Nation-building and modernization as persistent themes in U.S. foreign policy

'Nation building,' as the phrase is used in U.S. foreign policy circles, has long been closely tied to the notion of modernization.  Michael E. Latham traces this connection from the Truman to the G.W. Bush administrations in The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Cornell Univ. Press, 2011; link).          

Aspects of modernization theory had antecedents in classical social theory, notably Weber and Marx, even if the debt to the latter, at least, was not one that U.S. modernization theorists of the 1950s and '60s were generally eager to acknowledge.  As it took shape in the Cold War-era academy, modernization theory assumed, as Latham notes, that all societies passed through essentially the same gate from tradition to modernity and further assumed that the correct policies, properly implemented, could speed up the passage.  The premise was that the U.S. could simultaneously contain Communism and spark a transformation of the 'developing' world, rapidly improving living standards and propelling it into the twentieth century by means that would avoid the brutal coercion that marked, for instance, Mao's efforts to transform China. 

Modernization theorists saw the supposedly universal transition from tradition to modernity as stressful and, thus, unsettling to individual psyches.  The MIT political scientist Lucian Pye's 1956 book Guerrilla Communism in Malaya argued that Communism's appeal was not primarily ideological but psychological; Pye contended that Communism appealed in particular to young men from the countryside trying to escape from the anxiety and "personal uncertainty generated by the jarring social transition from tradition to modernity" (Latham, p.48).  The emphasis on psychology reflected the influence of Harold Lasswell, who had taught both Pye and Gabriel Almond (47).      

If the problem was the psychological strain of the transition to modernity, then the prescription, especially for poor societies in which revolutionaries mounted armed challenges to the government, was "a pattern of nation building that would replace the institutions of the insurgency with those of the state and give the peasant caught in the 'transition'...a renewed sense of the potential for personal advance" (138).  As applied in Vietnam in the early '60s, part of this prescription involved trying to expand the central government's reach into the countryside.  Somewhat like the king's agents in the medieval France of Philip Augustus, Ngo Dinh Diem's provincial and district chiefs would travel around their domains and supposedly "bridge the gap between the central government and the rural masses" (134). 

Another aspect of attempted nation-building in South Vietnam involved relocation of the rural population.  This was the strategic hamlet program, designed to move about 15 million people into fortified villages where the NLF (Viet Cong) would be unable, so the thinking went, to get at them.  As Robert Packenham writes, the program "reflected a curious mix of forced-labor and liberal-constitutionalist tactics," although "[t]he first element...seems to have been implemented more consistently than the second" (Liberal America and the Third World, pb. ed. 1976, p.83).

In America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill & Wang, 2008; link), David Milne describes the strategic hamlet program as follows (p.105):

The director of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, presented the program's blueprint -- "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam" -- to [President] Kennedy on February 2, 1962.... Hilsman correctly identified that South Vietnam's villages provided sustenance, recruits, and a safe haven for the NLF. To prevent the insurgents from requisitioning these vital commodities -- often through coercion -- he...proposed that a series of fortified hamlets be established with bamboo-spiked ditches dug around the exterior and barbed wire attached to the hamlet itself. South Vietnam's villagers would then be removed from their traditional homes and relocated to these fortified oases of non-communist security.

The program was not a success; by "the spring of 1963, only 1,500 of the 8,500 strategic hamlets remained viable" (107).  Milne observes that the "implementation of the strategic hamlet program was like watching an infant attempt to hammer a square plastic block through a triangle-shaped hole" (109).  The U.S. escalation decisions of 1965 changed the character of the Vietnam war, and by "January 1968 the intensified war in the countryside created approximately four million refugees" (Latham, 142).  By 1970 rural 'pacification' programs had been dropped entirely.  

As Latham observes, modernization theory and nation-building waned in the late '60s and '70s but made a comeback, albeit in altered form, in the late '80s and even more after the end of the Cold War. After the U.S. invaded Panama in Dec. 1989 and removed Noriega, whom it had previously supported, the first Bush administration embarked on nation-building via "Operation Blind Logic, the appropriately named plan for the reconstruction of Panama," which "was extremely ambitious and deeply flawed" (195). The Clinton administration's plans for Somalia were equally ambitious, with UN Ambassador (as she then was) Madeleine Albright stating that "we will embark on an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning, and viable member of the community of nations" (quoted, 197).  After the Somalia mission led to 'Black Hawk Down,' the Clinton administration retreated from this sort of rhetoric.  (Also, as Martha Finnemore notes [in The Purpose of Intervention, p.83], the Somalia intervention was partly prompted by defensiveness over charges by then-UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali "that powerful states were attending to disasters in white, European Bosnia at the expense of non-white, African Somalia....")

George W. Bush opposed nation-building as a presidential candidate in 2000, but that changed with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.  Bush declared in a Nov. 2003 speech that "[t]he establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution" (quoted in Latham, 204).  Of course the Pentagon basically ignored planning for the reconstruction of Iraq and cut the State Dept. and other agencies, which had conducted such planning, out of the loop. (Where nation-building or postwar reconstruction has proved more successful, it is likely to have been the result of UN or other multilateral peacekeeping missions with broad mandates.  Latham says that such peacekeeping missions have "rarely met expectations" [199], but I think that statement's too sweeping; some haven't but some have.)

