The Committee of Public Safety

The Supreme Realist and the Supreme Idealist

Pure foreign policy realism, especially in an American context, is like an fine revolver that no one bothered to load. It can produce ominous clicking noises but will have little or no kinetic impact. You can produce the exact same effect with a cap gun and for a far lower price. It also has the smell of elevating the tactical to the level of strategy. Take Svechin’s discussion of the difference between strategy and tactics:

While strategy pursues goals, tactics solve problems. A goal means a comprehensive major objective from which we are separated by a certain distance; the achievement of one goal requires the solution of several problems; the problems facing us grow in immediate proximity to us and become very urgent in nature. By this we would like to emphasize that strategy is essentially future-oriented, while tactics are practically immeasurable in time: while tactics may divide the conduct of a battle into certain phases, these phases are very close to one another and follow one another very quickly.

Realism tends to become tactical and the tactical tends to focus on the immediate and concrete, Svechin’s problem. Almost inevitably it degenerates into status-quo-ism where the focus becomes the known and well-lit present rather than the unknown and dimly lit future into which the present is hurtling. Yet strategy, the reconciliation of cultural desire with political power, is fundamentally future oriented. Saying you’re strategy is realism is means oriented: it says nothing about what you’re being realist for. Realism is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

The real is real in spite of whether humans are around or not. Reality as humans view it will always be somewhat fictional. We see upside down with no loss of peripheral vision. The mind flips it right side up and sharpens the focus on the immediate foreground. The mind also can’t fit the universe into the human mind. There’s something of an impedance mismatch:

World's Tightest Fit

Some, perhaps most, of the universe will be lost in the translation from universe to brain. Important bits are inevitably left out amidst the bustle. The end result is that the world the realist sees is already profoundly unreal. Unfortunately for the realist, realism itself is something of an ideal.

There is also the problem that the interaction between the human mind and the unfolding environment is a two way street. In one direction, instinct and culture attempt to impose their particular compression of reality upon the outside world. This is control, the degree to which an individual can impose their internal compression on external reality. The goal of all foreign policy is Wylie’s “some selected degree of control” over the quick and the dead. In the other direction, the outside environment attempts to impose its infinitude of plenitude on the individual. This is adaption, the degree to which reality can impose itself on an individual’s internal compression.

Pure realism is great on adaption but poor on control. It’s perpetually in reaction mode since the realists actions are held hostage to the readily discernible. While this can be an advantage in that defense, as Clausewitz argued, is stronger than offense, the urge to control is universal and someone will inevitably inject instability into even the most thoroughly maintained international order. Human nature is like a guitar. It has only six strings but the combinations that can be played with those six strings are vast. Say you successfully created a stable order based on the probable combinations of the guitar. That’s great. Now add electricity. You still have the same six strings but now the world rocks.

Darn hippies.

Thucydides identified three strings on the human guitar: fear, honor, and interest. The realist, focusing on the readily quantifiable, latches on to interest and won’t let go. As a result, realism sometimes sounds like a one string solo. However, Clausewitz’s trinity of rationality, chance, and passion is also applicable. Interest is a matter of rationality. However fear and honor belong to the wilder realms of passion. Throw in chance and you have a maelstrom. Preserving a status quo in a dynamic system is a losing proposition.

The winning hand is not a policy of realism but a policy of hypocrisy. America is a Christian nation but the United States is a secular state. This makes hypocrisy not only suspicious to Americans but, given The Lord’s frequent denunciation of hypocrisy, a sin. Outside of America, strategists frequently have a more enabling idealism. Stalin, a former seminarian usually portrayed as the consummate realist, was actually the consummate hypocrite. Stalin, it seems, was at heart a sort of twisted idealist. A realist would follow the NEP, like Bukharin advocated and Deng later initiated in China. Stalin, however, wanted to bring about a communist society and the nature of Marxist strategic idealism, rooted in revolutionary violence against a corrupt imperialist capitalist class, enabled an operational and tactical realism that formed one of the great strategic juggernauts of history. His goal was control, the imposition of Marxist compression on the world. Wylie comments:

Philosophically the pressures and constraints of control are perhaps the most subtle and at times, the most pervasive and persuasive of all.Consider the amount of control exercised over the past two millennia by the philosophy of Christianity. Consider the control exercised today by the philosophy of communism. And by the philosophy of individual freedom.

This is what we seem somehow to have missed in our strategy for freedom in the rural-peasant societies of the world—in those areas where the Mao theory of “wars of national liberation” is, far and away, the most dangerous foe we have to face.

In some ways we have, intuitively, recognized the problem…[But none of our] efforts seems to get at the root of the problem, which is the need for articulation of a philosophy to be “for”.

This is not a suggestion that someone go out and think up a brand new religion or a brand new political scheme. But it is a suggestion that, at the least, we might do a better job of adapting what we have (which is very fine indeed) to the actual situations that confront us.

We have known for a long time that, in our society, the Anglo-American, two-party electoral system of applied democracy is both an efficient and an acceptable system for the allocation, use, and transfer of power, which is the basic problem of politics. And we have known, too, that it provides us a quite satisfactory context for the observance of our predominantly Christian spiritual ethic.

But we have had a great deal of difficulty in stretching these two schemes of ours to fit other societies. Our basic, and usually tacit, assumptions have not often been in very close coincidence with those of other societies that we have wanted to win over to our side.

If we could adjust the assumptions to fit the reality of the scene of action, we might get forrader faster.

It is a little difficult to give an illustration of what is meant in this abstract discussion of philosophic strategy because illustrations are so scarce. But [one] may serve…

Mao has rearranged the theories of Marx to fit the situation in China. Marx focused on the urban worker who suffered under the dislocations of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. This man did not exist in China, or at least did not exist in sufficient number to be a governing element of effective revolution. So Mao revised Marxian theory to focus on the rural peasant, and the revised theory has worked with chilling effectiveness in rural societies…

It is something like this that we need to serve as a sort of foundation on which to build the whole strategic rationale. We would not all agree that it need be based on Jesuit Catholicism, or perhaps even on any religious philosophy. But it must have an acceptable and locally viable philosophic base; and it must be a strategy suited to, rather than imposed upon, the actual scene. The fighters must believe in what they fight for. The basic assumptions must fit the reality.

On a cultural and political level, this is a policy of idealism. On the strategic, operational, and tactical level, this is a policy of realism. Realism, as a solution to problems, is suitable to tactical and even operational problems. It is however, not a strategy, since it is inappropriate for pursuing goals in the future. For that, you need a vision.