Right Reason

Robert Citino on Dunkirk

 

Robert M. Citino, one of the foremost German-military historians today, has an interview, "Why the Germans Blew It at Dunkirk,” at Bloombery View about Dunkirk, both the actual event and Christopher Nolan’s movie about said event.

 

On the topic of the infamous Halt-Order, Mr. Citino says:

Remember, Hitler's May 24 Haltbefehl ("stop order") did not stop the Panzers from attacking the Dunkirk beachhead. They were already stopped by virtue of a "close-up order" from the commander of the Panzer Group, General Ewald von Kleist, on May 23rd. Kleist's Panzers were badly strung out and worn down as a result of the high-speed chase across northern France. Some of the other army commanders wanted to keep moving forward. The Army Group commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, backed Kleist, while the Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, disagreed with Rundstedt, and actually took the Panzer Group out from under his command. It was a mess of the worst sort! When Hitler flew to the front on May 24, it seemed as if the commander he respected the most, Rundstedt, was being sidelined. It also seemed (and this was actually true) that decisions of the highest order were being taken by commanders without looping in Hitler at all -- and that was something the Führer was determined to stop. That was the origins of the May 24 "halt order" -- an attempt by Hitler to reassert his control over events at the front.

 

Mr. Citino also speaks about the Wehrmacht’s command-structure, which is a reoccurring theme in his works:

Many students of World War II still hold to a myth of German efficiency, the notion that the Wehrmacht command was infallible. The Germans had a tradition of allowing commanders a great deal of latitude while on campaign, allowing them to seize opportunities that might otherwise be lost. That tradition was responsible for a great deal of their success. But often, German commanders worked at cross-purposes with one another, requiring a strong hand on the rudder, if you will. Virtually every "blunder" attributed to Hitler in World War II originated in a conflict within the German officer corps that only Hitler had the authority to sort out.

On Dunkirk, Mr. Citinio approves of the movie:

It’s impressive. 'Dunkirk' makes points about the human experience of war -- the almost anonymous and randomized killing, the chaos, the confusion -- but it also makes a far more directed point about the nature of modern war, the interplay of air/sea/land. And, as a German military historian, I would say that the movie provides the best treatment of a Stuka attack ca. 1940 that I have ever seen.

Many of the weaknesses many have identified with Dunkirk, including the anonymity of the characters and the movie's sheer loudness, are, to me, the movies greatest strengths. War does not care about whether its soldiers have interesting ties to home or about their back-story. It just places its soldiers in hell. Moreover, as anyone who has ever fired a rifle knows, war is loud, so very loud.

Dunkirk is truly a movie about Dunkirk. It’s about an organization’s struggle for existence in an almost hopeless situation. Those who have little interest in Dunkirk, or for that matter the cacophony of modern warfare, might have very little interest in Mr. Nolan’s film. But for those who are, Dunkirk is awesome.

Pope Francis vs Donald Trump on Saudi Arabia

 

 

A fascinating new article has been published in Foreign Affairs by Victor Gaetan, titled "Why Trump and Francis Diverge on Saudi Arabia."

In that article, Mr. Gaetan discusses the tension between how Pope Francis and President Donald Trump have entirely different views about the Wahhabist absolute monarchy that is Saudi Arabia. The Vatican condemns Saudi Arabia because it is a nation that persecutes Christianity domestically, has played a critical role in the wars in both Syria and Yemen, and, perhaps most fundamentally, is aligned with an intolerant branch of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism. 

An excerpt from the article:

A key source of tension between the House of Saud and the Holy See is Saudi limits on Christian religious expression. Some 1.5 million Catholics currently reside in the Kingdom, most of them guest workers from the Philippines. They have no way to practice their faith. Mass is only available to Christian diplomats at a few foreign embassies and is off limits to foreign national laborers. (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI met with King Abdullah in 2007, inspiring discussion of opening a Catholic Church, but nothing came of it.) Non-Muslim signs of religious devotion, from rosaries to Bibles, are banned. Meanwhile, the Holy See has collaborated with governments in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where Christian populations—and tolerance of Christianity—have grown over the past ten years, to establish Catholic places of worship.

Second, Catholic experts on terrorism consider the official Saudi faith of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century Salafi movement founded on the peninsula, to be a destabilizing source of extremism. For the Holy See, Wahhabism’s threat is existential: Wahhabi intolerance and money fuel violence against Christians and other communities across the Middle East and beyond. To counter this threat, the Vatican is cultivating relationships with non-Wahabbist Islamic cultural centers such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which Francis visited last month. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, visited Francis in Rome last year, an especially significant development given that Tayeb led a boycott against the Vatican in 2011 after Benedict commented on anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Many hope that the renewed relationship will give new momentum to Christian–Muslim dialogue.

Wariness about Wahhabism also applies to Syria, where local Catholic leaders remain skeptical regarding a Saudi-backed regime change. It is a simple calculus: Christian communities, whether Orthodox or Catholic, have been protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad before that; Sunni extremism could bring Sharia law and second-class status for Christians. In the Church’s view, it does not bode well for Trump to plant himself so squarely in the Saudi camp.

