Raison d'Etat

Foreign policy experts, for the most part, focus on realism (though one person's realism is not the same as another).  There's a peculiar sort of logic to it, in that experts are not concerned with what is morally right or wrong...the only true test is whether or not you achieve your aims.  On behalf of your nation. 


I deliberately made that a little vague.  Most of those aims are, to be sure, to make your own nation strong and prosperous.  Or secure.  Or somesuch.  All are nicely covered by saying "achieve your aims".


That's part of why figures like Cardinal Richelieu and Otto von Bismarck are such complex and fascinating characters.  Not saints, no.  Yet masters of their time, and mostly in service to their state.  (For good or ill). 


It's hard to judge characters like this, as they are definitely not 'nice', or 'good', or necessarily people we should admire or want to follow.  They managed to do great things, though. 


I brought this up because if we're using Raison d'Etat, or realpolitik, or some other form of realism to determine our own policies than (using that logic) the only way to judge the decisions made is by their results.


It's a harsh method, one that allows no wiggle room for error.  Nor for good intentions.


And by that rubric, American policy in the last 60 or 70 years has not been all that great.


Yes, we saw the end of the Soviet Union.  Yes, we're a very powerful nation.  Our policies haven't been a complete disaster, though how much of that is because of our innate strengths I don't know.  We're a large country, with fairly secure borders (comparatively speaking), a well educated populace and a lot of resources.  We're also dealing with all sorts of turmoil and change.  Globalization, the Information Age, nationalism, multi-nationalist corporations, environmental change...there's been all sorts of challenges.  People have been doing the best they know how, and this isn't meant to point fingers and condemn anyone.


At the same time, can anyone look at Vietnam and say that the United States came out of it stronger?  Can anyone look at our history with Iran and think we're safer, or more secure? 


Can anyone look at the financial crisis, the recession, Syria, rising tensions in the South China sea, tensions with Russia and China (and the Philippines) and think we've been doing well?


Again, I'm not trying to call anyone in particular out.  It's just...


It's just that foreign policy, national security, and the Washington consensus has fads.  Just like businesses, and fashion, and just about everything else.  People aren't ever going to be thrown under the bus for being wrong, if everyone else was wrong too.  So even though 'nobody' saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming when it did (as one example) nobody was going to be penalized for that failure.  After all, everyone made the same mistake.


And nobody was going to be penalized for failing to predict the financial crisis, since hardly anybody credible saw it coming.


Again, this is hard to do.  Like predicting 9/11.  Once you know something happened you can go back and pick through the pieces, figure out which clues foreshadowed the event.  But figuring it out in real time?  Sorting out those pieces, putting them together with the other pieces, and figuring it out in time to actually act on it?


Very, very hard.


And something that's absolutely essential.

Tunnel Vision, and the Problems of Critiquing the Past

Before going into more recent history, I wanted to touch base on some very ancient history.  Namely, the Sicilian Expedition where Athens invaded Sicily during their war with Sparta.  Take a look at this map, from the Wikipedia article previously linked:





Seems kind of crazy that Athens and their allies (in red) would invade Sicily during their fight with Sparta and Sparta's allies (in blue). 


If you read the wikipedia article, you can see why it doesn't seem as crazy as it sounded at first.  There was some prior history, Sicily could aid their enemy, the Athenians had initial success, there were some odd circumstances that were probably not considered predictable (i.e. Nicias's attempt to stop it backfired and the invasion became so large that a defeat was more disastrous than it could have been; also the whole strange tale of Alcibiades.)


You can dig into the weeds, of course, and argue over what played the largest role in the disaster, whether disaster was truly inevitable, and more.  Yet if you pull back a little bit and look at the map, I think there are some obvious dangers. 


First of all, the distance is a problem.  Athens is farther away, which means there's an inevitable delay in sending supplies, communication, and response time.  I particularly want to point out how hard it is to ship horses for the cavalry.


Second, the resources sent to Sicily were not there to assist with allies closer by. (I kind of agree with Pericles, who wanted Athens to consolidate their allies closer to home.)  I think there's some truth to assessing the economics behind a war, though the connection is not always as clear as you'd think.  Anyways, triremes are expensive, and mounting an expedition like this used a lot of Athenian economic power.  Resources that could have been used elsewhere, to better effect.