What about the present?  Latham sees "the ghosts of  modernization" hovering around the activities of the U.S. and its allies in both Iraq (at least up until U.S. forces withdrew) and Afghanistan.  Clearly the U.S. and NATO/ISAF have defined their Afghanistan mission not just in military but also in socio-political ('development') terms.  The context (corruption, the effect of decades of war, etc.) ensured that Afghan development was going to be extremely hard and, as Latham observes, the effort has not been funded at the levels of post-war reconstruction in e.g. the ex-Yugoslavia or E. Timor (if one takes population sizes into account).  Moreover, too much emphasis was put on 'the market' as opposed to building a strong central government, in line with prevailing neoliberal doctrine.  While there have been some successes (e.g., in opening up more opportunities for women), the overall picture seems not very encouraging (e.g., a recent WaPo headline mentioned roads built in Afghanistan with U.S. funds that are now crumbling for lack of maintenance).  Today the U.S. and its allies probably would settle for an Afghanistan in which the level of violence is kept under control; the Taliban, if brought into the government, is kept to a subordinate role; and the government is able to control key cities and transport routes.  Whether even this outcome will be achieved is an open question.

On the broader issue of approaches to development, Latham is right to emphasize the wisdom contained in some of the late-1970s emphasis on 'basic needs' and distributional issues, which challenged the then "dominant narrative" (215) that the rising tide of growth would lift all boats.  Even in China, where millions in recent years have left rural poverty for  factory employment, a more egalitarian growth path would have reduced poverty more.  The 1970s critics of modernization were also right to raise questions about the environmental implications of growth, even if some of the specific predictive claims might have missed the mark.  It's hard to disagree with Latham's view that development should focus on "locally centered" (216) efforts directed at "the problems of poverty, inequality, and environment, and combining them with a renewed focus on an expanded conception of human rights and social justice" (215), tempered by the acknowledgment that it will not be easy.

Added later: Jennifer Clapp (Univ. of Waterloo) reviewed Latham's book, along with Nick Cullather's The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (2010), in Perspectives on Politics 11:2 (June 2013).

Added 8/24/17: For a roundtable on Latham's book co-sponsored by H-Diplo and the Int'l Security Studies Forum, see here. 

Quote of the day

"Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too. Straight history, auto-revised history, history without handles, for all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn't answered, it wasn't even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of people felt like running in there to bring it out."

-- Michael Herr, Dispatches (pb. ed., 1978), pp.49-50.

Friday evening linkage

-- Nick Turse's book on the Vietnam War has an attention-getting title. The Amazon summary of the book refers to a general "obsessed with body counts." That's one lasting effect (there was more than one, of course) of the Vietnam War on the U.S. military: it does not do body counts today. In fact, the U.S. military makes no effort, AFAIK, to keep track of numbers of enemy combatants or of civilians killed in the course of operations in Afghanistan (that was the case for Iraq also). Turse on Moyers, here.

-- Richard Wolff, also on Moyers, here. (h/t) 

Fort Sumter and the Tonkin Gulf

I recently read Andrew Delbanco's essay The Abolitionist Imagination [Amazon link].  He traces the abolitionist impulse through U.S. history and into the present, detecting, for instance, "structural" (if not "substantive") similarities between the movement to abolish slavery and the anti-abortion (or 'pro-life') movement of today (pp.48-49), and  the movement for Prohibition in the early twentieth century (pp.46-47).

Delbanco's attitude toward the original abolitionists is ambivalent. Moreover, he views with some sympathy those who, despite being opposed to slavery, declined to join the abolitionists' ranks. He closes with a quotation from John Jay Chapman, who spoke of "the losing heroism of conservatism" with reference to "New England judge[s] enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law" (e.g., Lemuel Shaw) despite their personal opposition to it (pp.54-55).
 
My attitude to the abolitionists is more positive than Delbanco's, but I think he makes some interesting points even if I'm not persuaded by them. Toward the end of the essay he provocatively compares the Civil War to recent (and not-so-recent) American wars abroad (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). I don't think these comparisons work. A quote or two will indicate the tenor of his argument.

He writes (p.43):

...[I]f we imagine ourselves living in the America of the 1850s, how sure can we be of our judgment on the question of intervention in what people of advanced views today might call "the indigenous culture" of the South?

Would we have regarded the firing on Fort Sumter as the abolitionists did -- as a welcome provocation to take up arms against an expansionist power? Or would we have regarded it as a pretext for waging war, akin to that notorious event in every baby boomer's memory, the Gulf of Tonkin incident? If we could have known in advance the scale of the ensuing carnage, would we have sided with those who considered any price worth paying to bring an end to slavery? Or would we have voted for patience, persuasion, diplomacy, perhaps economic sanctions -- the alternatives to war that most liberal-minded people prefer today in the face of manifest evil in faraway lands?

He pushes the point a little further (p.44):

Most of us live quite comfortably today with our knowledge of cruelty and oppression in nation-states whose exports are as essential to our daily lives as slave-grown cotton once was to the "free" North--yet few of us take any action beyond lamenting the dark side of "globalization." Are we sure we would have sided with those who insisted that all Americans--even if they had never seen, much less owned,a slave--had a duty forcibly to terminate the labor system of a region that many regarded, to all intents and purposes, as a foreign country? None of these questions yields an easy answer--but they should at least restrain us from passing easy judgment on those who withheld themselves from the crusade, not out of indifference but because of conscientious doubt.

An obvious problem with this line of thought is that although the South might have been seen in the North as a foreign country, the South was in fact part of the same country. As Delbanco himself observes earlier in the essay, Lincoln's original war aim was to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. It was only in the summer of 1862 that Lincoln's "mind was opening to new possibilities" (p.13), leading him to free the slaves in the Confederate states but not in border states that had remained in the Union.