Third, the Vatican has opposed Saudi Arabia’s particularly aggressive war in Yemen, a relatively tolerant country with some respect for religious freedom. The Vatican classifies Saudi Arabia’s bombing in Yemen as an archetypical “unjust war”—inessential to the country’s survival, launched without negotiating first, and ruthlessly devastating to non-combatants. In an air campaign highly dependent on U.S. support, Saudi Arabia has dropped cluster bombs and other devastating munitions on Yemeni civilian populations, including schools and medical clinics.

 

Another interesting aspect of the Vatican's relationship with the Muslim world that Mr. Gaetan highlights in the article is its cordial relationship with Shia Iran: 

Analysts typically describe the Saudi–Yemeni conflict in terms of Sunni–Shia rivalry, with Saudi Arabia facing off against the Houthi rebels, mainly Zaydi Muslims, who, at least originally, had loose ties to Shia Iran. Although the Vatican has no link to the Houthi movement, it is generally sympathetic to Shia Islam, which has highly educated clerics organized hierarchically, a theology with Christian parallels, and a general respect for the Catholic Church and its faithful. The Vatican has developed a sympathetic relationship with Iran’s religious leadership and was highly supportive of the U.S.–Iranian nuclear deal. The modern diplomatic relationship between the two dates back to 1954, and was maintained throughout the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s embassy in Rome is one of the largest, most active missions to the Holy See, which sees Iran as key to solving the crisis in Syria.

Pope Francis and the Vatican are ultimately right. If the United States really wanted to advance peace in the Near East, it would pursue further détente with Iran and stop selling Saudia Arabia billions of dollars worth of weapons. 

On a side note, the problems with American policy transcend the person of Donald Trump and his administration. For over a generation, the United States has portrayed Iran as the evil empire in this area of the world all while casting a blind eye of the House al-Saud's patronage of Wahhabist causes that preach jihad. Moreover, the problem isn't even particularly American. Even Justin Trudeau's administration in Canada has gone ahead with an, albeit much, much smaller, arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. 

Comparing Rome and China: The Influences of island-geography

 

Earlier this week, I had an email on Tyler Cowen's post on the question of why Chinese civilization has been so successful in establishing a centralized hegemony over a population around the same size featured on Marginal Revolution. In that post, Rome vs. China, I look at how geographic factors, lacking in China, contributed to the unraveling of the Roman Empire: 

 

On the comparison of China and Rome, one of the factors that immediately came to my mind was a combination of (2) and (4): The Roman Empire faced a much more complex logistical problem of maintaining territorial integrity than did China and its territorial integrity could be destroyed from a sea campaign.

These two themes actually did greatly contribute to Rome’s unraveling during the Crisis of the 5th Century: One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Crisis of the 5th Century that led to the Fall of the Roman Empire was the loss of North Africa to the Vandals. Peter Heather provides a short description of how destructive the loss of North Africa was to the empire in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006):

“No other single blow could have done the Empire so much harm. At a stroke. Geiseric had removed from Aetius’ control the richest provinces of the Roman west, with the result that financial crisis looked How was it allowed to happen? Presumably, after four and a half years of relative peace, and thinking that Geiseric was going to keep the treaty made in February 435, people took their eyes off the ball. There was, I suspect, simply too much instability in other parts of the empire for troops to be left in Carthage on a ‘what if?’ basis. The Visigothic war in particular, brought to an end just before Geiseric made his move, had probably demanded every available man. So with the Carthage garrison at minimum strength, the cunning Vandal had taken full advantage.” (p. 289)

Here, I see the theme of (4) in your blog post: “[China] has a large space of relatively flat plains.” Chinese generals did not face the same complex logistical problems that Roman ones did in deploying their military force across their nation.

When North Africa was lost, retaking it to reassert territorial integrity was not as easy as simply marching a couple of legions there. If it were that easy, I very much doubt the Vandals could have held onto North Africa. Instead, the Roman Empire needed to launch a sea campaign, which is theme (2) of your post: “when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.”

In 468 both the Western and Eastern Empires launched a massive joint campaign to take back North Africa. However, the armada they had launched was smashed at the Battle of Cape Bon by a much smaller Vandal fleet that had the weather gauge to its advantage. Punching above their weight, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa was able to beat back a campaign manned and funded by both Ravenna and Constantinople—a feat that would have been close to impossible on land.

The failure of that armada to land on North Africa doomed half of the Roman world to extinction, for without the North African provinces, the Western Roman Empire could not reassert its hegemony over the centrifugal forces now at full force across Gaul and Hispania. The difficulties of maintaining optimal deployments of troops in an empire largely bifurcated (at least in scale of importance) by a sea and the hazards of warfare at sea conspired to make the problem of maintaining imperial territorial integrity too difficult for Roman politics to solve during the Crisis of the 5th Century, contributing to the total collapse of that integrity in the west. Had the Western Roman Empire not been encumbered by (2) and (4) the survival of said integrity is certainly imaginable—and within the capability its resources offered it.

