modern geopolitics, but as the land power analog to turn-of-the-twentieth-century theorists of naval power like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett or theorists of strategic airpower and nuclear weapons like Guilio Douhet and (perhaps) Bernard Brodie, respectively.
  6. Andrew Bacevich appears to advocate a similar view of regional power status for the Untied States. See America’s War for the Greater Middle East, New York: Random House, 2016, 367.                                                                                                                                                                    Although there may be no ideal economic/geopolitical world order, Jane Jacobs has suggested that one possibility would be an economic order based on small nations in turn based on naturalistic production regions. It is difficult to argue with such a perspective, but it is even more dfficult to imagine how such an order might be put in place. See generally Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations..

George F. Kennan

By Michael F. Duggan

On March 17, thirteen years ago, George Kennan, died at the age of 101.  One of the original Wise Men of the immediate postwar period, he devised the grand strategy of Containment that (along with numerous organic factors inside the Soviet Empire) led to the end of the Cold War and eventually the demise of the USSR.  Over time he had come to see the struggle as stupid, wasteful, and excessively dangerous, and loathed the fact that his strategy was hijacked by a succession of lesser men in both Democratic and Republican administrations who unnecessarily ratcheted-up tensions with the Soviets.

Kennan for the most part designed and administered the European Recovery Program—in its details and implementation, the Marshall Plan was more Kennan’s than Marshall’s—and was an influential voice on the rebuilding of Japan, the most successful foreign policy initiatives in U.S. history.  He supported the UN “police action” to restore the prewar border in Korea, but opposed MacArthur’s provocative drive north of the 38th parallel that brought the Chinese into the fight late in 1950.  At the Fullbright Hearings in 1966, he eloquently opposed continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam.  He opposed the deployment of American forces to Somalia in 1992, and in his last interview in 2002, spoke out against the planned invasion of Iraq.

In the 1980s he came to see nuclear weapons as the real enemy rather than any temporal human regime.  In 1996-97 he publicly opposed President Clinton’s support of the expansion of NATO further east.  This enlargement of the pact would eventually take it deep into the Russian sphere of influence (“The deep desire of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian borders is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period” and “a blunder of potentially catastrophic proportions”).  This continuing policy has dangerously renewed tensions with the Russians and will likely push them closer to the Chinese.

In foreign affairs, he was right almost all of the time, and in the few instances when was wrong, his ideas were still interesting, and, more often than not, were simply ahead of their time (e.g. he spoke in favor of German reunification in 1948, which was too early).  He came to believe that one of his biggest mistakes was his early support in helping to bring about the CIA.  He also had social views that reflected a dark side of his time and class.

Kennan wrote more than 20 books in some of the most elegant prose of recent American non-fiction, won two Pulitzer Prizes in history and a Bancroft Prize.  The first president Bush—who presided over the last administration to embrace foreign policy realism—awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  More than anything, Ambassador Kennan embodies reason, intimate historical understanding, expert diplomacy, and civility in the pursuit of interest-based policy.  As a friend of mine once noted, Kennan reminds us that it is a person’s insights rather than ideology that counts and which makes him or her interesting or not.  He is the incarnation of the good government official.  Although some of his private views were insufferable and tarnish his legacy and are rightly criticized, I wish we had people with his professional qualities in government today.

Welcome to Realism and Policy

This is the first posting on what will be an online journal of essays and commentary.  Over the coming weeks and months, I will be adding articles, papers, and essays under the various above headings and cleaning up the articles already uploaded.   As of now there are only a handful of short articles and other pieces, but these are fairly representative samples and will give a good idea of the intended outlook offered here.

My approach to matters of policy is one of applied history—the critical application of historical knowledge and understanding to today’s questions, issues, problems and events.

Mike Duggan