Archives for January 2024

David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts: Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2023.

 

This is a book about virtueand knowledge—specifically, on the “personal qualities [that] are needed for successful strategic leadership” and on how, since the end of the Second World War, military and civilian officials have learned or failed to learn from each previous war when “trying to fashion the means to fight the next” one. Although “strategic concepts have evolved faster since the Second World War than at any comparable period in history,” the virtues of statesmen have changed very little. When considering war, statesmen must still “master four major tasks”: to understand “the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach”; to explain their strategy clearly not only to their subordinates but to “all other stakeholders”; to make sure the strategic plan is carried out “relentlessly and determinedly”; and to adapt the plan to changing circumstances. Such “exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success”; it is also “as rare as the black swan.”

Although the League of Nations had failed to keep international peace after the First World War, the United Nations might succeed, its advocates hoped, since the two major world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were members of the Security Council, the U.N. body charged with sanctioning violations of the peace. This hope proved illusory, regime rivalries being paramount over international comity. Evidently, what has prevented a world war in the subsequent decades has been the possession of nuclear weapons by those countries and several others, especially the possession of such weapons mounted in submarines, which are hard to track and to attack—thus capable of surviving and punishing a surprise attack on the possessor’s territory. This hasn’t prevented other, smaller wars, including wars between major countries by their proxies and, more recently, world war in cyberspace. Some fifty million human lives have been lost in wars in the past 75 years, mostly victimized by “cheap, mass-produced weapons and small-caliber ammunition.” Such was the case in the two most important wars of the early post-World War II years, the Chinese civil war and the Korean War, civil wars with foreign intervention on both sides.

These conflicts were framed by the Cold War. “From the very moment the Second World War ended, Joseph Stalin was intent on extending Marxism-Leninism wherever he found a lack of Western resolve,” given his Marxist-Leninist convictions that “a clash between communism and capitalism was inevitable and unavoidable.” Stalin had subsidized Mao Zedong’s revolutionary civil war against Chinese nationalists ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek since well before World War II, while Chiang’s Guomindang Army had been substantially weakened by Japanese attacks in the 1930s and 1940s. While Mao learned to master the four tasks of military and political statecraft, Chiang never did. Although the Nationalists wielded the powers of the Chinese state—taxation, conscription, and political patronage—the “story of the Chinese Civil War is essentially one of Chiang and his senior commanders throwing away every advantage they had, while Mao survived until such time as he was able to launch devastating counter-offensives.” The Kuomintang was corrupt, and corruption is “dangerous,” robbing an army of resources needed to fight and demoralizing both soldiers and civilians, exacerbating factionalism within what needs to be a unified war effort. In addition to countenancing corruption, Chiang “ostracized the civic leaders who had collaborated with the Japanese in the coastal cities at just the time when he desperately needed their support,” wrested power from regional leaders in his own party, and fought “the powerful local warlords who controlled much of China.” That is, he failed to target his most dangerous enemy to the exclusion of lesser, and sometimes former, enemies. In contrast, Mao understood the strategy and tactics of the weak, who must avoid “direct confrontations” with the enemy in favor of “indirect maneuvering”—as outlined by the sixth-century B.C. Legalist military writer Sun Tzu in The Art of War. In the areas he occupied, Mao killed the local landlords and redistributed their lands to the peasants, winning their support but also conscripting them into his army (and executing any resistants, “often after torture”). 

As a result, the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ quadrupled in size in the two years following the world war, inflicting a million casualties on the Guomindang Army by the middle of 1948. By that time, the United States had withdrawn most of its never-substantial military support. Hyperinflation and the aforementioned corruption (particularly officers’ theft of supplies intended for their own troops) hastened Chiang’s military and political collapse on the mainland. He fled to the island of Taiwan in 1949, enabling Mao to found what (with fine irony) he styled the People’s Republic of China. Although his partisan opponents accused Truman of having ‘lost China,’ Chiang was the one who really lost it.

The Korean Civil War might have seen a similar outcome. The Communist Party tyrant, Kim Il-Sung, ruling the northern section of the peninsula, “had one advantage that all totalitarian leaders tend to share: they can launch a truly surprise attack, with no preparation needed to win over the opinion of the general public or dissenting politicians.” Further, the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency missed his military preparations. “Yet surprise attacks have pitfalls”: “they tend to shock the enemy into a more active response than would a slow build-up;” precisely because they require subterfuge, the attacker may not be able to mass sufficient reinforcements to follow them up; and “they leave no one in any moral doubt as to who was the aggressor.” Stalin assumed that the United States and Great Britain, having demobilized after the world war, lacked the military strength to do much to aid the non-Communist regime in the south. “Such underestimation of the West’s willingness to engage, believing it to be too decadent, has been all too common in post-war history,” and, it might be remarked, in pre-war history, too, as seen in the American Revolutionary War, the war with Mexico, the Civil War, and in the decade before the Second World War. 

Initially, General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander, also got things wrong. “His big idea was that it would be relatively easy to destroy the North Korena Army with superior American firepower, and that it did not matter if China sent an army across to the Yalu River to North Korea’s aid, as he could aways destroy that too.” Both the North Koreans and the Communist Chinese proved more formidable than he expected, as the Korean Communist forces attacked in September 1950, nearly overwhelming the Southern defenses. MacArthur countered with “one of the great feats of modern warfare,” MacArthur’s “strategically brilliant amphibious attack on Inchon, located 100 miles behind the North Korean lines.” (Here, the authors pause to observe that such a risky but potentially devastating amphibious assault might be attempted by the PRC against Taiwan.) But MacArthur continued to underestimate the likelihood and effectiveness of a Chinese counterthrust, which occurred a month later, employing techniques of stealth honed during the civil war. “The Chinese used camouflage, eschewed wireless communication and carried everything by hand—they were, in the words, of the American brigadier-general Samuel Marshall, ‘a phantom that cast no shadow’ across 300 miles.” MacArthur presided on one of the worst failures of ‘intel’ in “postwar American military history,” and neither the CIA nor the State Department had any more of a clue. In the words of one commentator, “the new intellectual ground of limited war proved difficult to navigate,” as “the total war mindset of 1941-1945 proved difficult to set aside.” By November 1950, the South Korea-American coalition forces were in retreat. 

Truman replaced the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, General Walton Walker, with General Matthew Ridgeway and eventually sacked MacArthur, too, after the general turned defeatist in the wake of the president’s refusal to widen the war to the Chinese mainland. Ridgeway determined that the coalition retreat had been precipitous but that this had caused the Communist forces to overextend. Taking advantage of “the sheer lethality of advanced American weaponry,” he dug in his forces for a longer war. By late January 1951, he counterattacked, repelling the Communists, who took tens of thousands of casualties. Ridgeway then fortified the 38th parallel, the middle of the peninsula, which withstood repeated Communist attacks for the next two years, forcing a truce (although not a peace treaty) which has endured, sort of, for the subsequent seven decades. “Wars end more messily in the modern world,” with formal surrenders seldom seen. In the war, 140,000 South Koreans died, 36,000 Americans, 400,000 Chinese and North Koreans, 1.5 million civilians.

“Korea changed warfare in several significant ways.” Strategists saw that limited wars could be fought without triggering nuclear war; nuclear deterrence works. Air power, impressive against urbanized populations, has limited effect when deployed against forces hiding in mountains and forests. And, as the alliance with the Soviets had already proved in the world war, a war to defend the American regime and its worldwide interests may involve alliance with a decidedly un-republican regime, as South Korea was at that time. 

As did the First World War, the Second World War accelerated the decline of several European empires. “Between 1943 and 1975 the largest transfer of territorial control in world history took place,” as guerrilla warriors fought rulers whose treasuries had been exhausted by the world wars and whose peoples had wearied of conflict. Although “guerrilla or insurgent warfare has in fact been the norm almost throughout history,” and had been seen in Europe itself during the world wars, European rulers were unaccustomed to it and often ill-prepared for it. “It was the Viet Minh victory over France in Indo-China which first saw a European great power humbled by guerrilla forces from the developing world,” as “the French Army had been wholly unsuited to the type of warfare it needed to undertake,” namely a counter-insurgency war, not one consisting of “traditional, set-piece battles.” A decade later, French president Charles de Gaulle, who had no part in the conduct of the war, told U. S. president John F. Kennedy not to involve substantial American troops because “the ground is rotten there.” 

Upon assuming the presidency of France and founding the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle inherited a guerrilla war in Algeria. The French colonists numbered about fifteen percent of the population, and most of them had no intention of leaving, meaning that de Gaulle, who intended to uphold France as the defender of small and medium-sized countries against the Soviet and the Americans, needed at once to decolonize and to outmaneuver the colons. He could do so, in part, because the French Algerians had fought the war “in ways that were fundamentally opposed to the Republic’s founding principles”—which remained what they had been in 1789, the Rights of Man and the Citizen—in a sale guerre that featured the use of torture. “Torture is a propaganda gift to the enemy,” as it “leads to corruption and cover-ups, provokes appalling escalation and retaliation,” and alienates that portion of the non-colonist population who are friendly. Crucially, news of these tactics filtered back to France, turning many of the French against the colons. This gave de Gaulle the political backing he needed to turn his back on the French Algerians and grant Algeria independence. The lesson in this war was the salience of regimes and their principles to warfare, not only in the aftermath of the war but during the war itself.

 The authors do find a successful counter-insurgency strategies formulated by British statesmen, first in Malaya against the Malayan Resistance Liberation Army in the years 1948-1960 and again in Borneo, against Indonesia, from 1962 to 1966. In Malaya, the British enjoyed the support of the majority of the population because the rebels were Chinese Malayans. “This placed Britain in an enviable position when compared to other counter-insurgency campaigns of the twentieth century such as the French experiences in Indo-China and Algeria.” More than that, however, they selected the right strategy, providing security for the rural population by interning more than 6,000 terrorist suspects and deporting 10,000 to China. They attacked MRLA supplies and sources of funding, provided houses for Chinese squatters, who were being recruited by the Communists, and promised Malayan independence once the war was over. Prime Minister Winston Churchill put Gerald Templer in charge of the campaign, which consisted not of ‘search and destroy’ missions against the guerrillas but of ‘clear and hold’ missions, including police training for Malayans. “The shooting side of the business is only 25% percent of the trouble,” Templer wrote; “the other 75% lies in getting the people of this country behind us,” not in “pouring more troops into the jungle” but in winning “the hearts and minds of the people.” The authors deem this “the most succinct explanation of how to win a counter-insurgency” war. “Few other Western counter-insurgency campaigns have been as successful.” 