The Centenary of American Intervention in WW1

 

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

-Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress on April 2nd

 

 

Yesterday, April 6th, marked the centenary of the American intervention in the First World War. After three years of armed neutrality, the United States entered that conflict and thereby rejuvenated the Entente’s strength, which had been drained after three years of great bloodshed. Within a year of American troops arriving on the continent, the Entente had achieved a decisive victory against Germany and the other Central Powers.

Although the United States ostensibly declared war due to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that January, the purpose of American intervention took on a rational constructivist intent even before war was declared. When he had addressed a special joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war on April 2nd, Woodrow Wilson announced that the intent of American policy would be “to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.”

As emphasized by the fourteen points that Wilson promulgated in January 1918, American aims in the war were not restricted to guaranteeing the safety of the nation and of American shipping. Instead, those aims were to rationally construct a new era of international relations, much as the Treaty of Westphalia had done. In this new order, self-determination was to be the ruling principle of this international order and a new League of Nations was to be the means of arbitrating international disputes. No longer would national borders be drawn by a clique of aristocrats, but instead by the general wills of distinct nationalities. No longer would nations need to go to war to achieve their ends, but they would have recourse to international arbitration. Rather than arms-races and autocracies, there would be peace and democracy.

However, benevolent his ambitions for rationally constructing a new international system out of the First World War’s debris may have been, Wilson’s efforts were never met with success and would actually do quite a bit of harm. By intervening in the war, the United States could grant the Entente powers a decisive victory, but it could not prevent them from demanding a Carthaginian peace from Germany that the would not be capable of enforcing. Moreover, the American war-effort brought with it a form of the closed society that willingly treaded on liberty in order to organize all of society towards the single end of fighting the war. Alas, Wilson should have known better because the American Founding Fathers had recognized how dangerous a policy of meddling into European affairs as and had admonished posterity to never do so.

There was no more forceful expression of those principles in foreign policy than in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In that letter, which served as a collection of the classically republican principles motivating the foundation of the American notion, Washington had advised against just the course of action that Wilson led America into: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” John Adams, perhaps the most underrated of all the Founders, himself emphasized those principles. In an 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson, he expressed his resentment of European political order and why America should have no part in it: “The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of.” Jefferson himself had expressed similar sentiments about the dangers of European entanglements in a 1815 letter to Thomas Leiper: “It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better.”

 

 

While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms.

-William Pitt, 1762 Speech in the House of Commons

 

Of course, around a century had passed since the Founders provided that advance and American intervention in the First World War. So, it is possible to argue that the American Founding principles were entirely unsuited to the First World War. After all, one might be inclined to think that, as the war’s name does imply, the First World War was the first war at a global scale. Being so, it is reasonable enough, at least prima facie, that the United States could not be neutral because the war had global implications that the American people would eventually have an interest in.

However, this argument neglects the fact that the First World War was not the first global war nor the American Founders have inexperienced with the challenges posed by global war waged by European belligerents. Instead, the American Founders lived in an era in which the American colonies and early republic were encompassed all about by the global wars of European belligerents, particularly the Seven-Years’ War and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Although the First World War may have gone into history as the first ‘world war,’ it was really not the first such war. Instead, the Seven-Years’ War (1756-63) is most properly the first of a long line of wars on a global scale. If anything, the Seven-Years’ War was more properly a world war than the First World War, as William Pitt had purposefully used the opportunity to secure extensive colonial gains in North America and India that would guarantee Great Britain a colonial empire for generations to follow.

Similarly to the Seven-Years’ war, most of the First World War’s bloodshed was in Europe and its hostilities were to be entirely decided in battles on the European continent, unlike, for example, the Second World War’s Pacific theater. In this sense, the First World War was much like the Seven Years’ War (1756-63): There may have been theaters of war across the world, yet those theaters were largely European violence spilling over into the rest of the world. Just as the French and British fought in North America in the Seven Years’ War (a theater known to American schoolchildren as the French and Indian War), so did the Germans and British fight around the African Rift Valley.

All the world-wide maneuvering in the First World War was largely an attempt by one power or another to tie down resources of its enemies that could otherwise be allocated to Europe. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla campaign required the British army to station battalions that could have otherwise buttressed the Western front just as Maximilian von Spee’s mischief in the South Pacific required the Royal Navy to dispatch two battlecruisers there, including HMS Invincible, that would have otherwise been stationed in Britain. Although, the First World War was a global war in scope, it was still fundamentally a European war similar to the war that America’s Founders had experienced in Seven Years’ War’s North-American theater.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were another set of European conflicts that spilled out into the wider world and which the Founders actually had to create concrete policies in response to. When the Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792, George Washington wisely kept America neutral, whatever may have been people’s sentiments over the political principles entangled with that war. For example, when the French ambassador Citizen Genêt beat the drums of war for the revolutionary government on American soil, Washington asked for the French to recall him, which they did. His administration also negotiated the Jay Treaty, which diffused tensions with Great Britain that might have led to another war.

