The power of a nation-state by no means consists only in its armed forces, but also in its economic and technological resources; in the dexterity, foresight and resolution with which its foreign policy is conducted; in the efficiency of its social and political organization. It consists most of all in the nation itself, the people; their skills, energy, ambition, discipline, initiative; their beliefs, myths and illusions. And it consists, further, in the way all these factors are related to one another. Moreover national power has to be considered not only in itself, in its absolute extent, but relative to the state’s foreign or imperial obligations; it has to be considered relative to the power of other states.
You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.
Mongol imperial power was largely based on military domination. Achieved through the brilliant and ruthless application of superior military tactics that combined a remarkable capacity for rapid movement of forces with their timely concentration, Mongol rule entailed no organized economic or financial system, nor was Mongol authority derived from any assertive sense of cultural superiority. The Mongol rulers were too thin numerically to represent a self-regenerating ruling class, and in many case, the absence of a defined and self-conscious sense of cultural or even ethnic superiority deprived the imperial elite of the needed subjective confidence.
In fact, the Mongol rulers proved quite susceptible to gradual assimilation by the often culturally more advanced peoples they had conquered. Thus, on of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, who had become the emperor of the Chinese part of the great Khan’s realm, became a fervent propagator of Confucianism; another became a devout Muslim in his capacity as the sultan of Persia; and a third became the culturally Persian ruler of Central Asia.
It was that factor — assimilation of the rulers by the ruled because of the absence of a dominant political culture — as well as unresolved problems of succession to the great Khan who had founded the empire, that caused the empire’s eventual demise. The Mongol realm had become too big to be governed from a single center, but the solution attempted — dividing the empire into several self-contained parts — prompted still more rapid local assimilation and accelerated the imperial disintegration. After lasting two centuries, from 1206 to 1405, the world’s largest land-based empire disappeared without a trace.
The overseas British Empire was initially acquired through a combination of exploration, trade, and conquest. But much like its Roman and Chinese predecessors or its French and Spanish rivals, it also derived a great deal of its staying power from the perception of British cultural superiority. That superiority was not only a matter of subjective arrogance on the part of the imperial ruling class but was a perspective shared by many of the non-British subjects. Cultural superiority, successfully asserted and quietly conceded, had the effect of reducing the need to rely on large military forces to maintain the power of the imperial center. By 1914, only a few thousand British military personnel and civil servants controlled about 11 million square miles and almost 400 million non-British peoples.
In brief, America stands supreme in the four decisive domains of global power: military, it has an unmatched global reach; economically, it remains the main locomotive of global growth, even if challenged in some aspects by Japan and Germany (neither of which enjoys the other attributes of global might); technologically, it retains the overall lead in the cutting-edge areas of innovation; and culturally, despite some crassness, it enjoys an appeal that is unrivaled, especially among the world’s youth — all of which gives the US a political clout that no other state comes close to matching. It is the combination of all four that makes America the only comprehensive global superpower.
It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Moreover, most Americans by and large do not derive any special gratification from their country’s new status as the sole global superpower.
The heart of the matter was simply that Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one. The desperate efforts to be strong on all fronts ran a serious risk of making the empire weak everywhere.
International society was like a frontier settlement without an effective police force:
In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs.
This essentially Hobbesian analysis delivered in, of all occasions, a Nobel Peace Prize lecture, marked America’s departure from the proposition that neutrality and pacific intent were adequate to serve the peace. For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interest, it could not expect others to respect them.
He noted that if Great Britain sacrificed the Continental nations to Germany, it would sooner or later be attacked on the British Isles. Nor would Great Britain take seriously a “guarantee” for its Empire. No German leader ever grasped the British view that any nation capable of protecting the Empire was also capable of conquering it.
It is easy for the policy of bluff to succeed in the short run, but in the long run it can succeed only if it is able to postpone forever the test of actual performance, and this even the highest quality of statecraft cannot assure.
The best that luck and political wisdom can do is to use the initial success of a policy of bluff for the purpose of bringing the actual power of one’s nation up to its reputed quality.
Without national morale, national power is either nothing but material force or else a potentiality which awaits its realization in vain. Yet the only means of deliberative improving national morale lie in the improvement of the quality of government. All else is a matter of chance.