There's something else that leaps out at me, though given how little Sparta knew about building a navy it doesn't seem relevant in this particular context.  Back then sailors generally hugged the coastline, as you can see by the red route on the map.  That means Athens is sailing past enemy territory for a large part of the journey.  If the Spartans did have more of a navy, they could have blockaded or interdicted the Athenians on any attempt to reach Sicily.  I suppose it's not always a bad idea.  The Allies hopscotched past islands in the Pacific during World War II, and it worked.  I just don't like the potential for an enemy to cut our supply lines, not unless it's a deliberate (and well thought out) strategy as in WWII.


I suppose of Sicily were some sort of key terrain, it might have justified the expedition.  But it really wasn't.  The level of support Sicily might have provided to Sparta was not worth the cost to Athens.


If you want to dig deeper into ancient history, there's plenty to look at.  I brought it up for two reasons.  The first is to point out how easy it is to know who was right and who was wrong when it's ancient history.  The truth, however, is that in the here and now it's always hard to know who to believe.  Who is most accurately assessing the situation.  There's always white noise, always information you have to filter out.  We can hear about the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades and wonder why Nicias didn't win at the time...


But if we were actually there at that point in time we probably would have believed Alcibiades instead.


The second reason?  Even a couple thousand years later we can argue over what did or didn't lead to failure.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

I have a draft post I'm working on, discussing ways that our tunnel vision during the Cold War negatively impacted our foreign policy.  Yet I find myself writing about something else today, and that's partly because of this article.  My own experience was not all that traumatic.  And yet this particular section resonated with me:

"Nobody talks about the boredom, the impossibility of finding meaning in 8 hours work in an air-conditioned office after you just spent months working 18 hours a day on a battlefield where your touch altered history. Nobody talks about the surreal experience of trying to remember how you got excited about a book, or clothing, or even a car or house. On the battlefield, in the burning building, the ground trembled, we felt our impact in everything we did, until the world seemed to ripple at our touch. Back home, or off shift, we are suddenly the subject of sympathetic glances, of silly, repetitive questions. The anonymity of the uniform is nothing compared the anonymity of comfort. We drown in it, cut off from what makes it worthwhile for others, unable to carve out a piece of it for ourselves."

It resonated on a couple of different levels.  First, because of that potential job that fell through the other day.  I struggle in the civilian world.  Not to the degree that there's an obvious problem.  I've got a good paying job, I'm doing well enough.  It's just...well, the joy of learning new things distracted me for a while.  Made it easy to forget how unimportant our job really is.  Will it make that much of a difference whether something ships today or ships tomorrow?  Or (now that I manage the returns center), would it really make a difference if the customer gets their credit today vs. tomorrow?  I mean, sure...it shouldn't take three months.  But most of the time if a customer really needs their credit they'll contact customer care, who contacts me, and we pull their order out of the queue and process it right away.  The rest of it?  Not such a big deal.

These are the things I don't feel like I can say at work.  After all, I'm a supervisor.  I'm supposed to care about being better, faster, etc.  And I do...I get it.  It's just...nobody is going to die if we don't get it done.  Nobody is being shot at over what we're doing.

So I've been hoping to find a job that fills my need to make a difference, that ties in my own interests (amply found here on the blog) with some sort of need that pays enough to do it professionally.  Sure, I've got my hobby horse here on the blog...but it's not like I'm in a position to put my ideas into practice.  I'm more like an armchair quarterback.

This job had the potential to change that.  The potential to do something I'm interested in, that I find meaningful, and that I think I'd be pretty good at.  And...well, it ain't  happening.

On the one hand, nothing has changed.  I'm still exactly where I've been for the past four years.  And on the other hand...

On the other hand, I increasingly find myself stuck.  Unable to see the way forward, to see a path that matches my skillset to the type of job I want to do.

Counter-Terrorism, Oversimplification, Etc.

In college I took hapkido and tai chi.  Even a little bit of push hands.  It's been years since I've done any of it, but some of the lessons stuck with me still.

Push hands is a little bit like an old childhood game.  The one where you put your front foot next to someone else's foot, grab each other by the hand and try to unbalance the other person.  Except, of course, the stances and point of contact are different.

As for lessons learned - first of all, when you're in contact with the other person you can kind of sense where their balance is.  Where they're moving to, and from.  (In the military sense - when you're in contact with the enemy you have a sense of where they're moving to.  It's when you lose all contact that they become unpredictable.)

Second - in push hands, once someone loses balance the other person has control.  If your opponent loses their balance, you control where they go.  In order to win, you need to keep your balance while making them lose theirs.  If they're moving towards you, maybe you should go with it...even aid them in that movement.  Make them overextend.  Then they lose their balance, and you can direct them easily. 