John Adams showed similar restraint in dealing with the scandal of the XYZ affair and in navigating American diplomacy through the Quasi-War without having to get involved in the wider war between Britain and France. Adams certainly did trample on American liberty by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, but a sympathetic historian could very well give the president some credit for trying to keep America out of war by signing them. Grievous mistakes like the Alien and Sedition Acts notwithstanding, the American Founders provided an example of how the American republic should interact with European wars, and that is with disinterested benevolence towards all.

During the First World War, America should have observed to the wise principles of the American founding and avoided committing the nation to a European war. By 1917, the First World War had devolved into a nationalistic struggle for existence that a nation founded on America’s principles should have had any role in. When Pope Benedict XV had asked for the belligerents to enumerate their war-aims, none could actually do so, because they really had no specific war-aims. For all belligerents, the only option worse than continuing the war was losing it. If the Entente won, Germany expected to be humiliated and dismembered. If the Central Powers won, France and Great Britain expected Germany to establish an autocratic hegemony over central Europe and thus control over the wider continent. The war was therefore a death-spiral, in which nations had no conscious policy but to commit themselves to the struggle.

 

 

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

-Ferdinand Foch

 

Wilson led the United States into the conflict with the view that America could provide a conciliatory solution to the conflict and mitigate other powers’ more unsavory interests. However, just as Washington’s principle of honesty being the best policy made American entirely unsuited to politics of late 18th century Europe, so should have it prevented the nation entirely unsuited to those of early 20th century Europe. Wilson had proclaimed “open covenants of peace” as the first of his Fourteen Points, but he should have known that Europe diplomats would have none of that. Britain, France, and Italy had signed secret treaties, including the London Pact and the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement,that had motivated the fighting. Self-interested as they were, British, French, and Italian diplomats and politicians were not going to happily, or even willingly, agree to having the spoils of the bloodiest war their respective nations have ever fought be denied to them.

 

The tragedy of the Treaty of Versailles, which ultimately failed to provide any lasting resolution to the First World War’s carnage, was that it was simultaneously too harsh and too lenient. For whatever Wilson may have intended to happen at the Paris Peace Conference, the United States was still but a single nation at the table. Primus inter pares, yes, but still but a single nation. The United States could decisively turn the fortunes of war in the Entente’s favor, but it could not prevent the Entente powers from demanding the kind of victory that the kind of treaty that such a victory would normally prescribe. The Treaty of Versailles was therefore too harsh of a treaty. Moreover, as that decisive victory came from an overseas source, when it came time for the European Entente powers to enforce the treaty they had inflicted upon Germany, they could not. Although Wilson would have liked to have America play a larger role across the world, the American public did not yet have an appetite for such a victory.

The Paris Peace conference was indeed a circus and it was a circus because the United States really had no place at the table. The reasons why the war had been so long and so bloody was that its motivations, to quote John Adams, were “deeply tainted with prejudices.” The problems and predicaments posed by the war had solutions and outcomes that could probably only be decided by Europeans and for Europeans. American involvement only pushed those solutions and outcomes back a generation, and unfortunately they would involve two foreign powers, America and the Soviet Union, establishing two competing empires over the continent.

 

Although it is possible to explain the harm done by Wilson’s foreign policy as a consequence of starry-eyed idealism, Wilson’s domestic policy during the war demonstrated a robust authoritarianism entirely contradictory to America’s Founding principles. The United States was going to go to war one and indivisible. Those who dissented would be singled out and dealt with. As Wilson warned in his April 2nd speech: “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And repression there was. The 1917 Espionage Act provided the federal government the ability to jail and punish those who interfered with recruitment or prevented enthusiasm for the war. Eugene Debs, who had previously been a Socialist candidate for president, was arrested and convicted for having “obstructed recruitment.” This systematic use of repression to control dissent was a radical departure from the polycentric mode of governance that Alexis de Tocqueville had lauded in Democracy in America. It was a rejection of the Founding ideals of a nation, rooted in dissenting Protestantism, that had formulated those ideals, in part, through protracted debates in pamphlets and other printed means.

 

Just as in medicine, the best maxim in politics is to first do no harm. The abandonment of Founding principles in foreign policy did much harm. At its best, Wilson’s enthusiasm for war was a naïve attempt to make the world better, at its worse, that enthusiasm was a prideful attempt to impose a political system on the wider world through central planning. Either way, Wilson’s intervention did very little good and a whole lot of harm. The Treaty of Versailles did not secure Wilson’s aim of “really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles” against “selfish and autocratic power.” Rather than making the world safe for democracy, Wilson’s attempt to rationally construct a new world order made it a petri dish for various mutations of the closed society, whether it be Bolshevism in Russia or Nazism in Germany. Rather than securing liberty at home, the American war-effort trampled on American liberty; the 1917 Espionage Act is still one of its reverberating effects.

When look at from a distinctly historical point of view, the American intervention in the First World War was a blunder that, like much else in the Progressive Era, corroded the Founding ideas of the American republic. It would have been better to take George Washington's words to heart and to avoid "interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe." The First World War was a European war that could have only reached a suitable resolution with a distinctly European solution. 