Newly independent Malaysia (as Malaya was renamed, after independence) allied with Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to fight a secret war against Indonesia, then ruled by the Communist Ahmed Sukarno, who “wanted to strangle the Federation of Malaysia at birth.” Major General Walter Walker fought the war in the jungles of Borneo, applying lessons he had learned in the Malayan campaign. First among these were offensive missions, inasmuch as “a policy of containment” against guerrillas “is a passport to failure.” He won the hearts and minds of the Iban population by showing them that his men could protect them from the Indonesian forces. He could indeed do so because he signed off on every operation the soldiers conducted, using only well-trained, experienced troops. He took care that his troops never overextended themselves, limiting attacks both physically and morally to “thwart enemy offensive action, never in retribution for one’s casualties.” He declined to risk civilian casualties, calling in air support only in an “extreme emergency.” He often had his troops remain in the jungle, setting ambushes for the enemy, instead of returning to their bases. “The jungle has got to belong to you; you must own it” in order to “out-guerrilla the guerrilla,” he insisted. The Brits won; the Indonesian Communists lost; and for a long time, no one was the wiser.

Americans were surely not the wiser in their contemporaneous war in against the Communists in Vietnam, heeding neither de Gaulle’s warning nor the examples set by the British. It is true that the Communist Vietnamese clearly outfought America’s South Vietnamese allies, bedeviled by corruption and incompetence. But “significant shortcomings in the US strategy and conduct of the war dramatically undermining the prospects for success, perhaps as much as the inadequacies of the South Vietnamese and the tenacity of the North.” “Vietnam was where the United States forces ought to have learned from recent history, but instead it was where they were condemned to repeat it” in their attempt to fight a World War II and Korea-style war against insurgents operating out of jungle encampments and underground tunnels.

North Vietnam’s Communist tyrant Ho Chih Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap adopted and adapted Mao Zedong’s strategy of protracted war. Mao had named three phases of such wars: the “Contention Phase,” consisting of agitation, propagandizing, and the limited use of guerrilla and terror operations; the “Equilibrium Phase,” where the insurgents step up their guerrilla operations and establish bases; and the “Counter-offensive Phase,” at which point the insurgents have achieved military superiority over the government forces and move to change the regime. These phases may vary in different regions of the country, as the war grinds on. For both sides, “the people are the prize.” “Achieving legitimacy is particularly crucial in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations.” To achieve it, counter-insurgents must use what’s called the “oil-spot” technique: “clearing, holding and rebuilding one spot or area and then expanding it, as an oil spot expands, by doing the same in a contiguous are…until a larger and larger area has been secured, held and rebuilt,” with local police gradually replacing the military forces, freeing those forces to move on to another area. If the insurgents resurge, “the counter-insurgents forces have to begin all over again.” Patience is a virtue, and politics, including political institutions, has primacy. But (as Montesquieu teaches) founding a stable regime requires “detailed understanding of the nature of the enemy and the local political entities, society, values, and culture.” 

American military and civilian strategists lacked “many of these key elements” of understanding. Like the French before them, they expected to fight a conventional war against the North, expecting a “Korea-style invasion” that would only occur when the Communists were satisfied they had reached the third stage of their insurgency. Meanwhile, Americans ignored their South Vietnamese ally’s insistence that the immediate problem was guerrilla war by the Vietcong in the South and the consequent need for “local security and the other elements needed to gain the support of the people.” When the Kennedy Administration took over from Eisenhower in 1961, they talked the ‘limited-war’ talk but failed to walk the institutional walk by adequately revising their strategic doctrine, the training and organizational structure of American troops in the region, and all other elements needed “for the conduct of true counter-insurgency operations.” Search and destroy instead of clear, hold and build remained the order of the day and the place and were unsuitable to both. Meanwhile, the Vietcong “infiltrated the villages, mobilizing the peasants with a combination of sophisticated political indoctrination and selective violence.” The religious divide among the South Vietnamese, with minority French-speaking Catholics, headed by President Ngo Dinh Diem, clashing with majority Buddhists in the countryside (some monks set themselves on fire in protest of government oppression) ensured that factionalism would hamper the war effort. The Johnson Administration’s sharp escalation of the war, using conscript troops, soon inflamed American college students (motivated not so much by the moralistic motives they claimed but by a reluctance to get gunned down in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia) without winning the war, as the generals promised, since the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the generals in Saigon, “failed to appreciate that the major source of the problems stemmed not from infiltration [from the North] so much as Vietcong successes in the South.” What is more, in 1965 Johnson agreed to have American troops fight independently of South Vietnamese troops, “with fateful results over the next seven years.” For example, American commanders “failed to coordinate American and South Vietnamese operations with follow-on Vietnamese governments to establish enduring control in the newly cleared areas, to hold them after they were cleared.” The one exception was the Marine Corps, whose Lieutenant General Lew Walt ordered platoons of his men and Navy medical corpsmen to work with South Vietnamese forces, securing and then holding the villages, “deny[ing] the VC access to the people,” under the idea of “living with the people to secure them,” as Gerald Templer had done in Malaya, a generation earlier. In this, Leathernecks were smarter than the Army men.

Ho Chih Minh launched the surprise Tet Offensive in 1968. It proved militarily premature but politically effective, shaking the overconfidence of President Johnson and his top commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, while tipping a substantial portion of American public opinion away from support for the war. Westmoreland’s replacement, General Creighton Abrams, wisely adopted a policy of “Vietnamizing” of the war, emphasizing security for the South Vietnamese population spearheaded by South Vietnamese troops and police. Unfortunately, it took some time to put this new strategy into play, and time was no longer on the American side. The next administration, under President Richard Nixon, engaged in a combination of bombing attacks on North Vietnam, attacks on Communist sanctuaries in neighboring Cambodia, American troop withdrawals with concomitant “Vietnamization,” all coupled with long-drawn-out negotiations with the Communists, who were in no hurry to reach a settlement. Another Communist attack in 1972 was successfully counteracting by mining the North Vietnamese harbor at Haiphong, which concentrated Ho’s mind on a settlement. The Paris Peace Accords were signed by the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, the Communists violated them, but U.S. withdrawals continued and the Democratic Party majority in Congress, no longer needing to defend a Democratic administration and zeroing in on impeachment of the Nixon, cut off funds for the war effort. A third offensive by the Communist proved decisive. 

American statesmen had failed, for too long, to meet any of what the authors identify as the four major tasks of military strategy, beginning with their “failure to understand the true nature of the war and the enemy,” thus failing “to craft a correct strategy before war weariness in the United States undermined the ability to continue the war.” Also, conscript troops are less effective when not fighting in defense of their own country, and the men were rotated in and out not as cohesive units but as individuals, precluding the establishment of such “all-important element” of military practice as “cohesion, trust and key relationships within small units”; similarly, platoon leaders and commanders were rotated out every six months, “just when they began to understand their jobs” and were establishing “relationships with local leaders.” The one strategic benefit of the long, failed war was the time it gave to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as to anti-Communists in Indonesia, to consolidate regimes that resisted Communist incursions in those countries. American allies in Asia—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan with their relatively new republican regimes, along with Australia and New Zealand, also “prospered under our security shield during the period,” in the judgment Henry Kissinger and American military strategists.

Not all wars of the past eight decades have been insurgencies, guerrilla wars, proxy wars, or wars fought in the shadow of nuclear weapons. The 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War consisted of battles between regular armies. In May 1948, Egyptian warplanes bombed Tel Aviv, the capital of the newly formed Jewish state. Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, Iraqi and Saudi Arabian troops invaded, as the United Nations agitated itself with demands for a ceasefire. (“Israelis were justifiably confident that capturing territory would bring greater security than would be achieved by abiding by the U.N.’s demands.”) Attacked on several fronts, the Israelis nonetheless “had two great advantages”: they fought with a central command that enjoyed compact “interior lines of communication, supply, and reinforcement,” contrasting with the “disjointed and uncoordinated” Arab assaults; and the Israelis were fighting for their lives as a nation, “only three years after the Holocaust.” “While morale is impossible to quantify, it is essential to victory.” Their prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, proved an excellent statesman in war, understanding that control of Jerusalem was central to the effort, choosing capable military commanders, and adapting quickly to events. The Israelis “used misinformation extremely effectively,” aided by a sympathetic world press. Their troops even took the Sinai, well beyond Israel’s borders, effectively providing Ben-Gurion with territorial gains that he could use as he bargained for a peace settlement with the enemies, state by state. “By the time of the last armistice, 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate was in Israeli hands, although the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Old City of Jerusalem [taken by the Jordanians] were not—thirty percent more territory than the U.N. had allotted them.” Not only were Israel’s new borders more readily defensible, this nation born in war immediately became a military, not a commercial, republic, with the largest army relative to population in the world. The soldier-citizens fought, and still fight, under a military doctrine based on “flexibility, surprise, and improvisation,” institutionalized by the training of the officers, particularly the junior officers who directly command the frontline soldiers. In the Six-Day War, surprise was indeed paramount, as the Israelis pre-empted an imminent Arab attack, again on multiple fronts. This time, General Moshe Dayan was the outstanding “strategic leader,” retaking the Sinai and securing it before turning to the conquest of the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

By contrast, the Israelis nearly lost the Yom Kippur War, this time failing to pre-empt the Arab assault because they overestimated the effectiveness of their own defenses and underestimated the enemy’s much-improved military technology. The authors cite this “growing lethality of combat, with weapons of ever greater destructive power and the increasing complexity and precision of war” as a fact to be learned from that war. “Future wars, it now seemed, would be short, intensely chaotic affairs in which forces needed to be ready for action at the outset, and intensive training could overcome the disadvantages of being surprised and outnumbered, as the Israelis had been.” This could indeed be true, on the relatively flat, open terrain of the Middle East and elsewhere, although (as the Russians and Ukrainians have demonstrated) attacks and counterattacks can bring a World War I-like stalemate, at least for a time. And, for all the technological advances, “ultimately, the victory had come down to the soldiers rather than their kit”—as the initial Ukrainian successes against the Russians recently proved.