So many people think battle is straightforward.  Attack.  Block.  Swing, block, swing.  A fight like that can easily become about brute strength, stamina, and speed.  It's comparatively simple...and makes you forget that there are other options.  Instead of blocking, just give them a little assist.  As they move farther and faster than they intended, they overextend and lose their balance.  Meeting strength with weakness can do the same thing.  (This is all situationally dependent, of course.)

So Vietnam, for example, could be seen as an overextension by the United States.  We lost our balance.  Funny enough, though, the Soviet Union then overextended in Afghanistan.

I brought this up for two reasons.  First because we all too often get locked into an 'attack/block' mentality.  It's important to remember that there are other options. 

The second reason?  We have to know when we're overextending. 

On a side note - when reading about the spy games during the Cold War it seemed that the Soviet Union regularly kicked our butts.  This may be a misleading impression, since I'm sure there are some things still classified...but the Soviets generally seemed to do better at building their spy networks.  Yet they're the ones that fell apart in the 80's...so apparently winning the spy game wasn't as critical as you'd think.

I'm part of that curious generation just old enough to remember the Cold War without being forged in it...and young enough to adapt to the internet and all the new technology that came out since then.  The logic of the Cold War was very black and white.  And during that time, we misread situations time and time again.  Focused more on communism, for example, and overlooked nationalism.  I believe our misreading the situation caused a lot of damage to our own national security. 

In the last decade or so terrorism has become the new thing...and I see some of the same mentalities.  Black vs. White.  Oversimplification of the issues.  When you see situations through that lens, you are just as likely to misread the situation and propose strategies that backfire.

This bothers me.  I think I hate terrorists as much as anyone, and I don't want them to succeed.  Yet I find, time and again, that the people who ought to be allies seem blindly determined to think in terms of attack/block...to the point where they actually make it harder to fight terrorism.

Personal update

Disappointing news today.  I've been doing a bit of job hunting, and didn't pass on to the next phase of a job I really, really was interested in.

Mesmerized by the Hard Choices

As a child, I remember reading an illustrated version of Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun.  The Wind, no matter how hard it blowed, only made the woman (in the illustration I recall) clutch her coat more tightly.  When the sun came out, however, it soon grew too warm and she took the coat off...thus making the Sun the winner.

Changing gears a bit...I linked to an article a while back that discussed a new way of interrogating suspects.  It mentioned that "If you want accurate information, be as non-accusatorial as possible—the HIG term is “rapport-building.”

This is apparently backed up by science, whereas the classic good cop/bad cop can lead to false confessions and doesn't actually have much of a scientific basis.  So why do we focus on that sort of interrogation so much? 

I personally think it's about power.  Control.  The interrogator wants to feel like they forced someone to talk. Made them 'crack'.  Overpowered them.  (Though sometimes that can get used against you, as Usual Suspects illustrated so nicely).

People think that in order to get what they want it has to be difficult, a competition...one that they win.  So even though you may get a better interrogation by building rapport, it doesn't satisfy as much.

Kind of reminds me of the complaints, when I was in the service, of the "kinder, gentler Army".  Don't get me wrong - if being soft on recruits makes them less capable of handling the pressures of war, it's a problem.  A big problem.  And yet somehow this 'kinder, gentler' army fought in Iraq and Afghanistan without too many reports of cowardice or cracking under pressure.  Is it because those wars weren't on the level of World War II?  That intermittent mortar attacks and IEDs isn't the same as facing a constant barrage of artillery?  Or were the fears of softness overblown?

I'm not trying to say any one way is right or not, to be honest.  I talked about ideologies and underlying assumptions before, and I freely admit I have my own.  Yet the heart of mine is that 'the map is not the territory', that all ideologies are just ways of making sense of a complex world...and that means they're always oversimplified.  (If they weren't, they'd be useless).  So I figure you have to consider which theory or ideology is most appropriate to the situation at hand, and shouldn't get too hung up on any particular one of them. 

That said, I feel some of the arguments for harder, harsher policies are less about a sound strategy and more about emotions.  Making you feel like you defeated something (or someone).  Making it seem like you fought the good fight.   That we have to defeat terrorism by waterboarding, for example, even though there's good reason to question the effectiveness of those techniques.

Good luck convincing anyone who supports such techniques, though.  It's the kind of thing that a supporter has to buy into whole heartedly.  Otherwise you'd have to consider whether or not you're a good person.  You can justify harming someone if you say "it saved lives" and "it was the only way".  Plus there's a healthy dose of de-humanizing.  "They deserve it".  "They would do worse to us if they could.  They have done worse".