Punitive Attacks in Syria

 

Vox reports: 

The United States has just intentionally bombed a Syrian regime target for the first time since the country’s civil war began in 2011. So far, it has been a limited cruise missile strike targeting one Syrian airbase, causing an as-yet-unknown number of casualties.

"Dozens of Tomahawks were launched against a single Syrian regime airfield,” a Department of Defense official told Vox.

The decision to attack was a direct reaction to the Syrian regime’s Tuesday gas attack that claimed 85 lives, including about two dozen children. Images of the Syrians who suffocated to death seemed to shock President Trump, who spoke Wednesday of the “beautiful little babies” killed in the attack, which he described as “an affront to humanity.”

 

Although ill-advised on the Founders' enduring principles of foreign policy, I think that the Trump administration's response makes tactical and, in more general, game-theoretic sense for those who share the administration's end of enforcing treaties prohibiting the use of certain weapons.

I don't think the United States' policy should really care about another power's use of chemical weapons. But if one think American policy should care, this is the kind of punitive response that should be used: Sudden, gratuitous, and clearly tied to the behavior being punished. It is the kind of policy that one can expect a military to actually be able to successfully carry out. Saving Syrian children? No so much. 

The perverse irony of Trump's punitive attacks in Syria is that they coincided with American entry in the Great War. These kind of policies are not only ends-means compatible with a Wilsonian world-system limiting national sovereignty through international treaties, they are necessary for sustaining such a régime. 

 

However, in my thought about the tactical nature of the president's decision, I should not neglect to point out that it is unconstitutional. GMU's Ilya Somin provides commentary:

Earlier tonight, the United States launched cruise missiles against a Syrian military base in retaliation for the Assad regime’s brutal use of chemical weapons against civilians. Assad’s atrocities are appalling. Perhaps they even justify US military intervention. Nonetheless, it is essential to remember the constitutional requirement that initiating war requires congressional authorization. That is both legally necessary, and the right choice from a prudential point of view.

Article I of The Constitution very clearly reserves to Congress the power to start a war. The Founders sought to avoid a dangerous situation in which a single man could take the nation to war. Even Alexander Hamilton — the strongest supporter of sweeping presidential power among the framers of the Constitution — recognized that “the Legislature have a right to make war” and that “it is . . . the duty of the Executive to preserve Peace till war is declared.”

The situation would be different if Assad attacked us first. In that event, Trump would be merely waging a war already begun by the enemy. But for all of its many sins, the Syrian government was not previously at war with the United States, and Assad did not attack us. Indeed, just a few months ago, Donald Trump spoke of cooperating with Assad and his Russian allies in waging war against ISIS.

 

In Review: Eye in the Sky

 

War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

-Carl von Clausewitz, On War

 

This weekend, I finally watched Eye in the Sky. I was quite impressed with it and so would like to tell the world, that is my humble audience of readers, about it. To provide a sentence-long synopsis for those who know nothing about the movie, Eye in the Sky deals with the questions about rules of engagement posed up by a British drone operation when a high-value civilian becomes possible collateral damage.

All media, whether a textbook or a movie, have two fundamental purposes: To educate and to entertain. Eye in the Sky successfully does both by posing a question about drone-warfare and then exploring how the characters react to that question and to the reactions of other characters. The plot unfolds in the cascade of events that follow and how the characters react to those cascading. There are no stunts, little quipping and very few explosions. Instead, Eye in the Sky’s plot is driven forwards by dialogue and, thanks to a very tight script, conversation is enough to ratchet the tension up scene by scene. The leads, Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman, were both great in their roles, with both actors providing a sympathetic light to a program that many, such as myself, are very willing to condemn as immoral. Aaron Paul is also quite good and he also provides quite a sympathetic look at the role he plays within the drone program.

Then again, I am also intrigued by dialogues that bring dense issues to light. The dense issues that this movie brings to light are those involving rules of engagement. Indeed, Eye in the Sky can be seen more as a dialogue about the rules of engagement in an undeclared war than as a movie about drone-warfare per se. For those who like this kind of movie, I also recommend Conspiracy, a movie about the Wannsee Conference.

This concern brings me to my complaint about the movie: It has surprisingly little to do with the drone-warfare that is going on in the world around us. Perhaps the reason is that the movie is from a British point of view, but at least from an American point of view, many of the questions brought up in the movie have been become daily occurrences. One needn’t go farther than Jeremy Scahill’s Assassination Complex to know that American drone-warfare tactics have gone far beyond the questions about the rules of engagement Eye in the Sky inquires into.

Moreover, the movie does not deal with one of the most salient aspects of drone-warfare: That drones are used to prosecute undeclared wars. They can strike anywhere without warning, and therein lie their novelty to the rules of engagement. That novelty certainly offers advantages to the nations who use drones, but the ability to readily attain violent ends without having to go through proper diplomatic protocol is a powerful drug that can, and has, become addictive to those who use it.

There is a reason that just-war theory insists on a declaration of war. Even when that declaration is merely ceremonial, it still provides civilians with the knowledge that war is upon them. Even when they cannot vacate the place of hostilities, that declaration still allows them to inform their decisions with the knowledge that they can be killed straying into dangerous areas. Sometimes mere rituals can serve a valuable role in communicating intentions across society. This aspect of war is central to Eye in the Sky and yet never it is addressed.