Another point is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was, at least on some accounts, completely manufactured: "North Vietnamese gunboats were probably operating in the area [of the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner], but no evidence has ever been produced to demonstrate that they committed hostile acts" (G. Herring, America's Longest War, 2d. ed., p.120). By contrast, there is no doubt that Fort Sumter was fired upon.

Then, too, it is far from clear that going to war to preserve an independent South Vietnam (i.e., independent of absorption into the Communist North) constituted in practice an especially noble goal, given that South Vietnam's rulers, from Diem to Thieu (and pre-Diem as well), were not exactly paragons of democratic legitimacy. By contrast, going to war to preserve the Union seems considerably more justified -- though not, I concede, an open-and-shut case. And to be sure, the Civil War proved very costly in terms of lives and I agree that has to be weighed (cf. Delbanco, p.54).


All this doesn't answer Delbanco's question of how sure we can be of our judgments had we been living in the 1850s. But it does suggest that some of the comparisons he draws are more than a bit strained.
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Note: Delbanco's essay, originally a lecture, was published with several responses. I've looked at the responses but not properly read them.

Big countries, small wars, different mindsets

Political scientists and other scholars have spilled a lot of ink on the question of why big states lose small wars, i.e., wars against weaker adversaries. Phil Arena recently pointed me to
Patricia Sullivan's 2007 JCR article, which I have looked at (meaning looked at, not read every single word of). Her main argument, put in simplified form, is that big states are more likely to lose small wars when their objective is coercive, i.e., when it requires the adversary to change its behavior, as opposed to when the objective can be accomplished simply with brute force (i.e., overthrowing a regime or conquering territory). The main reason, she argues, is that big states are more likely to underestimate the costs of achieving coercive objectives. Sullivan has a typology of objectives on a continuum with brute-force objectives at one end and coercive objectives at the other. [Cf. Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966).]

Interestingly, the objective "maintain regime authority" falls in the middle of Sullivan's continuum. This is interesting because if you had to choose a three-word label for the U.S. objective in Afghanistan, it would be "maintain regime authority" (against those who seek to overthrow it). That was also basically the U.S. objective in Vietnam, as Sullivan suggests (i.e., the stated aim was to maintain an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam).

The main point I want to make is that looking at this article highlighted (once again) for me the distinction between those who emphasize the idiographic in their methods versus the nomothetic, or to put it in simpler terms (this would probably drive PTJ up the wall, never mind), the difference between those who do historical case studies and those who do formal modeling or quantitative work (yes, some people do both in the same book or article, but we'll put that aside for now).

Sullivan's approach would suggest that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam are basically similar because the objective (maintain regime authority) was the same. Of course she would acknowledge there are local differences, but she is not concerned with exploring them; she is interested in a model that explains, at some kind of quasi-'law-like' level, when big states lose small wars, and she gets there via a 'homogenizing' approach, so to speak. So if you took her approach, even though her concern is not explicitly with policy debates or decision-making, you might be quite receptive to analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam.

A case-study approach might suggest something quite different. As opposed to a receptivity to the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy, it might suggest a wariness about such an analogy and indeed about analogies in general. Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War (1992) showed quite convincingly that analogies to Munich and to the Korean War exercised a harmful influence on the Johnson administration's Vietnam policymaking. The takeaway lesson of that book, one could argue, is that because even smart people find it difficult to use analogies properly (i.e., in a sufficiently discriminating way), one should be wary of the mobilization and use of historical analogies, especially in a broad-brush way (e.g. "Afghanistan is like Vietnam"), in policy debates. Each case should be looked at primarily on its own, in other words.

One might say there is no contradiction here. Sullivan is interested in explaining outcomes, not prescribing a method for policymakers to use in decision-making. Khong is interested in showing why and how policymakers tend to misuse historical analogies. They are doing different things but not contradictory things. OK. Nonetheless, if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases and treating them as data points to be coded. Whereas if you have a more idiographic mindset, you might be less prone to think in terms of analogies, i.e., in terms of similarities between cases, and more prone to emphasize that each situation is unique. And I think that might be true even if, for purposes of getting your dissertation or article or book past the relevant authorities, you made a general argument that mobilized case studies in its support. Close contact with the historical specifics of cases, even when mobilized to support a general thesis or argument, is bound to sensitize one to differences and unique elements. In other words, even if (as is very often the case) you are doing case studies to develop or back up an overarching theory, you are bound, almost despite yourself as it were, to acquire some wariness about the merits of generalization.

Of course, our two hypothetical scholars might end up, policy-wise, in the same place: for example, both might have decided to oppose the Obama administration's "surge" in Afghanistan (or to favor it, as the case may be). But they would have reached their conclusion, whatever it was, by rather different routes.

P.s. Just to be clear (and repetitive), that the U.S. lost in Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean it's going to 'lose' in Afghanistan. This partly depends on how one defines 'victory'. (See this post and the attached comments.)

A note and a few links

Posting will be light here in March and probably in April as well. Before going silent for a while, however, I might as well link to a few things:

*This article by Kalyvas and Balcells (from 2010) is something I'll be reading in the next week or two.

*A review (h/t HC) of James Hershberg's 900-page tome about a missed chance to end the Vietnam war in 1966.

*The continuing toll of chronic childhood malnutrition: here.

Also: Cynthia Ozick & Henry James.