The authors emphasize this point in considering NATO’s precision bombing campaign during the genocidal civil war in what had been the ‘Federal Republic’ of Yugoslavia—in fact a Communist state dominated by the Serbs under the dictatorship of Josef Broz Tito. Whatever his faults, Tito’s rule had kept the several ethnic and religious populations of the country from killing each other. His death, and the collapse of the Communist mission a decade later, let the Furies loose. When the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared their independence from the federation in 1992, following similar declarations by Slovenia, Macedonia, and Croatia, the minority Serb population demanded independence from the wherein minority Serbs appealed to the president of Serbia, Slobodan Miloševic, to prevent the majority Bosnian Muslims from breaking away from what remained of the federation. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ ensued, with the Serbs unleashing “the most horrific bloodletting seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War,” although the Bosnians also committed atrocities. As usual, the United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ forces were useless. eventually shouldered aside by NATO in 1995. While it is true that “the NATO bombing campaign did bring the Serbs to the table at the peace conference” which put an end to the war, vindicating Bosnian independence and making it seem “as if warfare had evolved so far and so fast that future conflicts would be won or lost almost on airpower alone, so long as one side was totally dominant there,” “it was not to be that simple, as the experience of Vietnam had already shown.” A few years later, after Milošovic attempted to end the province of Kosovo’s “relative autonomy” from Serbia, again in response to complaints against the majority Muslim Albanians by the Orthodox Serb minority, NATO repeated its precision bombing assaults, this time in Serbia itself. By now, United States military personnel (and therefore NATO military personnel) had been substantially drawn down in the hopes of saving expenses on military spending now that the Soviet empire had collapsed. NATO no longer had the ground forces necessary to supplement air power. Seeing this, Milošovic “expel[led] nearly 2 million Kosovars from their country,” simultaneously ridding Kosovo of the civil-social supports its army enjoyed and causing an immense refugee crisis for the neighboring European members of NATO. Without ground forces, NATO commanders found it harder to identify targets for their precision bombs, and the Serbian army could disperse and conceal its equipment much more effectively. However, Serbia still lacked the capacity to stop the bombers, which NATO retargeted on areas around the capital, Belgrade. Milošovic quickly capitulated, although the American NATO commander, General Mark Clark, cautioned that bombing alone didn’t force the tyrant’s hand. NATO didn’t fight on the ground, but the Kosovars did; their counterattack from neighboring Albania into southern Kosovo “had compelled Serbian forces to mass in the final days of the air campaign,” making them now an identifiable target for the bombers. Petraeus and Roberts conclude that air superiority matters, that “the United States must remain capable of building the best fighter jet in the world, and at scale, and must be able to train the best pilots,” a process that takes two years. Alternatively, computer-driven aircraft can be used, although recourse to technology eventually can be countered by enemy technologists.

Technological superiority, along with the proverbial ‘boots on the ground,’ easily prevailed over Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. In 1991, NATO still had substantial ground troops to deploy, and they were joined by soldiers from countries who joined a substantial international coalition led by the United States. Desperate for revenues after a brutal, eight-year war with Iran, Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait in the hope of seizing its oil fields. Although uninformed American critics warned that President George H. W. Bush was involving his country in ‘another Vietnam,’ the flat desert landscape of the Middle East bears little resemblance to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Iraq’s Soviet-made military technology proved inferior to that of the Americans. The authors regard the war as most notable for having inspired the “Powell Doctrine.” Coalition military leader General Colin Powell recommended eight questions policymakers should answer before making war under circumstances in which the United States has not been directly attacked: Is a vital national security interest threatened? What is the clear, obtainable objective? Have risks and costs been “fully and frankly analyzed?” Have diplomatic and other non-violent means of persuasion been “fully exhausted”? What is the “exit strategy”? Do the American people support the war? Does it have “genuine broad international support”? The First Gulf War met those criteria. It also met the just war criterion of jus in bello—that is, proportionality of means, including a good-faith attempt to minimize civilian casualties. The authors contrast this concern with the British General Herbert Kitchener’s chief lament after his forces killed 11,000 Dervishes at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman: What a “dreadful waste of ammunition.” But they add a ninth point, or perhaps a sub-point to the “exit strategy” question, that of regime change. The Bush Administration left Hussein and his Republican Guard in power. Hussein shrewdly ordered his generals to sign the surrender documents, which enabled him to point to his survival as “a personal victory,” as U.S. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney later called it. This was also a political victory, inasmuch as a personal victory for a tyrant is a political victory, tyrannical rule being personal rule of ‘one alone.’ 

Regime change in the United States and elsewhere was very much on the mind of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden when he declared war on America in 1996, a pronouncement he put into practice five years later by ordering attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building. Headquartered in Afghanistan, where he was protected by that country’s rulers, his allies, the Taliban, bin Laden dragged his host into a regime-change war against the United States, allied with Uzbekistan and Ahmed Shah Masoud, a warlord in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley. Removing the Taliban from power proved fairly easy, but the other war aims—destroying al-Qaeda and changing the regime into a ‘democracy’ or commercial republic proved elusive. American airstrikes and elite ground combat units, combined with allied forces, scattered the Taliban by the end of 2002. But the campaign to destroy al-Qaeda was “inadequately conceived and under-resourced.” It was inadequately conceived because it required that the new regime in Kabul and the Americans offer reconciliation to those among their enemies who were willing to work with them in the formation of that regime—most notably, the forces of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the main warlord of the Pashtun tribe, from which many of the Taliban had been drawn. Further, although the Taliban had been defeated, they had not been destroyed; the rulers of Pakistan, with exaggerated fears that India might infiltrate the country, offered them sanctuary, thinking of them as a sort of geopolitical insurance policy against any such incursion. “The U.S. never pressured Pakistan too hard, as American leaders knew that U.S. and NATO forces were dependent on the lines of communication through Pakistan into Afghanistan, and they were also concerned about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the event that the Islamabad government collapsed.”

The regime change policy was especially ill-conceived. It was undertaken by military teams who had no adequate “appreciation of the history, politics and culture of the Afghan people,” a people who “placed personal, tribal and ethnic goals above the formation of a democratic, fully representative central government”—something they had never seen and could not conceive the benefits of. Such benefits did begin to appear by 2004, when the economy improved, many refugees returned, and the schools were safe to attend. But warlords “who had gained stature with the fall of the Taliban contested the authority of the central government and training of Afghan security forces lagged behind the need for them.” The Taliban began to return from their Pakistan redouts, funding themselves with revenues derived from opium poppies. “By the summer of 2006, the Taliban were on the offensive, and by the end of 2008 their attacks were crippling the Afghan government and economy.” 

The Obama Administration oversaw a counterattack during the next three years. Understanding that Pakistan was “an integral part of the problem,” the president put a counter-insurgency strategy in place, increased American troop levels while adding more civilians who could “handle the multitude of nation-building chores,” including political consulting. In retrospect, Obama would conclude that these efforts “probably would have made sense, had we started seven years earlier, the moment we drove the Taliban out of Kabul.” “He was not wrong,” the authors remark. They offer praise for the counter-insurgency efforts of General Stanley McChrystal, who followed the “oil-spot” procedure that should have been used more extensively in Vietnam. This focused not on terrorism but on the Taliban and Haqqani insurgents, and implicitly abandoned the hope of changing Afghanistan “into a Western-style democracy at reasonable cost or in an acceptable period of time.” Unfortunately, under politica pressure domestically, Obama also announced a target date for withdrawal of American forces, giving the Taliban their own target date for self-protection and planning for the future.

Soon afterwards, co-author General David Petraeus replaced McChrystal, who had been quoted as criticizing the Obama Administration for under-funding the campaign. Petraeus followed the advice of Major James Gant, an experienced counter-insurgency fighter, who recommended embedding twelve-man special forces teams in Aghan villages assisted by interpreters, medical teams, civil affairs personnel, intelligence agents and other non-soldiers. These would help to train local police forces whose members would be selected by tribal leaders. “By the end of 2010, nine years after the invasion…the effort in Afghanistan finally had the ‘inputs’ right for the first time.” Petraeus points to “significant gains” that endured for the next two years, despite the embezzlement and fraud that hamstrung the international aid programs, too little of which reached those they were intended for. But when bin Laden was finally killed in May 2011, the Obama Administration began to draw down the American forces, military and civilian. The plan was to transfer authority more fully to the Afghans themselves, but it eventuated in transferring more relative power into the hands of the Taliban. “With a new government in Kabul and the withdrawal of the vast majority of Western forces from Afghanistan, the war entered a new phase, one highly dependent on the ability of the Afghans to secure their own territory and people.” “Ultimately, they could not do it,” since (as Vietnam had already shown) “without security, nothing else will last.” The authors conclude that although the conflict could not have been “fully resolved,” Afghanistan being Afghanistan, it “could have been managed.” The price of American withdrawal was defeat, “allowing the country to become an extremist safe haven once again and condemning some 40 million Afghans to a future of repression, deprivation, severely circumscribed opportunities and, very likely, continued violence.”

Petraeus also found himself assigned to the Second Gulf War, which carried out a missing piece of the first war’s “exit strategy,” the removal of Saddam Hussein. The administration of President George W. Bush had gone into the war with the overly pessimistic assumption that Iraq had a stockpile of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ along with overly optimistic assumptions about the Iraq that would emerge after the regime change. “While considerable effort had been devoted to planning the combat operations, much less had been put into planning post-regime-change operations to stabilize the country.” Most Iraqis did indeed welcome American soldiers as liberators initially, but that didn’t last. As in Yugoslavia, the tyrant’s removal spurred inter-factional violence, which was impossible to suppress with foreign military forces configured for conquest, not policing. “What planning there had been was overwhelmingly focused on humanitarian operations rather than on the establishment of wide area security, repairing critical infrastructure, re-establishing basic services and instituting governance.” Hussein’s Ba’ath Party operatives plundered the former regime’s arms caches, readying themselves for insurgency. The allies’ temporary government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, was led by a former American ambassador to Iraq, L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, a former Foreign Service officer with no experience in Iraq. Instead of removing “the top two layers of the ruling Ba’ath Party,” which consisted of about 6,000 persons, he removed “the top four layers, removing from the position 85,ooo-100,000 Iraqis,” mostly careerists, not ideologues—the people “that U.S. war plans had assumed would remain in their positions to provide continuity in government and to enable basic service restoration and reconstruction of Iraq.” In addition, Bremer dissolved the Iraqi security organizations, including the army, failing to distinguish between Hussein’s Republican Guard, which was feared and hated, from the Iraqi Army, “which was seen by many Iraqis as their only true national institution.” That is, “Bremer had gone beyond regime change to destroy the Iraqi state and to create the political and military foundations for the insurgency.” 

