The Committee of Public Safety

I often read posts and articles saying that America needs a new strategy. These posts and articles seem to imply some sort of rational design process that will take all of the fissiparous threads of America’s innumerable affairs and pound them into a miracle of coherence, unified by one strategy to rule them all. This is the first assumption that needs to be thrown out the door. Clausewitz revealed unto his people that the first and great Fact of War is: war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. Svechin goes further: war is a direct reflection of the nature of the politics that wages it.

This means that strategy, the child of politics, the tool of politics, will reflect the nature of the politics creating it. Politics, as Bismarck demonstrated, is like making sausage. Politics stuffs many bits and pieces into the products it produces, many of which it is better not to enumerate in polite company. Politics is the struggle for power between competing agendas and, in the course of producing policy, many distasteful compromises will be made. This process does not resemble the detached, antiseptic, and rational process that many writers on strategy seem to desire. There are stray pieces of innard, blood, and miscellaneous bits all over.  Strategy will inevitably end up as a piece of meat with bits you better not think about.

Strategy is the reconciliation of cultural desire with political power. Culture is even more the sausage making machine than politics. Politics has an overriding rational purpose (achieving the maximum amount of power for your agenda) that culture lacks. Culture is very much the realm of irrational residues. It is the realm of past desires that have endured long after they made sense. It is very much the domain of fashion and caprice. It is also incredibly resistant to deliberate manipulation. The manipulator may input his master design but he may not get back the outputs he expects.

This leaves strategy to try and fit something that is partially rational (politics) with something that is only remotely rational (culture). Political power and cultural desires are often incompatible. Their quantity and quality may not correspond. Strategy may have to fudge the differences to keep the whole ramshackle affair from flying apart at the least contact with friction or opposition. There may be harmony within the matrix of strategy but it may not be because of conscious design. Many things can happen by chance. Reason is only one ingredient that goes into the vortex of struggle. Passion and chance threaten to take over at anytime.

There are contradictory forces that constrain on any strategy that America adopts. Some of these are rational. Some aren’t. Most are a mixture of both. Here’s a sampler:

• The desire for normalcy. This is probably the foremost force interwoven into American strategy. Most Americans want to focus on purely domestic pursuits. They want change to be gradual and represent a clear step forward from the experiences of their parents. They want the hard edges of life, particularly the violent edges, smoothed. The ugly reality of other places on the globe should be left where they are. A step away from normalcy represents the ultimate American nightmare: the expulsion from paradise (relatively). Attempts to eject America into the world outside its bubble of domesticity provoke the harshest reaction from the American people.
• The institutional imperative. Most American organizations perform their primary function very well: perpetuating the organization as an institution. American public schools, for example, admirably succeed in their primary mission: to pay school teachers a secure wage. Most of the American military bureaucracy succeeds in its primary mission: securing procurement dollars from Congress. While these objectives may detract from the supposed instrumental purpose of an organization, the instrumental purpose rarely has a constituency. The iron law of organizational inertia is that an organization at rest tends to stay at rest.
• The shining city upon a hill. Americans like to see themselves as a beacon of righteousness in a world of darkness. This is true some of the time and often untrue a great deal of the time. Yet the pretense must be continued by strategy since any American cause, by the expectation of the American people, must be a moral and righteous cause. Even if it isn’t entirely.
• The law of the jungle. Strategy must somehow acknowledge the law of the jungle that governs the relations between political communities, even if pretense is otherwise. There are eternal truths of strategy that must be honored for a strategy to succeed. There are tactics that do not square with Sunday School truths that sometimes must be used.
• The bleed of culture. American culture has bled into the world since the early twentieth century and it’s influence is pervasive without any conscious design on the part of American strategists. America will be judged not only by what America really is but by what the people of the world think America is, however erroneous that thinking may be. America will go abroad and see its best and worst looking back at it in a thousand reflective shards.
• The need to be loved. Americans have this intense desire to be loved and tend to be offended when others don’t love them.
• The Other gets a vote. Americans, to an equal or greater extent than other cultures, tends to think that other people think like Americans. Americans tend to over-universalize the American experience, looking for parallels that are merely grasping for straws. The Other has a backstory and motives all his own.
• The winner’s dilemma. America has been very successful in the last 90 years. This tends to breed complacency and tempts strategists to do what worked well in the past. What worked in the past or what happened in the past isn’t guaranteed to work in the future. This wasn’t the attitude that characterized America in its first 100 years. We had the psychology of the challenger then. Now we have victory disease.
• America the inevitable. There is a common belief that America’s ascent was inevitable and that America is the future. It wasn’t and it isn’t necessarily the future. The ascent took hard work and tinkering and the future will need more of the same.
• The well is drying. America had a surge in prosperity post-World War II due to the rest of the world being flattened by events (war) or by choice (communism). That time ended by 1973 and the loan we took out in 1973 is coming due. Money doesn’t grow on trees and value doesn’t come from the Fed.
• Power is unevenly distributed in the world. Some power is made. This is the power that a people can develop by tending their own garden. Some power is extracted. This power tends to be unevenly distributed and the only way to get it is to be sitting on it already, buy it, or take it from the current owner. In the modern world, this type of power tends to be spelled O-I-L. America has some of both kinds of power but not all of it. This creates potential mismatches between power and desire that strategy has to patch. Sometimes someone else has what you need and you have to take it.
• The offended giant. America doesn’t like to be kicked around, especially by someone smaller. This tends to make Americans exhibit a milder form of the intense anti-foreign feeling that Russia under Putin displays. In my lifetime, this feeling was strongest during the late 1970s and early 1980s after the American defeat in Vietnam.
• ADD. Americans need to be extremely traumatized to exhibit more that a passing interest or memory of what’s going on in the world around them. If you want to rouse the American people, you need to kick us hard and you need to kick us dramatically. Doing so in a major media market is a proven tactic.
• The Hustler. Americans, as Walter McDougall points out, are a nation of hustlers. We’re always trying to work an angle. Usually to get richer.
• The Nation and the State. The nation and the state are two separate things. The nation is an organic growth dating back in its earliest incarnations to the English conquest of Britain. Other branches have been grafted on to that trunk. This nation is largely Christian and European in heritage. The state is expressed in parchment, legal documents, and institutional forms. It is secular and trans-ethnic. Sometimes the two overlap, sometimes they don’t.
• Faction. American foreign policy is largely an outgrowth of the political infighting between its major factions (which may or may not correspond to America’s major political parties). America doesn’t step overseas for long before one faction is trying to use foreign affairs to beat the other factions upside the head.
• Raw power. Since c. 1817, America has launched its overseas endeavors with a lavish outpouring of resources. America is, in spite of its profligacy, extremely rich. It doesn’t war like the poor. If treasure can be exchanged for blood, America will do it.
• The urge to engineer. Americans try to solve problems mechanically with simple, clean lines. Organic and emergent growth is downplayed. This has served America well in some areas, usually dealing with technical achievements, but served it poorly in others, usually human.
• Quantity over quality. America, the land of mass production, solved many of the problems of more. We engineered a world where the population increased, life expectancy increased, the amount of goods increased, and the amount of information increased. We haven’t been so good at defining what the more is for. The world’s population increased but what was it all of those extra people were supposed to do? People lived longer but what do they do with all the extra years? The amount of goods increased but how much is too much? The amount of information increased but how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? These questions remain unanswered (if there is an answer at all).
• The sacredness of life. America is a culture of the living. The dead are buried and then we go happily on our way after a brief period of morning. We see the interruption of life, enemy or friend or fellow citizen, as a major tragedy. We extend life as the first choice. We concentrate on earthly success as a sign of divine favor. That a culture would voluntarily embrace death is foreign to us. That we sometimes have to slaughter in the name of our civilization is also foreign. The learning process can be steep.