The Pentagon Papers 40 years on

Sanford Ungar and Michael Beschloss brought back the memories on the NewsHour tonight in a quite interesting discussion (which I heard on the radio as my TV is not working). Beschloss mentioned in passing that in 1961, ten years before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT, that paper had acceded to the Kennedy admin's request not to publish material it had acquired about the prospective Bay of Pigs operation. Apparently Kennedy later said, after the Bay of Pigs turned out badly for the U.S., that he wished the NYT had published it.

What really strikes me is the realization that only one short decade separates the Bay of Pigs from the Pentagon Papers. That was one heck of an eventful ten years. I'm not old enough to have many reliable first-hand memories of the U.S. in 1961 (and was only living here briefly then anyway, between my family's overseas domiciles), but I have a sense of what the early '60s were like from photos, movies, some things I've read, etc. The early '70s, of which I definitely do have memories, seem a long way away from the early '60s, which is, partly, a testament to how much happened in between and to how much 'the 60s' changed the tone (for lack of a better word) of American life and politics.

Is U.S. national security really at stake in Afghanistan? If not, we should get out

I was more-or-less inclined to give Pres. Obama the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while, when he announced the so-called Afghan surge in December of last year. He argued that the mission was vital to U.S. national security and that the commitment of 30,000 additional soldiers was designed to stop the Taliban's momentum and give the Afghan security forces the necessary time to increase their capacity.

In hindsight, perhaps I did not think hard enough about a couple of basic issues: (1) how closely is stopping the Taliban's momentum etc. linked, in a practical sense, to the goal of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda?; and (2) if the answer to (1) is "not very closely," then why is the U.S. committing so many resources to fighting the Taliban in the first place? Put more simply: would it make it any real difference to U.S. national security if the Taliban re-took the essential levers of power (such as they are) in the country and re-established themselves as the government in Kabul? I am more and more inclined to think the answer is no it wouldn't, in which case it becomes more and more difficult to justify the current U.S./ISAF policy.

In a recent post on his blog, Stephen Walt writes:

As our numbers fall [i.e., when U.S. troops start to be drawn down, starting presumably some time in 2011], the Taliban will regroup, Pakistan will help rearm them covertly, and the struggle for power in Afghanistan will resume. Afghanistan's fate will once again be primarily in the hands of the Afghan people and the nearby neighbors who meddle there for their own reasons. I don't know who will win, but it actually won't matter very much for U.S. national security interests. [emphasis added]

If who wins doesn't matter very much for U.S. national security interests, then I, for one, will find it increasingly hard to watch on the NewsHour those photos and names of U.S. military personnel who have been killed. I'm willing to stipulate that the Taliban leadership is a nasty and repressive lot and that a victory for them would be bad (to put it mildly) for Afghan democrats (small "d") and for women, among others. But the sacrifice of American lives at the scale on which it is occurring can only be justified if American vital national security interests are at stake. If, as Walt suggests, the U.S. is eventually going to concoct a fig-leaf peace settlement and then persuade ourselves that we won (if, indeed, this is the best possible outcome given current conditions), it would probably be better to get out right now.

Historical analogies are easy to misuse, and I have been wary of analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam. (After all, the misuse of historical analogies contributed to the U.S. getting into Vietnam in the first place.) However, it's worth recalling that whatever one thought of the 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, it was never in the cards that, once U.S. forces had left Vietnam, they would be re-introduced to prevent the 'fall' of Saigon. The Kissinger-Nixon strategy of pursuing "peace with honor" -- hugely costly in terms of Vietnamese and American lives, and costly too for the Cambodians and Laotians -- appears pointless (indeed, flatly immoral) in retrospect. Walt is worried that we have forgotten this piece of history (among others). I continue to be wary of historical analogies when they are mobilized for use in policy debates, but one can be wary of analogies and at the same time acknowledge that there is some wisdom in Santayana's dictum that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Democracy, deception, and war

In my inbox today was an e-mail from the journal International Security containing links to a podcast and to a recent article by John Schuessler. The podcast is a conversation about the article between Schuessler and the journal's editor, Sean Lynn-Jones. (Links below.)

The article, which I have only looked at quickly, examines the ways in which FDR (allegedly) tried to "manufacture" public consent for entry into WW2 by deceiving the public about some of his actions and intentions. Schuessler concludes that this is one case in which deception of this sort was in the national interest. (Note: For a better summary of the article's argument, see the link at the end of this post, which will take you to the abstract; you can also download the pdf of the article for free.)

From a theoretical standpoint, what is going on here, as I understand it from the podacst and a glance at the article, and put in an oversimplified fashion, is this: Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have argued that democracies tend to win the wars they fight, in large part because leaders, constrained by the necessity of obtaining public consent, generally choose to enter wars where victory is likely to be easy. Schuessler says: Hang on a minute. What about those cases where the leader thinks that, for security reasons, a war is necessary, but the war does not promise to be quick and easy? In those cases the leader may resort to deception rather than take his or her chances with trying to persuade the public directly of the war's necessity. America's entry into WW2 and the way FDR approached it, Schuessler argues, was such a case. (Obviously, the reference here is to the period before Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declaration of war against Japan was a foregone conclusion, and Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. brought it directly into the European war, thus fulfilling FDR's original aim, at least according to this argument.)