But if it wasn't, if there was a better way, and one that satisfied your conscience and didn't involve doing horrible things to another human being - then what does that make you?

Analysis, Prescriptions, Etc.

Due to previous experience as an analyst, I know that the way we describe something often shapes the decisions made to affect it...whatever that 'something' is.  I suppose that's not too different from 'framing' the issue, in a sense.

It goes beyond that, though, as well.  There is a lot of white noise out there, so you have to pick and choose what's relevant.  What's worth noting.  And what isn't.  Add to that the usual complexities of life (i.e. delayed responses, difficulty attaching outcomes to causes, etc) and sometimes it's a wonder we can predict anything.

On this, my second blog, I've been trying to keep my posts a bit more focused...and less meta.  It's hard to do justice to the topics, though, since so much depends on my particular worldview and how I filtered things in the first place.  If I skip all that, then I can write a simple and clear analysis that may disagree with someone else's analysis because I didn't go into the underlying assumptions.

I got onto the topic for a variety of reasons.  First, because of where we are in history today.  Can we "Make America Great Again"?  Did we stop being great?  Were we ever great?  If we were great and aren't any more, then what caused us to stop being great?  (As analysis often drives the conclusion...that's a pretty key question.  I think most people know what Donald Trump's answer to this is.  Even if you agree with him that America was great and is not any more, you can disagree on why or how that happened and come up with a completely different solution.)

Second - well, pinpointing how or why something occurred in human history is notoriously difficult.  Just look at all the books that discuss the fall of the Roman Empire.  Or The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and other books in a similar vein.  It's hard to do analysis like this on historical events, it's even harder to do in the present time.  Particularly because people have reasons for pushing one particular cause over another, and nobody knows what the end result will be.

I kind of wanted to add something here, as well.  Sometimes the side that 'wins' does so because they made fewer mistakes.  It doesn't mean that they had the perfect strategy...and sometimes they can mistake the real reason for their success.  I think of that, in particular, when I consider why dictators take power (and the lessons their offspring all too often learn about how to keep power).  A strongman may seem like a blessing when you've lived through a devastating civil war, and many people seem to think the brutality of a dictator is what allowed them to end the devastation.  Yet I think Caligula shows that brutality in and of itself isn't enough, at least if your Praetorian Guard decides to do away with you. 

So anyways.  With regards to foreign policy, there are a variety of theories on war, international affairs, etc.  There's the concept of realpolitik, there are realists, idealists, etc.  The policies you prescribe often have to do with what your underlying assumptions are, and those schools of thought have a lot to do with that.

This also gets at the hidden transcripts I talked about earlier.  Some of the people making these decisions believe they're making the ugly but necessary calls, the ones that look horrible in the light of day...yet they feel that's the way it has to be done.  And has always been done.  That any criticism shows you're too idealistic and should never see the hidden (ugly) inner workings that lead to such decisions.  Sort of like the famous quote that "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

So there can be a couple of competing narratives, two of which seem particularly relevant to America for the past fifty years or so.

In one, the people can not understand the reasons for decisions that look wrong on the face of it, and so must be sheltered and protected from the dirty work.

In the other, the elite are trying to hide their corrupt and self-serving decisions from the light of day.  Whether it was justified or not, doing so maintains their own control (and at the expense of the people.)

I said the last fifty years or so because these competing narratives seem to play out with the Vietnam War.  That is, you have some people who justify all sorts of things in order to fight Communism.  I am going to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say that they truly did think Communism was a tremendous threat that needed to be fought with every tool at their disposal.  These are the ones, then, who feel practically betrayed when the public so directly turned against them.  They aren't willing to question the decisions they made, to consider whether they were truly the best options at hand.  You see a more recent version of this with George W. Bush's argument that we needed to "stay the course" in Iraq.  In this worldview, the right decisions are being made and the right things are being done...ugly though they may sometimes appear...and we just need to stick with it and see it through.  (This is not helped by the fact that sometimes sheer perseverance really does win the day.  I would argue, however, that anyone who is horrified at Mao's willingness to lose 300 million Chinese should understand that perseverance can be a devastating way to 'win' and should probably not be your sole strategy.)

On the flip side, you have an entire generation that grew to distrust their government (because of Vietnam, and more)...and see repeated attempts to hide information less as a a necessary part of the business and more as a sign that we are no longer a true democracy.  That our government doesn't really respond to the will of the people, so much as to that secretive cabal of government, business and military interests.