This in turn led him to attempt to construct a new regime and a new state “from the top down.” Groups not selected for offices in that structure “viewed it as foreign-imposed and corrupt,” giving them reason to join the insurgency. “Bremer alienated the leaders of Iraq’s tribes, a critical element of Iraqi society, by deciding that they were another relic of the past that had no place in the new Iraq.” While Hussein was soon captured and his two lunatic sons killed, the Sunni Arabs, the largest of the country’s three main factions, remained substantially unreconciled to the American efforts, which were weakened when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld drew down U.S. forces. Without countervailing Iraqi forces in place, the insurgents attacked; the Sunnis even found an ally in their rival Shi’a Arabs, the one and only time that would occur. “The United States, limited to that point by a short-war mentality, was now stuck in Iraq without a truly viable strategy to defeat the insurgency and disengage from the conflict” because Bush Administration officials hadn’t recognized that “without a deep appreciation of the ethnic, sectarian, tribal and political elements, as well as how the country is supposed to function and how it really does function, it is very hard to govern it.” It would take the U.S. Army “more than three years in Iraq to regain the competencies so unwisely jettisoned after the end of the Vietnam War.”

The Sunni-Shi’a coalition didn’t last long. A Sunni terrorist organization claiming affiliation with al-Qaeda and led by a Jordanian-born militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ordered attacks on Shi’a Muslims and their religious sites in a successful “attempt to ignite a sectarian civil war,” which would make his men the Sunnis “defenders of last resort.” The several international humanitarian and economic aid organizations backed off, regarding the situation as too dangerous. Zarqawi’s death in a U.S. airstrike in 2005 didn’t stop prevent all-out civil war, which broke out the next year, after the terrorist organization destroyed the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, a major Shi’a religious site. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) proclaimed “the Islamic State of Iraq,” which did in fact control territory. 

To his credit, President Bush ordered a reevaluation of his administration’s policies, resulting in “The Surge, as the new initiative for Iraq came to be known.” It consisted of five U.S. Army brigades, two Marine battalions, and a substantial number of support staff. “More importantly, these forces and those already on the ground in Iraq would be used differently, in accordance with a new counter-insurgency doctrine that made clear that control and protection of the population were the key to winning a counter-insurgency struggle” against both AQI and their rival Shi’a militias. Only then could “the cycle of intercommunal violence in Iraq” be broken. General Petraeus ordered U.S. forces into the neighborhoods and villages, securing them from the militants and initiating “a formal reconciliation process with insurgents, and, over time, militia members.” Those who agreed to reconcile often were those among the former Ba’athists who should never have been removed from their positions in the first place. Bush participated in weekly meetings, monitoring the results of the Surge, which gradually began to work. The year 2010 saw AQI forces driven into Syria, from which they eventually returned to form the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which wasn’t dismantled until 2019. As long as the Surge continued, violence remained relatively low, but the Shi’a, emboldened by their Iranian allies, eventually rekindled the civil war after the Surge forces left. 

For decades, many Americans took ‘the lesson of the Vietnam War’ to have been that counter-insurgency wars are unwinnable. The authors show that they are winnable, but only if statesmen and the military officers they command follow the correct strategy. The lesson Winston Churchill drew from a far more destructive First World War, as enunciated in The Aftermath, remains the overarching one: military victory can only be consolidated with careful attention to the political settlement that occurs in its wake, and that attention must begin before intervening in the war or, if the war is unprovoked, during the war itself.

 

 

 

 

Richard Pipes: Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 

Pipes remarks that the term ‘conservatism’ didn’t take hold in continental Europe until the founding of Le Conservateur littéraire in Paris during the years of the Bourbon Restoration. It is therefore anachronistic with respect to Russia, where it “emerged in the sixteenth century.” What he means by Russian conservativism is the defense of a regime, “autocracy,” consisting of a “strong, centralized authority, unrestrained either by law or parliament,” but still different from both the absolute monarchy of the France’s Old Regime and from the constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII that the French littérateurs were defending. Pipes undertakes to explain a paradox: Whereas “Russia’s post-1700 art, literature, and science were all patterned on Western models, her industries emulated Western prototypes, and so did her military,” her politics did not.

In a way reminiscent of Aristotle, Pipes begins by considering the origins of politics as such. Nomadic tribes organize themselves along ties of family instead of territory; they are ‘social,’ not ‘political.’ Equality within each tribe consists in the fact that all members share a bloodline; chiefs are often elected and wield authority temporarily, with no rights inherent in the office. Private property exists in livestock. “Once nomads settle down and turn to agriculture, they transfer the right of private property to land,” held by the tribes, as seen in the histories of the Israelites and the Greeks. In “nontribal, settled communities” such as Egypt, land was the property of kings and priests. “Throughout European history, the existence of private property constituted the single most effective barrier to unlimited royal authority inasmuch as it compelled the kings to turn to their subjects for financial support and, in the process, to concede to them a share of political power.” But European history didn’t begin that way. “Early European kings tended to treat their realm as they did their livestock and land, that is, as property: they drew no distinction between what the Romans called dominium (ownership) and potestas (authority), giving rise to what has come to be known as a ‘patrimonial’ type of regime.” It was Charlemagne in the late eighth century who began to acknowledge the separation of these kinds of rule. If “the kingdom was not the property of the king but the joint possession of the king and the people,” if “kings had not only rights but also duties” to “promote peace and justice,” then Aristotle’s definition of politics as ruling and being ruled, reciprocally, begins to prevail. Politics as understood by Aristotle came to Europe through the influence of the Roman notion of the respublica, the public thing or way; to this, the Roman Catholic Church of course added “the precepts of Holy Scriptures” to the Greco-Roman understanding of justice. If the God of the Bible restricted not only His people but Himself to the rule of law, surely human beings ought to do the same. 

“One manifestation of this notion of a partnership between state and society was the convocation of assemblies throughout Europe for the purpose of consultation on grave matters of state, especially taxation.” Government by the consent of the governed, who sent representatives to speak (hence ‘parle-ment‘) in assemblies called by the monarch “ratif[ied] major political decisions” and “authorize[d] extraordinary assessments.” Throughout the Middle Ages in Latin Christendom, there was no taxation without representation, without parliamentary consent; “it was through control of the purse strings that the most successful of parliaments, the English, ultimately achieved representative democracy.” The relations between feudal lords and their vassals, which entailed mutual obligations, and the commercial relations of citizens, of city-dwellers, amongst themselves and with other cities, in turn fostered rule by consent. “The authority of European kings was thus from the earliest limited by a variety of ideas and institutions.” 

In taking aim at classical and Christian ideas and institutions, Machiavelli worked to establish modern, centralized states, often ruled by ‘princes’ wielding absolute power—both of these undermining the restraints imposed by feudal oligarchs and priests while deprecating the moral laws governing both. Yet even the “absolutism” of a Louis XIV, who asserted exclusive power to legislate in France, while “certainly violat[ing] custom accepted in Europe during the preceding millennium,” did not violate the people’s “fundamental civil rights,” their rights of person and of property, much less their even more fundamental natural rights to life and property under the natural law. That is, the absolute monarchs were not quite tyrants, whatever Machiavelli might have hoped. Absolutism “cannot be said to anticipate twentieth-century totalitarianism.” And when the Bourbon monarchs, the Hanoverians, and others “came under assault” by republicans, their political enemies could draw upon “a widely shared consensus dating back to the earliest days of European civilization as to what constituted legitimate government.” To be sure (it should be added), the conceptions of what constituted natural and civil law had been transformed by ‘modern’ political philosophers after Machiavelli, especially in regard to the new conceptions of natural and divine law those philosophers propounded, but principled resistance to arbitrary power, whether tyrannical or merely ‘absolute,’ throughout ‘the West.’

Not so in the East, not so in Russia. “For a variety of reasons—geographic in the first place, but also cultural—the political evolution of Russia proceeded in a direction opposite to that of the West: from the relative freedom of the Middle Ages to a regime that in the vocabulary of western political theory would be variously defined as tyrannical, seignorial, or patrimonial.” 

In terms of geography, Russian rulers faced the same problem as all others who lived on the Great European Plain, but in much more severe form. “As a rule, the stability and liberty of a country stand in inverse relation to its size and external security: that is to say, the larger a country and the more insecure its borders, the less can it afford the luxury of popular sovereignty and civil rights”; “a country that administers vast territories and is exposed to foreign invasions tends toward centralized forms of government.” What for France and Poland was a serious problem was for Russia a dilemma, being “the most spacious kingdom on earth” by the seventeenth century, with no formidable natural boundaries to protect it from nomadic raiders. “This experience contrasted with that of western Europe, which enjoyed immunity from external invasions from the eleventh century onward,” even if it hardly enjoyed such immunity from territorial encroachments by one or more states upon the others, within. “Under these conditions, there “could be no [Russian] society independent of the state and no corporate spirit uniting its members,” as “the entire Russian nation was enserfed,” with no social or political space for a titled aristocracy, for “a class of self-governing burghers,” or for “a rural yeomanry.” There was, moreover, a “virtual absence of private property in the means of production and marketable commodities” since land was so abundant that peasants simply moved around the immense forests, cutting and burning trees to make way for farming, then moving on to another patch of trees once the soil had been exhausted. “The notion that land could be owned in exclusive property was entirely alien to them: they were convinced into modern times, that land, like air and water, all equally essential to life, was created by God for everyone’s use.” If the czar “claim[ed] title to all of Russian soil,” so what? He didn’t interfere with their way of life, and the Orthodox Church taught that God owned the earth, with the czar as God’s vicar.

As for the cities, private property didn’t establish itself in them, either. “Muscovite cities were essentially administrative and garrison centers, containing sizable rural populations engaged in agriculture and lacking powers of self-government.” That is, cities were much as they had been in western Europe before Charlemagne: fortified nodes in a military-political network. Given Russia’s vast distances and harsh climate, little or no national commerce existed; residents held no property rights against the czar, and there was no credit. The Mongol conquest “destroyed such urban self-government as had existed” before their arrival, and Mongol warlords assured that no such thing would arise for the two and a half centuries of their subsequent rule. Landlords weren’t really lords, holding their fiefs “provisionally, on condition of satisfactory service to the crown.” With no independent titled aristocracy, no middle class, and no private property in land, the czars who took over after the Mongols ruled without civil-social or institutional limits to their power. Nor did the Russian Orthodox Church, heir to Byzantium, establish the idea of a standard of justice applicable to secular rulers, preferring instead the New Testament teaching that whether king or tyrant, the monarch served as God’s scourge of human sinfulness and must therefore “be unreservedly obeyed.” ‘Czar’ means ‘Caesar,’ but a Caesar as conceived in Byzantium, a secular Pantocrator in a ‘new’ Rome, unfettered by such restraints as Roman Caesars were expected to obey, even if many did not. The czars regarded their realm as “patrimonial property, property inherited from their fathers,” with no basis in consent and no obligations to their subjects. “In the eyes of the crown, its subjects had only duties and no rights, and in this sense, they were all equal.” In observing that Russian civil-social equality under despotism would rival the civil-social republicanism of democracy in America, Tocqueville founded his prediction on this longstanding fact.