Despite those qualms, I do hope that everyone decides to watch Eye in the Sky, even if it provides too romantic a view of drone-warfare, because it still brings up one of the most salient issues that governments must cope with, and one does hope resolve to constrain. Because it is undeclared and because it produces very few casualties for the nation using the drones, the costs of this secretive warfare can easily be buried in the headlines. Last October, an American destroyer launched a missile that killed over a hundred people—and yet all people could talk about that week was whether Donald Trump grabbed a secretary’s genitals. With the war distant and out of voters’ minds, the American military wields an uncomfortably vast amount of power in that region. It can kill both innocent civilians and American citizens alike without having to ever be accountable for those decisions.

It has been said that the first casualty in war is the truth. Certainly the second must be due process.

History's Ambiguities

 

 

 

That war, as well as history, is not black and white could never be as starkly demonstrated as when veterans of the Wehrmacht continue to defend their service on the Eastern Front decades after their defeat and after it became clear just how immense the Third Reich's atrocities really were. And yet those veterans still go on defending what they did. 

Their enemy? Bolschewismus. Not even the Russians, but Bolschewismus. Still after all these years, they still believe that they helped save Europe from the Red Tide. "If we hadn't stopped it, it would have reached your country and France too." 

One at least has to applaud their sense of agency when compared to Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter's depiction of the German people as just another victim of the National Socialist régime. While their defense of the Wehrmacht's certainly should make people looking in uncomfortable, I'm not entirely certain that an impartial spectator would censure them directly. For one thing, it does very little good to pick at an old man's narrative of their lives. Everyone has their delusions and those delusions can allow people to cope with traumatic events. Their narratives will die off along with the people harmed by those events. Furthermore, as the fate of East Germany attests to, the Red Army arrived in East Prussia, Potsdam, Silesia and elsewhere as conquerors whose leaders saw no place for an independent Germany ever again.

The teenage conscript was defending his East Prussian home in 1945. Alas, he was defending his home against a threat that was largely brought upon him by his government. With a stroke of a pen, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact handed all of Easter Europe into the hands of Comrade Stalin. If war was really inevitable between the west and the east, it was the Nazi's own blunderous foreign policy that made it inevitable. The uncomfortable fact is that matters of grand strategy probably mean very little to whether it's praiseworthy for a particular person to defend a particular plot of land against particular invaders.That being said, in 1944, I think it was in everyone's best interest for the Germans to simply surrender unconditionally. Defending one's own particular interests conflicts with such a surrender.

In his hagiographic memoir, Lost Victories, Erich von Manstein, for whom matters of grand strategy certainly reflect on the praiseworthiness of his actions, himself paints Bolshevism as the ultimate foe of his struggle. Moreover, the field marshal goes as far as to assert that Bolshevism should have been everybody's enemy:

There was that admirable tenacity of the British which impels them to go through with any struggle they have once embarked on, however threatening the situation of the moment may be. On top of this, in the bitterness of their 'unconditional' hatred for Hitler and his régime (and for 'Prussianism', too, in the case of several political leaders), came the inability to discern an even worse system, and an even greater menace to Europe, in the form of the Soviet Union... British eyes were blind to the fact that the big need in a changed world would be to create a world balance of power in view of the might which the Soviet Union had attained and the dangers inherent in its dedication to the idea of world revolution. (von Manstein 1982: 155-156)

Perhaps the greatest irony is that von Manstein's vision eventually came to be realized. While it took régime change, West Germany serve as one of the significant players in NATO. Heinz Guderian, despite his vocal loyalty to NSDAP during the war, would play a significant role in the reestablishment of the Bundeswehr. NATO would also gladly use the expertise of Hitler's generals in its own standoff against the Red Army. 

The Difference Context Makes

In philosophy, I’ve always thought that those who abstract the value of human life across different contexts are very much not to be trusted. Ethics and politics are necessarily strategic. When we abstract from context, we lose the details that should inform our conduct.

The excellent Bill Vallicella argues such a point in his rebuttal, “Why some think that terrorism is no big deal,” to Bryan Caplan and Nathan Smith’s views that people fret too much about terrorism because so many more people die other preventable events, they pick the example of automobile accidents. While I certainly think that the statement that people fret too much about terrorism should go without saying. However, I do not believe that their argument is all that convincing and agree with Mr. Vallicella when he writes:

But this sort of reasoning involves vicious abstraction. It is highly unreasonable to consider merely the numbers on both sides while abstracting from the motives of the terrorists and the societal impact of terrorism. With very few exceptions, drivers do not intend to kill anyone, and when their actions bring about deaths, those deaths involve only themselves and a few others.
Suppose a drunk driver unintentionally causes the death of himself and a family of five. Total deaths = 6. Other people will be affected, of course, but not many. (The wife and children of the drunk driver will now have less income to get by on, etc.) The effects are confined to a small circle of acquaintances and the effects are not additive in the way that the effects of terror events are additive.
One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society. Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11? It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally. And even if you don't. Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption. The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days. Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc. That had all sorts of repercussions economic and psychological.