Of all the factors which make for the power of a nation, the most important, and of the more unstable, is the quality of its diplomacy. All the other factors which determine national power are, as it were, the raw material out of which the power of a nation is fashioned. The quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines those different factors into an integrated whole, gives them direction and weight, and awakens their slumbering potentialities by giving them the breath of actual power. The conduct of a nation’s foreign affairs by tis diplomats is for national power in peace what military strategy and tactics by its military leaders are for national power in war. It is the art of bringing the different elements of national power to bear with maximum effect upon those points in the international situation which concern the national interest most directly.
Diplomacy, one might say, is the brain of national power, as national morale is its soul. If its vision is blurred, its judgment defective, and its determination feeble, all the advantages of geographical location, of self-sufficiency in food, raw materials, and industrial production, of military preparedness, of size and quality of population will in the long run avail a nation little.
The only nation which in modern times could maintain a continuous position of preponderance owed that position to a rare combination of potential superior power, a reputation for superior power, and the infrequent use of that superior power. Thus Great Britain was able, on the one hand, to overcome all serious challenges to its superiority because its self-restraint gained powerful allies and, hence, made it actually superior. On the other hand, it could minimize the incentive to challenge it because its superiority did not threaten the existence of other nations. When Great Britain stood at the threshold of its greatest power, it heeded the warning of its greatest political thinker — a warning as timely today as when first uttered in 1793:
Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never with to aggrandize ourselves in some way grandized? We are already in possession of almost all the commerce of the world. Our empire in India is an awful thing. If we should come to be in a condition not only to have all this ascendant in commerce, but to be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent upon our good pleasure, we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
Of all the achievements of Nixon’s first term, I consider the preservation of the sinews of our military strength among the most significant. Without it all efforts at relaxing tensions would have failed. For moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have a choice.
Even as a young man, Morgenthau resisted the idea that good intentions by themselves could prevail in the anarchic world of international affairs or that written documents could carry the weight of law without a credible threat of force behind them. Soothing words were never enough. Only the potential loss of blood demonstrated conviction. Or to put it another way, any attempt to end war required the possibility of going to war.
The great questions of history are decided not by speeches but by blood and iron.
You might think that more aggressive individuals would always fare better in the competition for evolutionary success. In fact, of course, too much of anything is a bad thing. An animal that fights too often, or too intensely, wastes energy and takes unnecessary risks. The trick is to get the balance right, to fight in the right contexts and at the right level of intensity, and only when the payoff is worthwhile.
France was not strong enough to oppose Germany in 1-to-1 struggle, something which all French governments were determined to avoid. If the mark of a Great Power is a country which is willing and able to take on any other, then France (like Austria-Hungary) had slipped to a lower position. But that definition seemed too abstract in 1914 to a nation which felt psychologically geared up for war, militarily stronger than ever, wealthy, and, above all, endowed with powerful allies.
And the Royal Navy ensured respect for British merchants in times of peace and protected their trade and garnered further colonial territories in war, to they country’s political and economic benefit. Trade, colonies, and the navy thus formed a “virtuous triangle,” reciprocally interacting to Britain’s long-term advantage.
But to the government in London, even when Attlee replaced Churchill, it was inconceivable that the country should not possess those weapons, both as a deterrent and because they “were a manifestation of the scientific and technological superiority on which Britain’s strength, so deficient if measured in sheer numbers of men, must depend.” They were seen, in other words, as a relatively cheap way of retaining independent Great Power influence — a calculation which, shortly afterward, appealed equally to the French. Yet, however attractive that logic appeared to be, it was weakened by practical factors: that neither state would possess the weapons, and delivery systems, for some years; and that their nuclear arsenals would be minor compared with those of the superpowers, and might indeed be made obsolete by a further leap in technology. For all the ambitions of London and Paris (and, later on, China) to join the nuclear club, this striving during the early post-1945 decades was somewhat similar to the Austro-Hungarian and Italian efforts to possess their own Dreadnought-type battleships prior to 1914. It was, in other words, a reflection of weakness rather than strength.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were in a position to appreciate the uncomfortable discovery made by so many Americans in the forties and fifties: enhanced power does not automatically, especially in the nuclear age, give a state greater security. From almost every point of view, economically and militarily, in absolute and in relative terms, the USSR under Brezhnev was much more powerful than it had been under Stalin. And yet along with this greatly increased strength came new international developments and foreign commitments that made the Soviet state more vulnerable to external danger and the turbulence of world politics than it had been, say, in 1952.
It was as clear to a Renaissance prince as it is to the Pentagon today that military power rests upon adequate supplies of wealth, which in turn derive from a flourishing productive base, from healthy finances, and from superior technology.
A large military establishment may, like a great monument, look imposing to the impressionable observer; but it is not resting upon a firm foundation (in this case, a productive national economy), it runs the risk of a future collapse.