One dimension of Tocqueville’s remedy to the ills of democracy, the refurbishment of an aristocracy which adapted itself to the new social condition, could not apply to Russia, which had no aristocracy in the Western sense. The titled aristocrats, the boyars, lived in Moscow, attending the czar’s court, or were assigned administrative duties in the provinces. Because the only way to bind the peasants to the land in the vastness of the Russian forests was to have the czars enforce serfdom, “the aristocracy forfeited its political ambitions” in exchange for such enforcement. “Serfdom, indeed, was the element that bound the Russian upper classes to the monarchy from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, and caused it to surrender its political interests.” Peter the Great completed the reduction of the aristocracy by opening military and civil offices to commoners, men even more subservient to their benefactor. There was indeed the Boyar Duma, but it held no public deliberations and initiated no legislation; “it was an instrument of the czar’s will,” neither “serv[ing] the interests of his subjects” nor “convey[ing] their wishes.” As for the Land Assemblies, most of the deputies were appointed by the czar in order “to strengthen the government’s control over the provinces.” The czar and his officials “neither then nor later conceived of society as independent of the state, as having its own rights, interests, and wishes, to which they were accountable.” In Russia, a social group or class could only look to the monarchy in the hope that it would protect them against the depredations of the other social groups. “It was a vicious circle: Russians supported autocracy because they felt powerless; and they felt powerless because autocracy gave them no opportunity to feel their power.” 

Political thought in Russia after liberation from the Mongols centered on a controversy that wracked the Orthodox Church, the question of monastic landholding. Exempt from taxation under the Mongols, the abbeys had accumulated some wealth, the larger ones in effect becoming analogous to the secular estates of Europe. One set of the clergy, the nestiazhateli or “nongreedy” ones, charged that these possessions had corrupted the clergy, who succumbed to worldliness; another set of the clergy, the stiazhateli or “greedy” ones, begged to differ, preferring not to be reduced to beggary themselves. How could a Church without wealth perform acts of Christian charity? they asked. The more cosmopolitan stiazhateli had traveled abroad, committed themselves to the logic taught in the Western European schools; the nestiazhateli eschewed what they labeled as foreign corruption, “reject[ing] logic and reasoning” as damnable vices. Corruption had infected the establishment clergy generally, many of whose members engaged in levels of debauchery unseen since the orgies of Roman emperors. Czar Ivan III countered these squabbles by seizing church properties, with the initial support of the nestiazhateli. In this, he found support also from still another faction within the Church, the ‘Judaizers,’ reformers who translated the Pentateuch into Slavonic and called for the abolition of Church hierarchy, monasteries, icons, and the veneration of saints. 

The Church establishment fought back in the Russian way, initially appealing to the czar to treat the Judaizers as the Spanish Inquisition had treated Jews but then, thanks to the arguments put forth by Joseph of Volokolamsk (“in some respects the most influential intellectual of medieval Russia”), provided the czars with “a novel (for Russia) theory of divine origin of kingship,” namely, that it was “the main task of political authority” to “safeguard the faith”—the doctrine of Caesaropapism. Having thus elevated the monarchy to a spiritual capacity, he justified clerical landholding—but with the monasteries, not the individual monks, as the landholders—as forming a strong foundation for ecclesiastical training and action, action in the service of the czar, justifying the ways of czars to men. Indeed, he took from one of the Byzantine writers the claim that the czar “in his being is like other men” but “in his authority he resembles God Almighty,” to be “unconditionally obeyed.” “He persuaded the crown that heresies, even if they did not directly touch on politics, undermined monarchical authority and that only by pitilessly persecuting them could the monarch secure absolute power.” 

This gave the czars a choice. They wanted to take Church lands, and so approved of the ascetic teachings of the nestiazhateli; yet, they feared the Church establishment, especially since it offered them a degree of churchlike authority in exchange for keeping their hands off Church property. An accident concentrated the czarist mind when, in 1522, Czar Basil resolved to divorce his barren first wife and marry a Lithuanian princess. (“He anticipated Henry VIII of England by nine years.”) This violation of Orthodox canon law met with resistance from the nestiazhalteli; even the distant Greek Orthodox patriarchs weighed in with a condemnation. This enabled the Joseph’s successor among the stiazhateli, Daniel of Volokolamsk, to side with the czar, “promising to take the sin—if such it was—upon himself,” in a remarkably adroit imitatio Christi (best called an imitation imitatio Christi?) that Machiavelli himself might have admired. As Pipes drily notes, the eventual child of the loving couple was Ivan IV, a.k.a. “the Terrible.” Thus solemnized, the doctrine of “the divine nature of royal authority and its claim to unlimited power” reigned victorious, assisted by timely reforms of the Church by the now predominant hitherto corrupt stiazhateli, whose hierarchy moved to squelch the corrupt practices that had threatened to turn the Orthodox Church ‘protestant’ avant la lettre. The newly appointed head of the Church, Macarios, even managed to persuade young Ivan IV “to abandon his unruly ways and take charge of government.” If ‘czar’ means ‘Caesar’ and a Caesar is an emperor, it made sense that the Patriarch of Constantinople (“a capital which had been without an emperor for more than a century”), eventually recognized Ivan as the “only one true Christian emperor in the world.” Czars could now claim their own capital, Moscow to be the Third Rome—replacing the Second Rome, Constantinople, which had, in the eyes of the Orthodox, replaced the First Rome, the Vatican, only to be conquered by the Muslim Turks in 1453. “Implicit in” this claim to rule the Third Rome “was the belief that Russia was destined to rule the world and that the Russian czar was the czar of all humanity.” It is no wonder that Western European political observers named this sort of rule ‘Oriental despotism,’ inasmuch as the czar now asserted a universal authority similar to that long assumed by the Chinese emperors. 

Russia was indeed distant from Western Europe now, not only geographically but intellectually, spiritually, and politically. The czar, as “the world’s only Christian emperor, was affirmed, with the support of theologians, as endowed with unrestrained power—his subjects were in the literal sense of the word his slaves,” rather as the Apostle Paul thought of himself in relation to God, only without the guarantees of the divine covenant. The Russian Orthodox Church acceded to domination by the czar, who appointed its officers and removed them without consultation. At the same time, the Church firmly censured “all independent religious thought” as mudrstvovanie or ‘smart-alecking, offering “no intellectual refuge from those seeking alternatives” to the regime in a manner that “startled foreigners visiting Russia, causing them to wonder whether Russians were indeed Christians” at all. This hardly disturbed the czar or his clergy, who expected nothing better from the lesser peoples, who did not understand Russia as the new Holy Land, “the only country so labeled apart from Palestine.” Understandably if fatally for Russia, “when Russia developed a class of secular thinkers known as the intelligentsia, the majority of them either rejected religion outright or showed themselves, indifferent to it, yet tended to pursue their worldly speculations with a pseudoreligious fanaticism” imbibed from their earliest schooling under the tutelage of the monks. When a prince dared to urge Ivan IV to accept counselors, citing Aristotle and Cicero (“of which” the prince wrote scornfully, “the Russians knew nothing”), the czar rejected the thought out of hand, citing the Bible as interpreted by his appointed priests. “How can a man be called an autocrat if he does not govern by himself?” he rejoined, with etymological exactness. To seek advice from others is “the rule of many,” he explained, and “the rule of many is like unto the folly of women,” who notoriously cannot make up their minds.

Ivan’s successors could only nod judiciously at the writings of the seventeenth-century Croatian emigre, Iury Krichanich, who wrote in his book, Politika, that “perfect autocracy” was the “first, most important, principal” cause of Russian happiness, maintained despite the country’s bad soil, miserable climate, and neighboring enemies. In his judgment, “only a powerful, centralized state could civilize the country. Although the contemporary Patriarch Nikon made an attempt to reverse the lines of authority by asserting “the supremacy of the church over the state,” drawing upon the teachings of the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, he succeeded only in weakening the Church still further, making it easy prey during the next century, under the rule of Peter I.

Peter “the Great” was a great modernizer. He abolished the annoying patriarchate altogether, replacing it with the “Holy Synod,” which was no more holy than (as the old joke goes) the Holy Roman Empire. Expropriating church and monastic lands, placing clergy and monks on state salary, he made the Russian church “a branch of the state’s administration” a “powerless tool of the crown,” and proceeded to appoint “laymen, sometimes military officers,” to the Synod. Just as important in theoretical terms, Peter was “the first Russian ruler to view the state as an institution in its own right, distinct from the person of the monarch” in imitation of the modern, Western European, political philosophers, notably Bodin and Hobbes. He sent young men to European universities, the better to absorb modernity and to reinforce it upon their return to Russia. Although in theory this meant the introduction of the idea of the “common good” to Russia, in practice Peter “denied Russians any aspirations of their own and perceived themes subjects capable of functioning only within the context of the absolutist state”—a practice old Hobbes himself would have found congenial. Dissatisfied with his weak and disappointingly religious son, Peter chose his own successor, his grandson. Subsequent anti-absolutist stirrings, centered among the descendants of the boyars, were neutralized by czars who played off this elite against the newer “service nobility,” which “owed its ennoblement to Moscow’s rulers.” Absolutism was vindicated in The History of Russia by Vasily Tatishchev, a former military officer and foreign service officer who served under Peter the Great, his weak immediate successors, and finally the Empress Anna, who reigned from 1730 to 1740. “Skimming over Russian history since Kievan times, he argued that for a country like Russia autocracy was the only suitable regime,” making his the “first document in Russian history in which autocracy was advocated on purely pragmatic grounds, without reference to the Holy Scriptures or the divine origin of royal authority” citing as its justification “the unique size of Russia and the ignorance of her population,” an argument that “would be used by the Russian crown to reject proposals for constitution and public representation during the next century and a half.” Russian ‘conservatism’ conserved the regime of absolute monarchy at the price of dismissing religious justification of its rule as superfluous.

But Peter’s educational program of sending Russian innocents abroad to absorb modern ideas had long-term results unfavorable to czarism. First among these was the emergence of public opinion. With Enlightenment ideas now imported and the structure of a modern state in place, the regime began to see recognizably ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and even ‘radical’ movements, in something that was starting to resemble a modern civil society. It started small, under the rule of Peter’s successors, the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II. With compulsory state service abolished for the aristocrats and the introduction of private property in land, Russia saw, “for the first time, a leisured and propertied class,” “leisured and enlightened” in its upper reaches, “able to view itself as ‘society’ (obshchestvo)—that is, as the state’s counterpart.” This small group “paid attention to the way the country was governed,” and was “actively encouraged” to do so by Catherine, herself “born and raised in western Europe.” This put the regime in a bind, as it wanted and needed elements of modernity in order to survive in its ever-dangerous neighborhood but wanted nothing to do with back-talk, let alone political resistance, from ‘the few.’ “Filled—sincerely, it seems—with the desire to benefit her adopted country and rid it of the stigma of despotism, she nevertheless reacted angrily to any suggestion that she formally limit her autocratic powers.” She admired the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire (with whom she corresponded), and Rousseau, permitting their books to be published and distributed in Russia, yet persecuted private publishers when “displeased with some of their output.” She knew what she thought but didn’t know what to do about it.