Now, this argument may be right, but how often are such cases likely to arise? Schuessler himself suggests in the podcast that WW2 was exceptional. If it was an exceptional case, then it may reveal some interesting things about when and how a leader resorts to deception, but it can't pose a severe challenge to the Reiter/Stam thesis. The most it can it do is present an addendum to the thesis, i.e.: yes, leaders of democracies generally choose "easy" wars, but in rare cases 'realist' reasons will incline them to "non-easy" wars and then deception may come into play. Of course one has to add a couple of other complications: (1) wars that most people think are going to be "easy" but turn out not to be (e.g., Iraq 2003); (2) wars that leaders believe mistakenly are necessary for security reasons (I would be very inclined to put the Vietnam War in this category).

So, deception -- accepting for the sake of argument the claim that FDR did engage in it -- may have been in the national interest in the run-up to U.S. entry into WW2, but more often, or so I would argue, deception will not turn out to be in the national interest (Vietnam, Iraq). When in doubt, then, the rule of thumb for a leader in a democracy should probably still be: Go directly to the people, explain your case straightforwardly, and hope they agree with you that the costs -- even if they promise to be high -- are worth bearing. (Whatever you think about the "Afghan surge," for example, it is clear that this is basically the approach Obama took when explaining why he ordered it. Admittedly the example is not on all fours since it involved an ongoing -- i.e., inherited -- war, and an undeclared one.)

Links: podcast; article.

Civic spirit, sacrifice, and the draft

The question Should the U.S. bring back the draft? has been hovering around the edges of political discourse in this country for a while, notwithstanding that the chances of its happening are minimal to zero. The reason the question continues to hover, I think, is that it taps into an ongoing uneasiness about the distribution of sacrifice at a time when the U.S. is involved in two active wars (albeit one of which, Iraq, appears to be in a gradual end-phase as far as U.S. military involvement is concerned).

The point of this post is not to offer a yes or no answer to the question, but simply to raise the issue, which I've not done here before (to the best of my recollection). Given the approach of Memorial Day, this seems like an appropriate time to do it.

I'll start with a quotation, something Michael Sandel wrote five years ago:

"Notwithstanding the outpouring of patriotism in the immediate aftermath of September 11, and the sacrifices being made by the soldiers in Iraq, American politics lacks an animating vision...of the shared obligations of citizenship. A few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush...was asked why he had not called for any sacrifices from the American people as a whole. He replied that the American people were sacrificing by enduring longer lines at airports. In a 2004 interview in Normandy, France, on the anniversary of D-Day, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked the President why he was not asking the American people to sacrifice more.... Bush seemed mystified, replying, 'What does that mean, "sacrifice more"?' Brokaw offered the example of World War II rationing and restated his question: 'There's a great sense, I think, that there's a disconnect between what the American military people are doing overseas and what Americans are doing at home.' Bush replied: 'America has been sacrificing. Our economy hasn't [been] as strong as it should be, and there's -- people haven't been working. Fortunately, our economy's now strong, and it's getting stronger.'

"That Democrats did not seize the theme of sacrifice, and that Bush scarcely understood the question, testifies to the dulled civic sensibilities of American politics in the early years of the twenty-first century. Without a compelling account of the public purpose, the electorate [in the presidential election of 2004--LFC] settled, in a time of terror, for the security and moral certitude they associated with the incumbent President." [1]

Sandel's approving reference to Brokaw's mention of World War II is one of many indications that, as the historian David A. Bell wrote a couple of years ago, "in the United States, our equivalent of the [French] legend of [the mass levy of] 1793 is the legend of World War II. Particularly today..., the years 1941-45 have come to be regarded as a veritable American Golden Age.... instead of treating the war [WWII] as a truly exceptional moment in American history -- a combined moment of industrialized mass warfare and real national peril -- we treat it as a paradigmatic one. It has become the standard against which we measure ourselves and, not surprisingly, find ourselves wanting." [2]

Bell went on to argue that the civic reason for reinstating the draft -- to even the distribution of sacrifice and "provide the population as a whole with a common civic experience" -- receives little support from "the overall history of modern Western democracies":

"At the height of the French Revolution, during a legislative debate on the war, a deputy to the Legislative Assembly grandly declared that 'if we are not yet Spartans or Athenians, we will become them.' But in fact, we are not Spartans or Athenians, and will never become them. Which is to say, we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger. To do otherwise is simply not in our civic nature." [3]

I'm not certain that experts in the history of systems of military service (of which I'm not one) would agree that "we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger." The last time the U.S. had a draft was during the height of the Vietnam War, and in that case publicly articulated opposition to the draft was couched, for the most part, in terms of opposition to that particular war. It was not primarily framed in terms of "we are not Spartans or Athenians" and therefore conscription, except in highly unusual circumstances, is alien to our "civic nature." How much doubt this casts on Bell's argument is, I suppose, debatable -- opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft was, to use the jargon of social science, overdetermined -- but it does perhaps suggest that the question is a bit more complicated than Bell allows.
--------------------------
1. Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005), p.3.
2. David A. Bell, "When the Levee Breaks: Dissenting from the Draft," World Affairs (Winter 2008), p.66.
3. Ibid., p.67.

Quote of the day

Last month marked the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. So for today's quote, here's one of the concluding paragraphs from Christopher Lasch's 1971 essay "The Foreign Policy Elite and the War in Vietnam" (reprinted in his The World of Nations, 1974). I'm not sure I agree entirely with everything in it, but that would have to be the subject of another post sometime.