Unless there is an enemy immediately at the gate, high defense spending in this century has nearly always provoked a “guns vs butter” controversy.
Not for the first time in history, therefore, there looms today a tension between a nation’s existence in an anarchic military-political world and its existence in a laissez-faire economic world; between on the one hand its search for strategic security, and on the other hand its search for economic security. Precisely because a top-heavy military establishment may slow down the rate of economic growth and lead to a decline in the nation’s share of world manufacturing output, and therefore wealth, and therefore power, the whole issue becomes one of the balancing the short-term security afforded by large defense forces against the longer-term security of rising production and income.
Besides, it is argued, a large army and navy did not bring Japan “security,” whether of the military or economic sort, in the 1930s; and it is difficult to see at present how an increase in defense spending could prevent a possible cutoff of Arab oil — which is a far greater danger to Japan strategically than, say, the hypothetical nuclear winter, and explains Tokyo’s desperate efforts to “lie low and say nothing” whenever there is a crisis in the Middle East.
History teaches that weakness is provocative. Time and again weakness has invited adventures which strength might well have deterred.
The playboy Maharaja — wealthy, Westernized and weakened to the point of political impotence — was to become a familiar figure throughout India.
In return for running the kingdoms for them and granting them a generous allowance, the British expected only one thing in return: supine loyalty. Generally they got it.
Opposites are two sides of the same thing; strength is the tension of opposites; “Strife” (competition) “is the father of all and the kin of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he made slaves and some free.” In the end, Heracleitus concluded, “strife is justice”; the competition of individuals, groups, institutions, states, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.
If the desire for peace turns into an avoidance of conflicts at all costs, if the just disparage power and seek refuge in their moral purity, the world’s fear of war becomes a weapon of blackmail by the strong; peaceful nations, large and small, will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. Yet if we pursue the ideological conflict divorced from strategy, if confrontation turns into an end in itself, we will lose the cohesion of our alliances and ultimately the confidence of our people.
In a crisis only the strongest strive for responsibility; the rest are intimidated by the knowledge that failure will demand a scapegoat. Many hide behind a consensus that they will be reluctant to shape; others concentrating on registering objections that will provide alibis after the event.
They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it. Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.
A nation becomes a great power only on one condition: that its military establishment and resources are such that it could really threaten decisive warfare. In the rank order of states a nation must fight a great war successfully in order to be truly great. The effective force of what an ambassador says is rather direct reflection of how mighty the general, how large and effective the fighting force standing back of him, is supposed to be. Military power determines the political standing of nations, and to the extent that nationalism is honored, to that extent generals and admirals share decisively in the system of national honor.
In such matters, it is well to remember that this is no chicken-and-egg issue. The chicken is power, and comes first, the egg is status.
So long as we live in an imperfect world, one containing enemies of democracy, we will need a military strictly committed to combat-effectiveness. Our liberal democracy must be protected by a bodyguard of lethal warriors, organized, trained, and equipped to dominate in battle.
An oft-spoken admonition in the Marines is this: when you’re going to a gun-fight, bring all your friends with guns. Having fought many times in coalitions, I believe that we need every ally we can bring to the fight. From imaginative military solution to their country’s vote in the UN, the more allies the better. I have never been on a crowded battlefield, and there is always room for those who want to be there alongside us.
Our young men had to harden their hearts to kill proficiently, without allowing indifference to noncombatant suffering to corm a callus on their souls. I had to understand the light and the dark competing in their hearts, because we needed lads who could do grim, violent work without becoming evil in the process, lads who could do harsh things yet not lose their humanity.
My command challenge was to convey to my troops a seemingly contradictory message: “Be polite, be professional - but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
Diplomacy depends above all on available assets. We had stronger hand; we played it.
As is the way with most forms of giving birth, the advent of the modern state not only took what it seemed to be an excruciatingly long time but was also a bloody mess. Virtually all issues were resolved with violence or the threat of it. Any hint of weakness was a invitation to further mayhem.
Partly for that reason, many Germans failed to understand why they had lost the war. They sought responsibility within Germany, pinning the blame on one another (the incompetent militarist or the November criminals, according to taste). The reality was that German defeat was exogenous, not endogenous: it was the inevitable result of trying to fight a global conflict without being a global power.
While the fertility celebration focused on those who possessed wombs, the political proceedings were open to all those who possessed weapons. This fact — that political participation was limited to those who could provide the force needed to secure or project the will of the group — ties to another core dimension of what makes states states: the ability to legitimate project force.