As the French would say, she had reason for her confusion. Montesquieu’s labyrinthine L’Esprit des lois scarcely commends despotism but it does maintain that countries with large territories and weak civic culture will require at best constitutional monarchy and sometimes despotism. A constitutional monarchy, upholding “the rule of law, derived from the Law of Nature and adapted to a country’s specific conditions,” needs what Montesquieu (and Tocqueville, following him) called “intermediate” powers—typically an aristocracy, although the civic associations seen in the (then) British North American colonies can serve the same function. That is, non-despotic rule of ‘the one’ limits itself by law, but it must have some elements of civil society capable of resisting monarchic encroachments upon legal barriers. Montesquieu pointed to Russia’s lack of “liberty, honor, freedom of speech, and a commercial third estate” as guarantees of a despotic regime. He thus gave several Russian factions their ‘talking points’: the aristocrats could say, You czars need us if you seek to achieve “a true monarchy”; liberals could say, To survive and prosper in modernity, we must have the rule of law; and partisans of autocracy could say, Russia is far too large to be ruled by anything but a strong hand directed by a single mind. 

Neither the single mind of Catherine nor any of the minds around her could figure out “how to restrain the autocracy by law.” She wanted the rule of law but “drew no distinction between laws and administrative ordinances,” the latter enacted by bureaucrats appointed by the czar and, “implicitly, acting in [her] name.” Further, the rule of law aristocrats propounded didn’t apply to themselves, unencumbered by any “legal restraints over the serfs or their belongings” short of killing or torturing them. Reform efforts thus proved fruitless and autocracy/despotism continued. At the same time, public opinion sniped at the regime, weakening its authority and at times making it question the authority it wielded. Pipes identifies Count Nikita Panin as one such critic, “Russia’s earliest liberal in the Western sense of the word,” an advocate of constitutionalism and civil rights, including property rights. Empress Elizabeth appointed him to tutor Catherine’s son, Paul, and even promised to establish “proper limits and regulations” for “each government institution.” Paul proved a disaster as czar, Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, who took over after the assassination, also “made no secret of his liberal sentiments” and, like his grandmother, found himself unable to bring those sentiments into practice in any consistent way. 

Alexander’s chief minister, briefly, was Michael Speransky. By now, the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had shifted from their adherence to natural rights to the historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. Speransky hoped and expected that Russia would evolve toward republicanism. ‘History’ would solve its problems. His intellectual nemesis, Nikolay Karamzin, a Romantic opponent of Hegelian rationalism, denied that Russia could sustain republicanism, that without an autocratic regime the country would succumb to anarchy and consequent rule by foreigners. He admitted Montesquieu’s distinction between constitutional monarchy and despotism, arguing that Russia could achieve the former without representative institutions by forming a partnership between the czar and “a gentry in possession of inviolable estate rights,” including the right to absolute rule over the serfs. Good men, not good institutions, were what Russia needed—the mirror opposite of what Publius argued in The Federalist, respecting the civil-social conditions prevailing in the United States. A far better historian than Tatishchev, he followed in his predecessor’s line as a historian, writing his History of the Russian State in twelve volumes, persuading himself, and not incidentally the czar, of the soundness of his understanding of autocracy and of its indispensability to Russia. In the dispute between Speransky and Karamzin, Russia saw the two philosophic ‘replacements’ for natural-rights theory: rationalist historicism and anti-rationalist Romanticism. Alexander waffled between reform and ‘conservatism’; as late as 1818, he announced in a speech opening the Polish Diet in Warsaw that Russia, like Poland, would have “legal and free institutions” once its people had attained “the proper level of maturity.” He likely meant reforms along the lines of Karamzin, not of Speransky, but Russian liberals took heart, hoping that this marked the beginning of the end for serfdom.

Until 1825, “all attempts to change Russia’s autocratic form of government had emanated from above,” from the czars or from persons appointed by the czars: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Panin, Speransky, and in his own way Karamzin. Now, however, officers in St. Petersburg and Ukraine led a mutiny of army garrisons against the rule of the newly-crowned czar, Nicholas I. The ‘Decembrists,’ aristocratic liberal admirers of Speransky, had seen, while stationed in Germany and France during the Napoleon Wars, that civic order could be maintained without autocracy. A decade later, they hoped that Alexander’s elder son, Konstantin, would succeed to the throne. When Konstantin’s refusal of the succession became known, their surprise was complete; their rebellion amounted to an attempted palace coup against the perceived autocratic leanings of Nicholas. They were crushed, but alarmed autocrats, very much including Nicholas, leaned even more heavily toward autocracy. 

Nicholas I felt the need for “an official ideology” to justify his regime—another sign that public opinion now existed and counted for something politically. Eventually called “Official Nationalism,” the doctrine was summarized in the slogan, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” or, alternatively, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland.” While all of these terms invoked the longstanding Russian regime, reconceived in terms of Romanticism, and as such opposed what Nicholas saw as the dangerous secular-liberal, individualist elements of Western European thought and politics, Pipes distinguishes Official Nationalism from the more stridently anti-rationalist Slavophilism contemporary with it: “Peter the Great, anathema to the Slavophiles, was the doctrine’s idol.” If this sounds like an attempt to square the circle—a Hegelian synthesis without Hegelian logic—it may well have been something very much like that. 

The Slavophiles themselves addressed the Hegelian problem in terms of nationalism. If ‘History’ unfolds dialectically, and world history unfolds as nations confront one another “as bearers of specific ideas,” where does Russia fit in? “The Slavophiles depicted the West as poisoned by shallow rationalism inherited from classical antiquity and racked by class antagonisms from which Russia was saved by her Byzantine heritage and Slavic spirit” as seen in the peasant commune, “a solution to the class conflicts which the West was vainly seeking in socialism.” Hegel mistakenly took a fully rational World State to be the ‘end of History,’ but the Slavophiles held up Russia as “the model for the world.” “Russia was the future,” the true end of History. Slavophiles proposed a continuation of autocracy, but an autocracy limited to the realm of the state, a state that left the private lives of its subjects alone in exchange for subjects’ refraining from citizenship, from participation in political life. As did Tatischchev and Karamzin, the Slavophiles presented a mythologized account of Russian history, this time claiming for Russia a fundamentally peaceful character in contrast with the barbaric violence of the West. Fundamentally spiritual, not political, Russians neither want nor should have anything to do with government; “their sense of freedom was inner, spiritual; indeed, true freedom can exist only there,” never in civic life. Autocracy permitted Russians to live the highest form of life human beings could achieve, confining the dirty business of politics to ‘the one’ and his colleagues. The Slavophile writer Konstantin Aksakov summarized: “To the government unlimited freedom to rule, to which it has the exclusive right; to the people full freedom of life, both outward and inner, which the government safeguards.” Russian liberals did not understand true freedom, instead pursuing the illusion of civic freedom, an illusion imported from the West. The successes of the first half of the century, beginning with the victory over Napoleonic France, fed Russian self-confidence.

Reality set in, quickly enough. In response to Russia’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire’s Danube Principalities in 1853, the Turkish emperor allied with Great Britain and France (themselves newly allied) to repel the czar’s army. If France had a powerful army and Great Britain a powerful navy, and both had the most advanced military technologies of the time, Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality had none of these to the same degree, and this handicap derived from its “refusal to involve society in the social and political life” of the country. “Russia, it came to be widely believed in and out of government in the aftermath of the Crimean War, had to build up her human and material resources,” which could be done only with “far-reaching reforms” beginning with the emancipation of the serfs, who constituted eighty percent of the population. This Czar Alexander II did in short order, two years before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, and four years before the ratification of Thirteenth Amendment. Additionally, Alexander established institutions of local self-government which enabled peasants to begin to govern themselves; he separated the judicial power from the executive, with jury trials. Autocracy didn’t disappear; it concentrated itself and invoked a more virulent nationalism even as it democratized and politicized elements of Russian civil society. What Pipes calls “conservatism,” the defense of the autocratic/monarchic regime, became increasingly “chauvinistic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic,” as seen in some of the unlovelier passages in Dostoevsky’s writings. 

 The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a jurist and advisor to the czars, viewed Alexander’s reforms with distaste. In the wake of Alexander’s assassination in 1881, he was quick to persuade the heir to the throne to roll back many of the reforms and to reassume “the uncompromising absolutism” of the young man’s grandfather, Nicholas I. In his 1896 book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Pobedonostsev argued that “the modern world was on the verge of self-destruction, which only cooperation between the autocratic monarchy and the Orthodox Church could forestall.” Democratization could only lead to tyranny; such abstract principles as natural rights were anti-life, failing to account for nature’s concrete, organic quality, whether in biology or in human society; the modern-Western ‘cult of humanity’ enunciated by Auguste Comte and others would destroy the human personality, which can only flourish under the rule of God and his Orthodox Church. Man must submit to the rightful authority of Church and Czar, since “power is the depository of truth,” ordained as such by God. Pipes observes that Pobedonostsev “had a greater impact on government policy than any other Russian theorist of his time.” After he had passed from the scene, Sergei Iulevich Witte took up the mantle of autocracy, serving as finance minister then as Russia’s first prime minister at and around the turn of the century. Constitutionalism, he told the German chancellor, “will be the end of Russia”; “a parliament and the universal vote would produce anarchy and destroy Russia,” leaving it defenseless against enemies foreign and domestic. Such liberalization might occur, successfully, sometime in the indefinite future; in the interim, industrialization would protect the country from Western predation.

By this time, autocracy continued to prevail, with progressive-gradualist liberalism and revolutionary radicalism gathering strength below. “One cannot comprehend any of the three strains that have dominated Russian thought” in modernity “except in relation to one another.” Among the liberals, Boris Chicherin was “arguably the most prominent,” an advocate of laissez-faire economics and therefore antagonistic to anarchists, Slavophiles, and socialists. Marxist-Leninist doctrines were propounded by Peter Bengardovich Struve, who, unlike his contemporary V. I. Lenin, denied the claim that Russia could vault over the capitalist stage of economic production and establish socialism. But he eventually rejected Marxian notions of historically determined revolution as the issue of class conflict, a heresy which earned him expulsion from the socialist ranks. He became a reformist, convinced that autocracy’s days were numbered and that only a return to the reformism of Alexander II could ward off violent revolution. 