"The [Vietnam] war is more than a generalized expression of American culture; it is also the particular expression of a particular class which has for too long played the dominant role in our affairs. This was not a war thrust on the country by reactionaries or marginal elements; it was a liberal war, the culmination of twenty years of cold war carried out under liberal auspices and reflecting the traditions of a ruling class supposedly enlightened, mature, and superior to the grosser strains in American life. The pretensions of the political elite have been thoroughly shattered by this debacle, and if the American people have learned anything from it, they will not again turn to a Johnson or a Kennedy merely because he presents himself to the public as more moderate than a Goldwater or a Nixon."

It's nice that they're reading about Vietnam but...

...Jon Western asks the right question. This debate is about Afghanistan, so why aren't they reading books about Afghanistan in the White House?

I have read neither Lessons in Disaster nor the Lewis Sorley book that it is supposedly dueling with. But I just quickly read the PW summary of Sorley at Amazon, and my equally quick (i.e., off-the-cuff) reaction is this: One could make a good case that the Vietnam War was lost after the Tet Offensive -- not military but psychologically. So what happened on the ground after that was in some sense irrelevant to the outcome. However, the Vietnam War was one thing and Afghanistan is another. Historical analogies are always perilous because it is so difficult to make intelligent, wise use of them in decision-making. So, decision-makers, put down the Vietnam books and start reading some books on Afghanistan, please. Thank you.

Cronkite and Vietnam

We've been reminded in recent days of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, when he declared, after having traveled to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive, that the war was going to end in a stalemate and the U.S. should embark on negotiations.

Kathleen Parker, in an appreciative column about Cronkite, notes that his critics say the Tet Offensive was a defeat for the Viet Cong (the NLF) and that his famous broadcast ushered in an era of supposed media bias. (Actually Parker refers to the North Vietnamese not the NLF, but it was mainly an NLF operation.) In truth, the Tet Offensive was both a defeat and a victory for the NLF: in strictly military terms it was a defeat, but in psychological terms it was a victory. It showed that the NLF, after several years of being subjected to American air power and fighting American ground soldiers, was capable of launching and carrying out a sustained operation against a large number of population centers in the South, and the NLF's penetration of the U.S. embassy in Saigon was a major propaganda coup. Cronkite's reaction was entirely understandable in view of the official American assurances that the war was being won and that the enemy was on the run.

McNamara: some suggested reading

Having said that I'm not going to be writing very much in July or August (see post for July 2 below), I think I can be excused for not making any substantive comment on McNamara in the wake of his death.

For those who may be interested, however, I'll mention a few books that might be worth a look. Deborah Shapley's biography of McNamara Promise and Power is well regarded but I haven't read it so can't comment directly; Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead I've read bits and pieces of; Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest I haven't looked at in a long time. I also have not read most of McNamara's Vietnam apology In Retrospect.

Two books that I have read, both of which contain interesting material on McNamara and Vietnam and both of which I can strongly recommend, are:

Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton U.P., 1992; also in paperback). This was the author's dissertation, so not all of it is easy going, but especially for those interested in how policymakers use and misuse historical analogies, it's very valuable.

David Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill & Wang, 2008). This excellent, impressively researched work on Rostow is interesting on a number of points, including the relationship between Rostow and McNamara. (I reviewed this book in the Winter 2009 issue of New Politics; the review itself is not available for free but some other parts of that issue, as well as parts of the current Summer 2009 issue, are. The NP website is here.)

A famous photograph

Remember the picture of a long line of people waiting to try to get onto a helicopter departing from a rooftop as Saigon "fell" in 1975? The Hong Kong-based Dutch photographer who took the picture, Hugh Van Es, recently died. As this BBC piece notes, the photo is sometimes mistakenly thought to depict the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. (In fact, it was another building, not the embassy.)

Humanitarian intervention, social science, and "the new aid imperialism"

In a review of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, William Easterly criticizes what he calls "the new aid imperialism," i.e., "the willingness to combine foreign military intervention with traditional aid work" in developing countries ("Foreign Aid Goes Military!" The New York Review of Books, 12/4/08).

Easterly notes, among other things, that the "share of U.S. foreign aid distributed by the Pentagon increased from 6 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2005." What Easterly does not note, however, is that the overall amount of U.S. foreign aid increased from 2002 to 2005, so the Pentagon was distributing 22 percent of an expanded pie, not a shrinking one, which thus still left more in absolute terms for civilian agencies, such as the Millennium Challenge Corp. and AID, to distribute. Nonetheless, it's true that the line between military activity and foreign aid, as far as the U.S. is concerned, has been blurring in recent years.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Easterly thinks it's bad, and he does have a case to make. In using a review of Collier's book to make it, however, he runs into some difficulties. I'll mention a couple of them.

1) The basic argument of Collier's book, according to Easterly, is that the poorest countries in the world "are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, civil war, military coups, looting of natural resources, and failed states. They need outside rescue by the rich nations." Easterly questions this argument on several grounds, accusing Collier's book of failing adequately to distinguish correlation from causation and of engaging in selection bias. Among other things, Easterly notes that poor countries have experienced "growth reversals...in both directions."

"Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Zimbabwe had good growth between 1960 and 1980, before falling prey to economic decline -- brought on by political disasters and other factors -- from 1980 to the present. Conversely, Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Vietnam [my emphasis] had mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980, before registering impressive growth from 1980 to the present. If there is so much movement into and out of success and failure, it is hard to argue looking forward that the Bottom Billion are trapped in failure."

