The Committee of Public Safety

Identity at work.

Adam Elkus makes a few interesting observations on Zenpundit’s Kilcullen Doctrine post. These inspired a few thoughts:

What we as Americans excel at are technical solutions and innovations. Modern counterinsurgency doctrine is an brilliant technocratic solution…Modern counterinsurgency was instrumentalized as a solution to irregular conflict, drawn from British and French military intellectuals of the 60s and 70s and enhanced by modern social science and the bitter experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is, as Zenpundit noted, a purely operational doctrine and has never pretended otherwise.

The fact that counterinsurgency become so celebrated is a commentary on the American love of technocratic solutions and innovations and the problems we face in creating and implementing abstract and complex long-term visions. The American narrative is one of progressive innovation and triumph over adversity. This is a helpful narrative and we should celebrate our talent for innovation. But Zenpundit rightly argues that operational innovation isn’t enough.

Reflecting on this point further, I believe counter-insurgency does have an important grand strategic component: it has broadened the range of whims that American grand strategy can choose to pursue. COIN has reopened  the possibility of successfully remaking other societies in America’s image through the application of military force.

This is not to say this possibility is very large. It isn’t. However, the common interpretation of Vietnam seemed to completely foreclose the possibility of overseas social engineering. Now there is a counter-example in post-surge Iraq, however slight and however temporary. The Wilsonian urge, deeply embedded in both major political parties in the post-Cold War era, even after the at best mixed results of the Iraqi and Afghan experience, is still there. The urge to remake the world in America’s image, an expression of the love of cleanly engineered solutions that A.E. refers to and the incredible bewilderment that Americans have at the ability of other political communities to run along clean, elegant American lines, lurks in the heart of the American establishment. It wasn’t completely quashed by Vietnam, it survived Lebanon and Somalia, and it will probably survive Iraq and Afghanistan.

A problem with the various schools of realism in international relations is that they underestimate the potency of creative forces in history. An Roman or Persian realist  in the early centuries of the Christian Era would have measured the range of possibility in international relations by which empire possessed a few towns in Syria and northern Mesopotamia or who held the protectorate over Armenia at any given moment. Nine out of ten times, they’d be right. However, a black swan would appear out of the desert and change the world beyond the imagination of any Roman or Persian realist.

While the realist is correct that human nature is a constant, that ultimately the world is tragic, and that man is inevitably bound, spread-eagled, to the Thucydidian trinity of fear, honor, and interest, at times change erupts in bursts of disruptive change that punctuate the equilibrium and change the scenery beyond recognition. Realism is more a reversion to the general mean of history than the constant drumbeat of human existence. While most of the time people live a life of Thucydides, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, sometimes they live a life of Herodotus, where great people do great things that actually change history. Every Sicilian Expedition has its Marathon.

I was also struck by this observation:

Ultimately a grand strategy is a shared vision that originates from a dream of a nation’s place in the world–and a nation’s vision of itself. Yet few are looking at identity as a source of strategy. We should expend more energy conducting this kind of analysis instead of purely geopolitical or threat-based analysis.

I wonder which comes first, the grand strategy or national identity? Hamilton’s grand strategy, the American System, is a good example. Hamilton was not a great politician. He also had a lousy read on American culture. Hamilton seems to have had a certain contempt for the American public and its elected officials and it’s probably a good thing for the health of the Republic that he never got in a position where he could absolutely dictate policy. That being said, he managed to get enough of his program into place that it continued strongly for another 150 years, powering America to heights he barely conceived of.

Yet much of this grand strategy, which we should call the eternal grand strategy, since it didn’t originate with Hamilton or even Sir Robert Walpole but extended back to the seventeenth century, was directly opposed to powerful currents of American culture. American Revolutionary thinkers objected to many of the features of contemporary Britain. Stock-jobbers, the Bank of England, monopolies, navigation acts, and other outrages that corrupted the virtue of the people were just the sort of thing we kicked the Hanoverians out of the country for. And Hamilton wanted to reintroduce them. What Hamilton needed was a Trojan horse, someone who tasted American that the American people would follow, someone who would easily trade principle for the power that Hamilton offered. Hamilton needed Thomas Jefferson.

After Albert Gallatin, the Jefferson creature that most resembled Hamilton, explained the Hamilton program to Jefferson, Jefferson proceeded to slice a few egregious parts of it off, like large parts of the navy, and kept the essentials in place. As the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars made a mockery of High Jeffersonism, Jefferson and his minions Madison and Monroe grew to embrace more and more of the program. After beating the Virginia Dynasty, the American System ran into Jackson but survived even that and emerged victorious in the War Between the States.

Greater New England grew to love Hamilton while Southerners always hated his legacy. Greater New England outbred the South though so it won in the end. Hamilton’s system became as American apple pie. It became an example of a grand strategy that proceeded identity rather than being shaped. In fact, grand strategy adapted American national identity or at least certain strands of it to its own ends.

Culture, like politics, is a struggle. In fact, politics is the instrument that culture uses to fight the good fight. Identity is a byproduct of this cultural sausage making: the bits of ejecta that go into it will come from many different bodies, be stuffed into a stray piece of gut, and sold as a single piece of meat. If identity is relatively constant, such as in old nations like France or Japan, the end result of the cultural struggle will be fairly cohesive. Where it is relatively fragile and shifting, such as in the United States, the result of the sausage making process is liable to be confused.

Confusion is likely to be the end result of any American attempt to create an American grand strategy. A grand strategy that seeks to draw from American national identity is likely to be equally confused. A confused culture leads to confused politics. Confused politics leads to confused strategy. It may be that someone who has no clue about American national identity, someone like Hamilton who has no clue what makes America tick, may have a better chance at forming a working grand strategy than someone inside looking out. It may work so well that in the end we’ll describe it as quintessentially America.