Pipes considers Peter Arkadevich Stolypin to have been “imperial Russia’s last great statesman,” a judgment Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later affirm. Stolypin “understood the need to be rid of the patrimonial ideal by bringing society into some sort of equilibrium with the government.” This made him a lonely figure, supported neither by Nicholas II (whose liberalizing concessions were made “under duress”), nor the autocratic purists, nor the liberal advocates of parliamentarism, nor the Communist advocates of ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. Although he “tried repeatedly to bring representatives of public opinion into his cabinet” and to “lay the foundations of a constitutional autocracy” by transforming the peasant communes into villages in which private property in land was respected, and more, to enact legal guarantees of civil rights for all Russians, it was too late. In 1911, he was assassinated by one Dmitry Bogrov, a shadowy figure who was both a member of one of the socialist parties and an informer for the czar’s secret police. In a few years, the Great War would ruin czarism, soon replaced by a new, far more murderous form of tyranny claiming legitimacy not from tradition but from the supposedly ineluctable laws of ‘History’ as formulated not by Hegel but by Marx, as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin. 

Pipes concludes by remarking that the Russian word for ‘sovereign,’ gosudar, “originally designated a master of slaves.” In Aristotelian terms, then, Russian regimes imitated not the political character of the family’s marital relationship, a husband and wife ruling reciprocally, but the tyrannical character of the relations between master and slave. At best, a czar might mimic the third family relationship, the parental relationship of the father (occasionally the mother) ruling children. Russian thinkers, churchmen, and statesmen never fully accepted the Western Europeans’ distinction between the person of the ruler and the state apparatus he ruled with. In the words, of Nicholas I, “the government and I are one and the same.” And as late as 1917, Nicholas II contended that the Russian people needed to regain his confidence, not the other way around. For most of its late-feudal and modern history, with the exception of a thin layer of modernizing elements, Russian minds and hearts inclined to concur. 

Later, Romantic invocations of nationalism could not bind the czar’s subjects together because “Russia was an empire before she had become a nation.” Russia’s vast territorial conquests resulted in a population that was only half Russian, and ethnic Russians themselves “were widely scattered over the empire’s immense territory.” “Until quite recently most Russians, when asked who they were, would identify themselves not as ‘Russians’ but as ‘Orthodox Christians.” As such, they felt greater affinity with their coreligionists abroad, be they Greeks or Serbs, than with westernized Russians who did not observe Orthodox rituals. That is, both elements of the modern ‘nation-state’ remained incomplete in the empire of the czars. “Limited government was beyond their comprehension, and so was patriotism.” As Montesquieu saw, despots govern by fear and, as Pipes adds, in Russia they were governed by fear, fear of internal stability and external foes. The czars “were convinced—and not without reason, as the events of 1917-1920 were to show—that lacking strong central authority acting for the benefit of the whole and independently of the particular wants of the diffuse population the country would promptly disintegrate.” A regime of autocracy, and of autocracy alone, could undertake the enlightenment of Russians, liberate the serfs, rule a people “by nature apolitical,” defend that people from the degrading philistinism of modern materialism, individualism, and nihilism, and raise Russians “above selfish class interests.” Or so Russian autocrats contended, and still contend to this day.

 

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller: Wilhelm Tell. Gilbert J. Jordan translation. Cleveland: Bobbs-Merril Company, 1964.

 

First produced in 1804, a few years into the Napoleonic Wars, themselves the aftermath of the excesses of the French Revolution, Wilhelm Tell provides a political education in the virtues needed to found republics that avoid such excesses, and thus to issue in no such wars. In the play, three Swiss cantons struggle for independence from Hapsburg rule, which had prevailed in the Holy Roman Empire since 1273, some four centuries after Charlemagne’s founding and three decades before the events of the play. The lessons Schiller draws from the events of that struggle and the men and women who fought it—part history, part legend—may have contributed to the stability of Swiss republicanism after the European revolutions of 1848. In many other countries, republican gains soon evanesced, but not so in Switzerland. 

In 1804, the Swiss had good reason to view French revolutionary fervor unenthusiastically. A few years earlier, invading Frenchmen had centralized Switzerland, abolishing its citadels of self-government, the cantons, and founding the “Helvetic Republic.” Reacting to an invasion by Austrians and Russians in 1803, Napoleon had partially restored Swiss independence, which would be fully restored only after Napoleon’s defeat in the settlement reached by the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Appropriately, given the political and military conflicts of Europe in the previous decade and a half, Schiller opens his play with Lake Lucerne roiling in a thunderstorm, emblematic of the Stürm und Drang of Romanticism, itself roiling European thought. A peasant from Unterwalden canton, Conrad Baumgarten, flees the forces of the imperial governor of the Swiss, Albrecht Gessler, whose Burgvoght or steward he had killed in defense of his honor and the honor of his wife and home. He has crossed the lake in search of relatively safe haven in Uri canton—what “any free man in my place would do.” Fearing the storm professedly and perhaps the civil storm unprofessedly, the boatman refuses him passage. A hunter and expert marksman, Wilhelm Tell, offers to bring him across, saying, “rather fall into the hand of God than in the hands of men.” “No other man is like him in these mountains,” the boatman says. In revenge for the peasant’s escape, the Emperor’s troops take revenge by killing the citizens’ livestock, setting them against both the Hapsburg emperor and his subordinate, who vows “to put a stop to all this freedom,” especially the peasants’ practice of building houses without his permission. Life, liberty, property: the Austrians consider the Holy Roman Empire to be their state, even as Machiavelli describes lo stato as the prince’s personal possession.

As this is happening, Gertrud Stauffacher, wife of the Schwyz canton Landammann or chief magistrate, urges her husband to consult with the “good citizens” of the neighboring cantons to determine “how we can best escape from this oppression.” The cautious Werner admits to having “a storm of dangerous thoughts” in his mind, a storm Gertrud traces to its firm source: “God will always help courageous men” and “noble hearts will never bear injustice.” Her husband acknowledges that “For centuries we Swiss have prized our freedom.” In Uri canton, the Hapsburg governor forces citizens to build a fortress to be used in the enforcement of his edicts, erects a pole and puts his hat on it, announcing that any man who fails to salute the hat will be executed. Wilhelm Tell urges calm. Pointing to the mountains, calls them the “house of freedom God created,” a natural fortress for the Swiss, more formidable than the artifact of tyranny. Such “hotheaded rulers never last for long” because although “sudden storms arise within these gorges,” the Swiss “put our fires out,” bring their boats to harbor, “and a mighty spirit moves across the land without a trace of harm.” He advises his countrymen to “stay quietly at home,” as “peace is granted to the peaceful man.” But Tell knows his limits. He is a huntsman, not one for deliberation: “I cannot weigh and compare.” He stands ready “for a special task,” if called upon. He is no French revolutionary avant la lettre. The problem, Tell’s father-in-law Walter Fürst observes, is that “tyrants give assistance to one another”—in Switzerland, the governor to the emperor—as readily as citizens do.

Revolutionary sentiment also builds in Unterwalden canton. The governor’s advocatus or bailiff demands the ox team of Heinrich von Melchtal, who has failed to pay his taxes. Heinrich replies that if he loses his oxen he won’t be able to pay his taxes at all, and may starve. Let your son pull the yoke, the advocatus sneers, enraging the young man, who raps him over the knuckles with his oxen prod, then flees the imperial troops to the home of Walter Fürst. Again as retaliation, the Austrians gouge out Heinrich’s eyes. This turns son Arnold into a revolutionary, telling his host and the other cantonal dignitaries that he has “many friends” in his home canton who would join them, “the trusted fathers of our country,” in resisting Austrian tyranny. He pleads with them not to “reject my judgment and advice because I’m young and inexperienced,” as “I’m not impelled by hot, impetuous blood, but by the power of a painful grief.” “You too are heads of families, and fathers and you must wish to have a virtuous son who wants to honor and respect his father”; “the tyrant’s sword hangs over you as well.” Whether by rape, confiscation, or physical attack, tyrants destroy families, the foundation of the political community. Fürst reiterates his point about collaboration among tyrants: “Were there a judge between us and our foe, then right and law would govern the decision. But our oppressor also is our emperor and highest court.” Therefore, “our God must help us now through our own strength.” The Swiss elders agree to combine against the tyrant—one association against another.

In Uri canton, the elderly Baron of Attinghausen, a free aristocrat, sympathizes with the peasants. But his nephew and heir, Ulrich von Rudenz, is a collaborator with the Austrians, preferring “the brilliant court” of the Hapsburgs to the role of “ruler of these lowly herdsmen.” Like Heinrich von Melchtal, he has been “blinded,” his uncle tells him, not physically but in his soul, “seduced by splendor,” ready to “renounce your native land, and be ashamed of good and ancient customs of your fathers.” Someday you will “yearn for home and your native mountains,” since “the love of fatherland” is more powerful than “the foreign, evil world” of Vienna. “At the proud imperial court, you’ll be a stranger to yourself and to your heart,” alienated. “The sturdy roots of your strength are here. Out in the foreign world you’ll stand alone, a swaying reed that any storm can break.” The natural bonds are love will prove stronger than the ties of “word and oath” to the emperor. As it happens, it is another natural bond that keeps Ulrich away from the imperial capital: his hope of winning the Lady Berta von Bruneck, the imperial governor’s ward, whom he hopes to impress by his links to the court. Assuming that the young lady must esteem her guardian, the Baron can only lament, “Fortunate is he who need not live to see the new,” the new being the replacement of good and ancient customs, still-older nature, and the God Who created nature.

The people arm themselves against what Arnold von Melchtal calls “the tyranny of this regime,” symbolized by an unsettling rainbow caused not by the sun but the moon. Arnold has been protected in his conspiracy by the “sacred laws of hospitality” obeyed in the Fürst household, still another ancient custom derived from the natural institution of the family. He was right to claim that he is motivated by grief at his father’s unjust punishment and not blind rage. He shows “self-control” by refraining from murdering one of the emperor’s men at a feast, self-government being the foundation of political liberty. Inheritance sustains families through generations, and Fürst finds in him a trustworthy ally in the Swiss political inheritance; “”in secret we must meet on our own soil, which we obtained in freedom from our fathers, convening furtively like murderers, at night, when darkness lends its cloak to crimes and to conspirators who fear the light,” but for a cause that deserves to flourish in the light: “justice for ourselves—a thing that is as pure and bright and fair as is the radiance of the light by day.” Arnold avers that “what’s plotted in the darkness of the night shall joyfully and freely come to light.”