Vietnam? Why do you suppose Vietnam might have had "mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980"? Might it have had something to do with the facts that virtually the entire able-bodied adult male population, at least of N. Vietnam, was mobilized for military service, and that the U.S., from 1965 to the early 1970s, dropped more bombs on N. Vietnam than were dropped during the entirety of World War II? These count as extraordinary circumstances that give the case of Vietnam no probative weight at all, in my opinion, on the point Easterly is adducing it to support.

2) Easterly writes:

"...[B]oth statistical exercises and case study analysis give ambiguous direction on military intervention [for humanitarian or ostensibly humanitarian ends]. I think the moral of the story is that, as tragic as poverty and violence are, social science does not have much to offer as a guide to using military force to stop them. This is not so surprising: why should social scientists have any strategic expertise on whether a contingent of foreign or international troops will pacify a country easily (Sierra Leone) or with great difficulty, or not at all (Somalia)? It is regrettable if social science is used to give spurious cover to military intervention."

Easterly is right to strike a note of caution, I think, but he may go a bit too far in dismissing social-scientific expertise: surely there are scholarly experts on Sierra Leone and Somalia who might have provided insights about the relative likelihood or unlikelihood of successful intervention in the two countries.

In making his case, Easterly himself draws on social science, namely the research of political scientist Alan Kuperman, who has written about "the moral hazard" of humanitarian intervention. In Easterly's words, Kuperman "argues that the hope of international intervention may embolden rebels to undertake military action that will inevitably catch many civilians in the crossfire between the rebels and the government before the interveners arrive. This is exactly what happened with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose members admitted in interviews with Kuperman that their violence against Serbs starting in 1997 was motivated by hopes of foreign intervention." (Although Easterly does not give a footnote citation to an article by Kuperman, I assume he is drawing on Kuperman's "The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans," International Studies Quarterly 52:1, March 2008, pp.49-80. Full disclosure: I have not read the article, only the abstract.)

Political judgments about whether, when and how to intervene in humanitarian crises such as genocide or ethnic cleansing must be recognized as political and not masquerade as purely scientific, neutral decisions: on this point Easterly is unquestionably correct. But in his concern to reveal the weaknesses of what he takes to be unduly optimistic and pro-intervention standpoints, Easterly may be in danger of condemning, by implication if not explicitly, all social-scientific efforts to understand the consequences of intervention and the possible conditions of its success or failure. Careful case studies backed up, where appropriate, by statistical analysis that does not claim too much for itself may still have a role to play in helping politicians reach defensible, intelligent, and practical judgments on these matters.

But you can read the Easterly piece for yourself (see link above) and reach your own conclusions.

Holbrooke on 'Lessons in Disaster'

Earlier I took note of Kissinger's review in Newsweek of Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Now Richard Holbrooke gives his take on the book in the current NY Times Book Review.

Kissinger's latest pronouncement on Vietnam

In the current (Nov. 3) issue of Newsweek, Henry Kissinger reviews Gordon M. Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Bundy was Kennedy's and then Johnson's national security advisor from 1961 until April 1966, when he resigned and was replaced by Walt Rostow. Along with Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, Bundy was a key contributor to the decisions that led to the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965. Perhaps not surprisingly, this review tells one as much if not more about Kissinger than about Bundy.

Newsweek's decision to have Kissinger review the book, which was written by Bundy's former research assistant, is a bit peculiar. For one thing, most Americans born before, say, 1960 cannot read the words "Kissinger" and "Vietnam" together without being assailed by a host of largely bad memories. Yet Kissinger makes only glancing references to his own extensive involvement with the Vietnam War and adopts the tone of a dispassionate and compassionate observer: dispassionate in apparently trying to rise above the controversies associated with what he calls "the traumatic event [for America] of the second half of the last century," and compassionate towards Bundy, whom he views as someone who did his best in difficult and somewhat novel circumstances.

Kissinger briefly recounts the history of Vietnam policy-making under Kennedy and Johnson, and toward the end of the piece he distills some general lessons (for lack of a better word). Some of this is unobjectionable; who would quarrel, for instance, with the statement that "when the President is asked to consider going to war, he must be presented, above all, with an analysis of the global strategic situation on which the recommendation is based"? (In fact, of course, Kennedy and Johnson were presented with such analyses: the problem was not lack of analysis of the "global strategic situation" but that such analysis was often based on faulty assumptions.)

While some parts of Kissinger's review are unobjectionable, other parts raise hackles. For instance, he criticizes the commitment of U.S. combat troops in large numbers in 1965 "on behalf of a general notion of credibility...." Yet Kissinger himself, after coming to power with Nixon, refused to quickly terminate all American involvement on the grounds that that would have been "immoral" because it would have damaged American credibility in the world! (Michael J. Smith has a good brief discussion on this point in his Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger, pp.213-214.)

Kissinger observes that Bundy hoped a diplomatic compromise would emerge "once Hanoi's efforts to dominate South Vietnam were thwarted." This approach wrongly sought stalemate rather than victory, Kissinger maintains, and he goes on to say that "the effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory -- as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience." This, I suppose, is a veiled way of saying, among other things, that the "Christmas bombing" in 1972 of Hanoi and Haiphong was necessary to bring about the settlement that was reached in January 1973. Without rehashing the depressing saga of Vietnam policy under Kissinger and Nixon, suffice it to note that "the effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory" is a highly tendentious statement, at best.