The generation governing the Soviet Union in the 1970s accumulated military and geopolitical power less as an expression of long-range geopolitical aims than as a substitute for them. Inevitably the pursuit of strength for its own sake frightened most of the non-communist world and brought about a tacit coalition of all industrial nations plus China against the Soviet Union, which made its ultimate collapse inevitable.
Like Roosevelt, he considered the national interest to be the defining objective in the pursuit of national strategy and foreign policy. Recognizing that national interests are often in tension with each other and not always reconcilable in so-called “win-win” outcomes, he saw the statesman’s task as identifying and managing those differences; this could be accomplished either by mitigating them or, when necessary and as a last resort, by overwhelming them with force. In such extreme cases, he was prone to apply a maxim he frequently put to his associates: “You pay the same price for conducting policy halfheartedly or hesitantly as for doing it the correct way and with conviction.”
If you’re strong, you don’t have to be smart.
In the 1980s, the dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was forced from power and a series of elections and coups ensued. When elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced out by his military in the 1991, the US put pressure on the coup leaders to turn over power peacefully. My destroyer, USS Barry, was dispatched to Haiti as part of an arms embargo (read: show of force) in the mid-1990s.
In these circumstances, it should become more evident to the Russian political elite that Russia’s first priority is to modernize itself rather than to engage in a futile effort to regain its former status as a global power.
Almost always the experiment of armor failed. Creatures adopting it tended to be unwieldy. They had to move relatively slowly. Hence they were forced to live mainly on vegetable food.
America’s security and prosperity depend on its political influence as much as on its military might. The US has been strong because it has been admired.
One of the first acts of the founder of the Song dynasty was to induce his generals to leave their posts in return for lavish pensions. The power of China’s neighbours caused a terrible dilemma for anyone who wished to exert supreme authority over all China, for to repulse raids from outside large standing armies had to be maintained near the frontiers, but the generals appointed to head these armies could easily become powerful enough to throw off central control. Thus it was necessarily either to risk invasion by reducing military strength, or to risk revolt by powerful Chinese generals. Having himself been placed on the throne by his army, the first Song emperor was only too aware of this problem. Whereas the Tang emperors had in general tried to maintain military strength, and had suffered loss of authority as a result, the Song dynasty usually chose to accept military weakness in order to reduce the risk of overthrow by their own subordinates. Barbarians could, after all, always be bought off, and under the Song they commonly were.
The simple truth is we will deal more effectively with China - and other nations - from strength, not weakness. For most of post WW2 period, our strength and resolve were never in question. This is no longer the case. While the US economy remains the biggest, most innovative on earth, we face two critical, defining challenges to our continued preeminence: our long-term fiscal situation is unsustainable, and our growth rate has been persistently anemic, exacerbating wealth and income disparities in our society. In the past decade we have seen just one year with a real GDP increase greater than 3 percent. We need to grow much faster to solve our fiscal problems and to create more and better-paying jobs.
With growing strength came a broader definition of what it took to stay safe. Success fuels insecurity and ambition.
It did not matter that war seemed unlikely in the here and now. The attitudes of other powers were changeable, and although they were reasonably well disposed to China today, one wanted the capacities to make sure one could deal with them if that changed tomorrow. No responsible Chinese government could have done otherwise.
The victorious army is victorious first and seeks battle latter. The defeated army does battle first and seeks victory later.
Crowe concluded that it made no difference what goal Germany avowed. Whichever course Germany was pushing, “Germany would clearly be wise to build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” And once Germany achieved naval supremacy, Crowe assessed, this in itself — regardless of German intentions — would be an objective threat to Britain, and “incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”
Under those conditions, formal assurance were meaningless. No matter what the German government’s professions were, the result would be “as formidable a menace to the rest of the world as would be presented by any deliberate conquest of a similar position by “malice aforethought.” Even if moderate German statesmen were to demonstrate their bona fides, moderate German foreign policy could “at any stage merge into” a conscious scheme for hegemony.
Có nhà chép sử trách Nguyễn Bá Nghi rằng tuy ông ấy muốn giảng hoà, nhưng không chịu nhường đất, cứ lấy lý mà cãi, chứ không biết rằng thời buổi cạnh tranh này, hễ cái sức đã không đủ, thì không có cái lý gì là phải cả. Vả chăng quân nước Pháp đã sang đánh lấy mấy tỉnh ở Nam kỳ là cốt để làm thuộc địa, lẽ nào tự nhiên lại đem trả lại. Bởi vậy sự giảng hoà cứ lôi thôi mãi không xong.