Meeting in nature, in the Rütli, a meadow near Lake Lucerne in Uri canton, the Swiss elect Itel Reding of Schwyz as their magistrate. “I cannot take my oath upon the books,” he tells them, “so I will swear by all the stars above that I will never turn aside from justice.” Walter Stauffacher assures him that he commits no novelty, as this only reconfirms “our fathers’ ancient covenant” in founding Switzerland. And “we’re all one blood,” all Swiss. The new convention, the new and arbitrary ‘law’ of the Hapsburg corrupts families. The stars symbolize unalienable or natural rights. To confirm his claim, Stauffacher relates the founding story of Schwyz canton, then draws its lesson. “Other nations bear a foreign yoke because they yielded to the conqueror. But we, the true and ancient Swiss, have always treasured and preserved our freedom. We did not bend our knees before the princes; we freely chose the emperor’s protection.” That is, not unlike the Americans in their Declaration of Independence, Schiller’s Swiss point to natural rights and to government by the consent of the governed—consent being reasoned assent, neither compelled nor unthinking. These revolutionaries want not anarchy but self-government. “Even free men have an overlord,” Stauffacher says. “There must be government, a highest judge, to render justice when there are disputes,” and “our fathers gladly gave this honor to the emperor,” pledging themselves to “military service” in the Empire, “the freeman’s only duty, to shield the realm that is his own defense.” There is a standard above the emperor, however: Men’s “everlasting rights, which still abide on high, inalienable and indestructible as are the stars.” In light of those stars, in the meadow at night, “we’ll stand for our own homes, our wives and children” as “a nation of true brothers” who “stand as one in danger and distress.” Self-government by reason enjoins prudence or practical reasoning in addition to reasoned assent to just government as rationally discerned from nature and nature’s God. For now, “let each man go calmly on his way to his own friends and his community,” “endur[ing] what you must suffer until then” and “quietly win[ning] friends to our new union,” the new covenant that reprises the old one. “Let the tyrants’ debts to us increase until the day of reckoning is here”; “let everyone restrain his righteous rage and hold his vengeance back to serve the whole, for if one man thinks only of himself, he robs our common welfare and our goal.” 

Rudenz and Berta have their own conspiracy going. They meet secretly in the forest, but to his unpleasant surprise she upbraids him for his preference the Austrians over Switzerland. Once again, it is a woman who holds a man to patriotic account. Having been forced by the imperial governor to accept the prospect of an arranged marriage with one of the courtiers—her guardian guards her poorly—she tells Ulrich, “Only love, your love, can set me free,” but to love me you must love our country. “Where could we ever find the Blessed Isles if not in this fair land of innocence,” a country of mountains and meadows, not of cities. “Here where the ancient loyalties yet live”—fidelity may well be on her mind—and “where falsehood still has never found its way, no envy can obscure our happiness; the hours will pass and fill each shining day,” and “in true and manly worth I see you there, the first among these free and equal men,” sharing “the privilege of king and citizen.” Otherwise, get lost, she implies. True and manly worth is the cornerstone of the family that supports a self-governing federal republic. Nothing less will do.

Wilhelm Tell’s wife is less brave. Her husband declaims, “Whoever looks around with open eyes and trusts in God and his own ready strength can keep himself from danger and distress. He fears no mountains who was born among them.” Against her reservations, he finds virtue in his own disinclination to deliberate: “Who thinks too long will not accomplish much.” But it is not an act but a failure to act that puts him and his son in danger. Passing the governor’s castle in Uri canton, he fails to salute the hat on the pole and Gessler arrests him for this capital offense. During the interrogation, son Walter proudly says that his father is such a good marksman that he can shoot an apple at the distance of 100 yards; it might be that the boy thinks the governor would want to keep a man with such a skill alive and potentially useful to him. Determining to punish both father and son for their insolence, Gessler commands Tell to shoot an apple off his son’s head. In this, he continues the Hapsburg’s evidently systematic assault on family, tightening the noose of centralized imperial rule. In so commanding, he ignores Berta’s compassionate pleading (“My lord, don’t play with these poor people’s lives”), but Gessler will be a man of the law, self-ordained and capricious as it is. He prefers a show of compassion to the real thing. “Your life is forfeited, and I can kill you,” he says to Tell, “but see, I mercifully place your fate in your own skilled and highly practiced hand. You can’t complain and call the sentence harsh if you are made the master of your fate.” Many an archer can hit a bull’s-eye but “I consider him a master who trusts his skill in any situation, whose heart does not affect his eye and hand.” It is the goad of a would-be Machiavellian, a test of virtù disguised as a test of virtue. In the test, the son proves courageous, virtuous by nature, refusing to be tied or blindfolded and, famously, Tell splits the apple without harming him. Gessler keeps him under arrest, anyway.

But this presents the would-be Machiavellian prince with a difficulty a real Machiavellian would have foreseen. In playing with his captive instead of jailing and executing him quickly, in undertaking a mere game of dominance, Gessler has ordered his intended victim to pick up a crossbow. Good arms make good laws, Machiavelli cynically teaches; ergo, a real prince will scarcely let his enemy take up arms and give him the chance to enforce some law other than that of the prince. Tell hastens to instruct him, announcing that if his arrow had missed the apple and hit Walter, he would have used a second arrow to kill the Governor. With this threat he has committed a second crime, this time with no offer of exoneration, however cruel. Walter clings to his father as he is led away, but Tell calmly replies, “Above us is your Father. Call on him.” His message to his wife, who will think her fears vindicated, is “the boy’s unhurt, and God will help me too.” He is no Machiavellian.

God, or nature’s God does indeed help the patriot. As the ship carrying Tell to prison crosses a lake, another storm comes up, understood by a fisherman nearby as the rebellion of nature against the Governor’s assault on the bond between father and son. Evidently not himself a fisher of men, the fisherman considers this a return to the state of nature, now that no humans would want to live in Austria-tyrannized Switzerland. But the natural storm is more powerful than the Governor’s storming, and natural ruler, Wilhelm Tell, is the only one who can pilot the boat through the storm. In releasing him for this task, his guards enable him to escape and to join the rebels. The Governor’s unnatural tyranny won’t last much longer.

In Attinghausen, the Baron is on his deathbed. He has heard of the rebellion. “If countrymen have dared so bold a deed all by themselves, without the aid of nobles, relied so much on their own strength and means, good—then we nobles are no longer needed, and we can meet our death with confidence that life goes on, that mankind’s glory will hereafter be maintained by other hands.” Those hands are before him, the hands of Walter Tell, whom he blesses: “From this child’s head, on which the apple lay, shall spring you new and better liberty,” the liberty defended by the people, who, if united, can resist tyrannic imperial rule. He dies with the light in his eyes, the light that symbolizes God-given republican liberty. But in the event, he is wrong about the needlessness of the aristocrats. Indignant at Tell’s arrest, now followed by the arrest of his beloved Berta on charges of sympathy with the people, the nobleman Ulrich Rudenz shakes hands with the peasant, Albert Melchtal. Across the social classes, national unity has risen and the Swiss agree to fight.

Tell the huntsman lays an ambush for Gessler along a mountain path. He watches as a peasant woman, Armgart, approaches the Governor, petitioning him for the release of her husband from jail on the grounds of hardship; they have seven children. He has no more compassion for her than he had for any of his other subject, saying that what the Swiss need are still stricter laws. At this, Tell intervenes. “I led a harmless, quiet hunter’s life,” he begins. “My bow was bent for woodland game alone, my mind was free from any thoughts of murder.” That was then. “You frightened me away from peaceful ways. You changed the natural milk of human kindness to rankling, bitter poison in my breast. You have accustomed me to monstrous things. A man who had to aim at his own child can surely hit his adversary’s heart,” and he has taken “a dreadful oath that only God could hear” to do just that. Nor is this really murder, but rather the exercise of his duty to “protect my faithful wife, my children, against your awful anger, Governor”—the same argument from natural justice the peasant Baumgarten had enunciated, before Tell rescued him from Gessler’s troops.  If the Governor would endanger Tell’s son and refuse relief to the family of Armgart, he threatens all Swiss families. The Hapsburg regime has forcibly attempted to change the Swiss regime, for the worse, aiming to substitute a Viennese-centered tyranny of fear and force for the liberty of the farm and the hunt. Tell shoots Gessler, and Armgart takes this as a teachable moment for children who need schooling in republicanism: “This is how a tyrant dies!”

But will the Hapsburg emperor not retaliate, send force majeure against the rebel Swiss? On the contrary, God intervenes once more. The Swiss learn that the emperor has been assassinated by his nephew, the duke of Austria. Hapsburg rule has been disrupted, although the Empire remains. But since the Empire does remain, why will the next emperor not bring the Swiss to heel? Will he distinguish between criminal murder and tyrannicide, unjust rebellion and the manly (and womanly) assertion of natural right? Here, Providence enables the Swiss to speak in action ‘louder than words.’ The fugitive Duke, disguised as a friar, seeks refuge with Wilhelm Tell’s family, “hop[ing] to find compassion” there on the grounds that “You too have taken vengeance on your foe.” Tell won’t have it. “You dare confuse ambition’s bloody guilt,” your own, “with a father’s necessary self-defense”? “I’ll raise my guiltless hands to heaven above and curse you and your deed, for I avenged the laws of nature; you dishonored them. I share no guilt with you. Your act was murder, but I defended what’s most dear to me.” But Wilhelm Tell turns out to be a better deliberator, a more prudent man, than his wife or he himself had supposed. He does not turn the Duke in to the Swiss republicans or the not-so-Holy Roman Empire. He tells him to go to Rome, to the Vatican, and beg forgiveness and absolution from the Pope, the Holy Father, vicegerent of God the Father.

Fatherhood vindicated, the Swiss regime, its way of life, equally vindicated, the aristocratic couple, both now patriots and republicans, engage to be married. Having changed his regime allegiance and his national allegiance, Ulrich Rudenz now honors his own late father and readies himself to form a new family, a new foundation for Swiss liberty. In events occurring after the time of the play, the Swiss would ally with Ludwig of Bavaria to defeat Frederick of Austria at the Battle of Morgarten Pass in 1315, helping to remove the Austrian Hapsburgs from the imperial throne. For the modern Swiss, witnessing Napoleon’s rampage across Europe, Schiller teaches how the passions of the French revolutionaries must never be allowed to ruin a republicanism based on families, ancient customs in support of families and local self-government, securing the natural rights of the people as individuals and as citizens, all under the God Who ordained those rights and protects just liberty in the mountainous land He created.