Finally, consider Kissinger's last paragraph. It is written in Kissingerese -- a blend of the orotund, the unctuous, and the epigrammatic -- and runs as follows:

"Throughout history, every problem [sic!] America had recognized had proved soluble by the application of resources and idealism. Vietnam proved obdurate. Mourning the assassination of a president with whom it had identified, and perplexed by an impasse to which its own theories had contributed, the intellectual establishment ascribed its traumas to a failure of the American experience and the moral inadequacy of its leaders. This turned the national debate from an argument over feasibility into a crusade increasingly settled by confrontations designed to demonstrate a moral indictment. In that sense, Bundy was victim as much as cause of the forces unleashed as America was obliged to adapt its history to a changing world."

Of course, there could not have possibly been any prior "failures" in "the American experience." There could not have been even one deep flaw or failure. Nor, needless to say, can there have been any flaws in the approach pursued by Nixon and his national security advisor/secretary of state. The flaws lay elsewhere -- in a narcissistic intellectual establishment determined to indict "the American experience" rather than rationally conduct an "argument over feasibility." Never mind that this confuses one element of one segment of the anti-war movement's critique with the whole. Never mind that it implicitly whitewashes every less than glorious moment in the American past. In this last paragraph Kissinger reveals his true colors: as a student of history who apparently fails to comprehend that questions of war and peace are not simply about "argument[s] over feasibility," and as a public servant who has never fully come to terms with his own part in prolonging "the traumatic event [for America] of the second half of the last century."

P.s. I recognize that some people believe "war criminal" is a more apt designation for Kissinger than "public servant," but I think the latter is defensible if one considers his whole career rather than particular, admittedly despicable episodes.

Those were the days...

"Those who today proclaim that the United States is in decline often imagine a past in which the world danced to an Olympian America's tune. That is an illusion. Nostalgia swells for the wondrous U.S.-dominated era after World War II. But although the United States succeeded in Europe then, it suffered disastrous setbacks elsewhere. The 'loss' of China to Communism, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Soviet Union's testing of a hydrogen bomb, the stirrings of postcolonial nationalism in Indochina -- each was a strategic calamity of immense scope, and was understood to be such at the time. Each critically shaped the remainder of the twentieth century, and not for the better. And each proved utterly beyond the United States' power to control or even manage successfully. Not a single event in the last decade can match any one of those events in terms of its enormity as a setback to the United States' position in the world."

-- Robert Kagan, "The September 12 Paradigm: America, the World, and George W. Bush," Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct '08), p.38.

Well, the rise of "postcolonial nationalism in Indochina" was not "a strategic calamity" until the U.S. turned it into one. And if you don't find the last sentence of the quoted passage at least debatable, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.

p.s. For a link to the Kagan article, see the first comment.

Does Tilly's thesis travel to the third world?

"War made the state, and the state made war." The late Charles Tilly's adage neatly captures some of the dynamics at work in the formation of states in late-medieval and early modern Europe. As Tilly himself recognized, the slogan does not embrace all the complexities involved or the fact that there was no single, unilinear path to sovereign statehood. Still, it points to the synergy that sometimes existed between war-making and state-building in early modern Europe: embryonic "states" -- meaning a variety of polities, including "composite monarchies" and other forms -- that managed to extract resources effectively were able to build armies, often largely composed of mercenaries; the armies often made further extraction of resources easier, with those revenues in turn strengthening nascent bureaucracies. Luck and the quality of leadership, among other things, played a considerable role in determining which "states" succeeded, but Tilly's factors were important.

What about the contemporary 'developing world'? Does Tilly's thesis apply there in the same way as it does to the history of state formation in Europe and elsewhere? Yes and no, according to Brian Taylor and Roxana Botea in their article "Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third World," International Studies Review, March 2008, pp.27-56.

They observe that the quasi-Darwinian logic of competition in early modern Europe, where weak polities were often swallowed up by stronger ones, no longer holds in a world where the norm against conquest is widely observed and "state death" (T. Fazal's phrase) is almost nonexistent. Consequently, weak states persist, and war often weakens them further.

This is what happened in Afghanistan, one of the two main cases the authors examine. Although the article contains some large-N evidence about the relation between state strength and ethnic fractionalization, most of the article is a comparative analysis of Afghanistan and Vietnam, third-world countries that "experienced multiple, lengthy, and deadly armed conflicts with a significant external component" (p.28). Why did decades of war drastically weaken the Afghan state but strengthen the Vietnamese one? The authors argue that there were two elements present in Vietnam that were missing in Afghanistan: (1) ethnic homogeneity and (2) a unifying revolutionary ideology, or more specifically "a revolutionary movement that successfully combined nationalism with communist ideology and state-building strategies" (p.48).

Ethnic homogeneity in Vietnam meant that the problems of national identity and cohesion were already half-solved or three-quarters solved, in contrast to Afghanistan, where ethnic and tribal fragmentation never allowed the formation of a real sense of national identity, and where more than a quarter-century of war (from 1978 to the present) only deepened the divisions. And while the Vietnamese Communists melded nationalism and the transnational ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the service of statism, the Taliban's "neo-fundamentalist" Islamic worldview worked against effective state-building (p.48). Moreover, unlike the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the Taliban, both before and after their seizure of power in 1996, relied heavily on external funding sources (plus smuggling and the opium trade) for much of their revenue.

In sum, war is apparently no longer an effective path to state-building, except under quite unusual circumstances, e.g. Vietnam. One hopes that this will in turn contribute to a continuing decline in the overall amount of armed violence in the world, as would-be state-builders come to realize that war usually hinders rather than furthers their aims.

p.s. (added 10/25/12): see also this post.