The practice of war, indeed its “art,” is to achieve an asymmetry over the opponent. Labeling wars as asymmetric is to me something of a euphemism to avoid acknowledging that my opponent is not playing to my strengths and I am not winning.
Unlike all other socially acceptable behavior except some sports, wars and fights are not competitions: to be second is to lose.
The art of tactics is more like a lethal brawl in the gutter where there are no rules or referees, and where low cunning matched with the maximum use of force available wins the day. The outcome of tactics is simple: kill or be killed.
If the costs of manufacturing or purchasing the weapons and maintaining the force are so great as to become a burden that adversely affects the economy of the society, then at best the society fails to prosper and at worst the leaders have destroyed the very thing they sought to defend. We now tend to see this outcome as a mark of an underdeveloped society, and also of an undemocratic society, since people will always seek prosperity over military strength, unless their survival is under threat.
In order to defend our state and advance our interests, we need armed forces. To win, we have learned from Napoleon that we must fight wars with all available resources. To this end we need to be able to mobilize a mass army with considerable reserves. But no mobilize we need to a have strategic plan so as to know what is required, in what order, and to what purpose. However, to have a strategy, we need an enemy. It is most logical to choose the worst case, and therefore be prepared for all lesser events.
Conflict has been, is and probably always will be an integral element of human society. It is vitally important to maintain the search for peace, but peace must be understood as a condition relating to conflict: not in the sense of the absence of conflict but as one in which that option is not chosen.
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. We have acknowledged war as at present the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species. War, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
The fighting instinct enters more obviously into the analysis. Nature develops it vigorously as an aid in getting food or mates; it arms every animal with organs of offense and defense, and lends to the physically weaker species the advantages of cunning and association.
A wise people will love peace and keep its powder dry.
As the old military adage goes, “If you’re in a fair fight, you’re doing it wrong.”
Militarism is the conception that the power of a nation consists primarily, if not exclusively, in its military strength, conceived especially in quantitative terms.
The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the floodgates, and the European imperial powers quickly secured similar deals: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia all signed new treaties in the wake of Perry’s return.
By 1858, the so-called Unequal Treaties regime was firmly in place: without a shot being fired, Japan found itself in a similar position to China after the Opium Wars (with the notable exception of that the Western powers agreed to prohibit opium trade with Japan). Japan had lost control of its tariffs, had opened its borders to trade and commerce with the West, and had even granted the privilege of extra-territoriality to the Western powers (which meant that foreign nationals were exempt from Japanese law even on Japanese soil). Rather than being justified by military defeat, however, these measures were imposed on Japan on the basis that it was not an equal member of international society — it was not a modern, industrial, constitutional polity. This humiliation was itself a powerful force fueling the development of a strong sense of nationalism in late 19th-century Japan, as well as a key factor driving the revolution to come. At all costs, Japan sought to end the Unequal Treaties.
For the first time in centuries, the bakufu was shown to be militarily inadequate to the task of controlling the realm; its last and most basic claim to legitimacy was destroyed. In the following months, there was an explosion of social unrest and peasant uprisings across the nation, reflecting the crisis of legitimacy that was exacerbated by the sight of the defeated bakufu army marching home, and also by the omen of change represented by the death of Emperor Komei in 1867.
In any sort of a contest — financial, mental, or physical — it’s an enormous advantage to have opponents who have been taught that it’s useless to even try.
Either side can force the 2nd path on the other while it takes both sides to follow the 1st path. In the back of the minds of all parties, regardless of which path they choose, should be their relative powers.
Control over or access to critical resources and industrial infrastructure, after all, were the chief determinants of long-term military capabilities.
Vanderberg remarked that it seemed that the American negotiating position would insure a permanent Cold War. Acheson retorted that he did not think the Cold War would be permanent, but it was true that the American negotiating posture would do nothing to stop it. His advisers had been unable to find anything to offer the Russians. Be that as it may, the administration’s goal was not to resolve differences but to gather strength.
Without superior aggregate military strength in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of containment — which in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion — is no more than a policy of bluff.
But how about the waste, the costs, the endless crises, the dissipation of resources on the arms race, the wars on the periphery? These, too, were part of the legacy of building strength and seeking preponderance. The configuration of power sought by Acheson meant insecurity for the Kremlin.
But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.
War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.
In war there is no substitute for victory.
“Why,” my soldiers asked of me, “surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” I could not answer.