Deaths due to terrorism have wider effects than deaths due to automobile accidents. Mr. Caplan gets that point right in a follow-up to Mr. Vallicella’s remarks, writing:
"This boils down to complaining about the reaction to terrorism. But that's ultimately my and Nathan's point: Popular cures for terrorism are far worse than the disease."

He is right, but then he fails to recognize what, I believe is Mr. Vallicella’s point: That the deaths due to terrorism will have a qualitatively different effect as deaths due to tragedies people consider mundane. As much as intellectuals, such as Mr. Caplan, may be right in arguing that popular cures for terrorism are worse than the disease, his saying that won’t have much impact on whether those cures are implemented. I don’t think that the voting public will ever think after a terrorist attack: “Well, these things are bound to happen and we are safely within the acceptable level of deaths.” They should, and they may come to such an opinion when time passes and cooler heads prevail.

Nevertheless, in thinking about policy, the public response to terrorism must always be factored in when thinking about terrorism strategically. Policy-makers should adjust their actions based on how they believe voters and commentators alike will respond to terrorist attacks because those responses will have definite effects, just like the terrorist attack.

We shouldn’t be romantic about how people will respond to terrorism. If we take reactions to terrorism attacks, such as those that happened in Istanbul last week or Paris a couple of months ago, as given, terrorism will generally have the cost of creating public uproar to stop terrorism. As much as that public uproar may be unproductive, it shall still be there, and a wise statesman should take that into account. Not stopping a terrorist attack therefore might have a second-order effect in causing anti-terrorism panic.

Ultimately, Mr. Vallicella is right. If we care about civil liberty, we do need to take seriously the fact that terrorist attacks have adverse consequences for those freedoms. Going on to pretend that a serious terrorist attack won’t empower those who desire to mitigate our civil liberties in favor of harsher anti-terrorism measures is nothing less than a romantic view of politics.

1916: The Year of Sieges

 

 

 

Everybody should be watching the YouTube series The Great War. Each week, short, to-the-point videos cover events that happened during that week a century ago in the course of the conflict. Entertaining and educational, the series should be among one's steady diet of videos from YouTube. My only complaint is an utter lack of sympathy for the problems faced by each nation's politicians and high command and an appreciation for how they solved those problems. The view that the armies of the period were lions led by donkeys is a prejudice that does not do justice to the interconnected strategic problems commanders faced throughout the conflict. For instance, the lessons learned during the July Crisis, including the fact that a nation needn't immediately mobilize its military if it is not to be caught flat-footed, may have helped save society from nuclear annihilation,  but I digress.

In last week's video, Indy Neidell set the scene for the year explains how 1916 will be known as a year of battles. But should we really think of the drawn-out engagements of the war, frequently fought over a period of months, as battles? Are the Battles of Verdun and of the Somme similarly battles just like the Battle of Waterloo and Leipzig? I don't think so. Instead, we should think of them as sieges. 

In a spectacular passage from The World Crisis, 1911-1918, Winston Churchill depicts the organization of the two great western battles of 1916 as being very similar to how a commander would prepare a siege, whether its Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre or Erich von Manstein's Siege of Sevastapol:

The anatomy of the battles of Verdun and the Somme was the same. A battlefield had been selected. Around this battlefield walls were built—double, triple, quadruple—of enormous cannon. Behind these railways were constructed to feed them, and mountains of shells were built up. All this was the work of months. Thus the battlefield was completely encircled by thousands of guns of all sizes, and a wide oval space prepared in their midst. Through this awful arena all the divisions of each army, battered ceaselessly by the enveloping artillery, were made to pass in succession, as if they were the teeth of interlocking cogwheels grinding each other.

For month after month the ceaseless cannonade continued at its utmost intensity, and month after month the gallant divisions of heroic human beings were torn to pieces in this terrible rotation. Then came the winter, pouring down rain from the sky to clog the feet of men, and drawing veils of mist before the hawk-eyes of their artillery. The arena, as used to happen in the Coliseum in those miniature Roman days, was flooded with water. A vast sea of ensanguined mud, churned by thousands of vehicles, by hundreds of thousands of men and millions of shells, replaced the blasted dust. Still the struggle continued. Still the remorseless wheels revolved. Still the auditorium of artillery roared. At last the legs of men could no longer move; they wallowed and floundered helplessly in the slime. Their food, their ammunition lagged behind them along the smashed and choked roadways.

 

1916 was not the year of battles. 1916 was the year of sieges, and the difference does matter for understanding the strategic machines of war that unleashed the carnage that has since scarred the conscience of Western Civilization. 

 

 

Der Krieg by Otto Dix

Capitalist Peace?

 

What problem could there possibly be with a data set choosing 1940 as its origin?

 

 

In an interview with Vox , Steven Pinker, the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that the world has been safer than it has ever been in the last hundred years, with the two main causes being capitalism and an Enlightenment morality. According to Mr. Pinker, capitalism has reduced the benefits of war since people can know get things from their neighbors without having to steal them. Rather than people generating their wealth through conflict, they now generate it through mutually beneficial specialization and trade. In turn, the Enlightenment morality, which has come hand-in-hand with capitalism, has helped to reduce violence by changing the way that people have calculated the costs and benefits of foreign policy. As Mr. Pinker explains:

In the 19th century, there was this cliché from [Carl] von Clausewitz that war was just the continuation of politics by other means: you consider whether to go to war [like any other policy option]. Now that's just not something decent leaders do.

Finally, cost-benefit calculations depend on what counts as a "cost." If you lose several tens or hundreds of thousands of your own citizens, is that a cost? And how big a cost is it? Now, increasingly, that counts as a cost: leaders are less likely to see their young men as cannon fodder, which means countries are willing to endure other costs to avoid that one. That's a result of the rise of humanistic sentiments, as opposed to nationalistic or ideological ones.

The problem with Mr. Pinker’s thesis, at least the most obvious problem, is that the data used to argue for a seventy-year long peace since the Second World War ended is horrifically biased and, as rigorously demonstrated by Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Mr. Pinker’s naïve statistics don’t exactly hold up. The graph for the interview, produced by Vox and reproduced above, is close to fraudulent in the way that it cherry picks a starting date that has little to do with capitalism.

 

I won’t go deeply into Mssrs. Cirillo and Taleb’s argument. Instead, I will exhort any reader to at least skim it themselves. In short, the article demonstrates how cautious we have to be in talking about the trend of violence across human history and how critical assumptions are made if we were to simply look at the sample mean, as the observed mean is not an estimator of the true mean. On Twitter, Taleb also did what Vox’s hacks didn’t do and that is to graph more than mere battlefield casualties, as the destruction of war isn’t constrained to where the battles happen:

 

 

Getting back to my main target: Vox’s biased graph skews our entire understanding of the 20^th century by cutting out almost half of the pertinent data. Although the Second World War is generally the apocalyptic conflict that captures the imagination of contemporary commentators, its predecessor is the conflict that really set the stage for the 20^th century’s hot and cold wars. Furthermore, in the beginning of 1914, people could freely trade and move between borders to a much higher degree than they could now, so any argument for the capitalistic peace hypothesis needs to be able to address why the argument doesn’t hold for 1914. The world was, after all, interconnected in trade. Even Krupp, the supplier of most of Germany’s arms, had a business relationship with the British government, whose subjects would soon enough bleed out due to weapons produced by Krupp. 

Interconnectedness is, therefore, not a sure panacea to conflict, nor is the cosmopolitan attitude that comes along with interconnectedness. Indeed, the high degree interconnectedness of nations may very well have affected the statistical properties of war in the past century or so, since an interconnected world would probably have less small wars, yet there will always be a small chance of an apocalyptic war. Power laws are everywhere. Had Vox chosen, say, 1800 as the starting date for the graph, the graph would have told a story about how apocalyptic wars are very much possible in a capitalistic world. It would have been a story more compatible with a power-law world than a world made safe by the international division of labor. 

 

As a bit of an aside, one way I like thinking about the capitalistic peace hypothesis is with a basic thought experiment: Would a liberal Englishman reading a newspaper article about the ascent of Kaiser Frederick III, the liberal emperor, to the German throne, drinking his tea from China, his clothing made from Egyptian cotton spun in a Manchester mill, and with a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations upon his bookshelf have imagined the slaughter that would define the political lives of his successors? I doubt it. 

Depending on his naïveté, he would have probably thought that the worst atrocities of human history were behind the population. If he were a child of the Enlightenment like Pinker, I really doubt that he could have foreseen the purposeful starvation of the Ukrainian population, by the government to follow the Tsarist régime to boot, and he would have never imagined the industrial slaughter of the central and eastern European Jewish population. 

Of course, as a thought experiment, this thought needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. Nevertheless, I think it gets to a fundamental truth: The expounders of progress in the 19^th century would have been very disappointed with the fruits of the 20^th century. That, in turn, means that we should treat the notion of ‘progress’ with some caution. The broad pronouncements of the capitalistic peace hypothesis should ring a bit utopian to our ears.

 

Whatever philosophical problems I may have with Pinker’s narrative about Enlightenment morality, the most pressing problem with his view of history is statistical. Without a doubt, Vox’s data is biased. It cherry picks a starting date to create a graph that seemingly perfectly corroborates his hypothesis. Despite the seeming corroboration, starting a graph to illustrate capitalistic peace at 1940 is fraudulent and should be called out for being so. The commercial society didn’t emerge in the forge of the Second World War—indeed, the war did more to make a world safe for socialism than liberalism. Instead, the war broke out in a world where the international division of labor, innovation, and the pursuit of honest income was already apart of the daily lives of most belligerents. 

When we correct for the biased starting date and use more sophisticated statistical tools than a journalistic average, what we see is that the 20^th violent has been just as violent as many other periods of human history and even more violent than others. That’s certainly no argument for a fundamental change in the way that violence is treated in human society.