Philip Bobbitt: The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. New York: Random House, 2002. Book I: “State of War.”

 

The modern state—typically bigger than a polis or ‘city state,’ smaller than an ancient empire, nearly as centralized as the former and much more centralized than the latter—arose in sixteenth-century Italy. Its great if not good proponent, Machiavelli, understood it as a political form that could resist the Papacy and indeed Christianity itself, authority over which the Vatican had successfully claimed for centuries. “This book is about the modern state—how it came into being, how it has developed, and in what directions we can expect it to change.” It has changed and will continue to change because both constitutional law, the form or regime of the modern state, and international law, the formal relations among states, have been and will continue to be contested, most urgently under the pressure of war. “The dying and regeneration of its constitutional orders are a periodic part of the history of the modern state.”  To win a war, a state needs a strategy, and the strategies statesmen devise may well require them to reform or even revolutionize the regimes in which they rule. Conversely, a change of regime may alter patterns of international relations, including the frameworks in which statesmen conduct wars. Writing a generation ago, Bobbitt contends that the modern state is undergoing another of its several revolutions, in which the “nation-state” is being transformed into the “market state.” Whereas the nation state “links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders,” five conditions now challenge that claim to ruling legitimacy: the recognition of human rights as universal standards that ought to be respected by all states, regardless of their regimes; the existence of weapons of mass destruction readily deliverable across borders; such widespread global threats as environmental degradation, migration, population expansion, disease, and famine; “the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment,” thereby limiting states’ control over their internal economic affairs; and the “global communications network that penetrates borders electronically and threatens national languages, customs, and cultures.” “Many current political conflicts…arise from the friction between the decaying nation-state and the emerging market-state.” Such conflicts may escalate into an “epochal war” among the most powerful states. Bobbitt writes in the hope that recognizing the situation in which statesmen now act will enable them to think seriously about how to prevent such a war, how to make the ongoing regime conflicts in and among modern states attendant to the revolutionary change from nation-state to market-state relatively peaceful. “It is our task to devise means by which this competition can be maintained without it becoming fatal to the competitors.”

Bobbitt divides his book into two parts, the first on the several internal constitutions that have prevailed in the modern state, the second on interstate relations. He begins by defining his principal terms: law, strategy, and history. By history, he does not mean a literary genre (the “history of the Peloponnesian War”) or the course of events; he means a society’s self-understanding, its identity, the characteristics of ‘us’ that we think and feel make us distinct from ‘them.’ No society gives itself a regime or sets a strategy for itself without conceiving of its history. Taken together, history, law (as in jurisprudence, and especially constitutional law or regime form), and strategy (“the drive for survival and freedom of action”) “make possible legitimate governing institutions,” institutions that will be obeyed, instruments of real rule. “Until the governing institutions of a society can claim for themselves the sole right to determine the legitimate use of force at home and abroad, there can be no state,” and no establishment of a coherent body of law and no setting of a coherent strategy in war.

As of the year 2002, “the most powerful states do not face state-centered threats that in fact imperil their security.” What is more, it then seemed that, “having vanquished its ideological competitors”—fascism and communism—the “democratic, capitalist, parliamentary state no longer faces great-power threats, threats that would enable it to configure its forces by providing a template inferred from the capabilities of the adversary state.” This accounted for some of the aimlessness of post-Cold-War states, dithering over whether or not to intervene in small but brutal conflicts in such countries as Somalia or Bosnia, worrying about regimes in North Korea, Iraq, and Rwanda. With no major external pressures to unite them, the great powers, very much including the greatest one, the United States, were seeing their own legitimacy weaken, internally and internationally, inasmuch as “the strategic thinking of states accustomed to war does not fit them for peace.” This situation won’t last, Bobbitt correctly predicts. “Mesmerized by ‘rogue states’ whose hostility to the United States is essentially a by-product of our global reach that frustrates their regional ambitions, we will find ourselves increasingly at odds with the other great powers.” One might quibble that the roguishness of rogue states registers not only their regional ambitions but their animosity toward the American regime, but Bobbitt’s prediction was exactly right.

At the time of Bobbitt’s writing, an “epochal war,” the “Long War of the Nation-State,” had recently concluded. An epochal war differs from others because it does indeed last a long time, encompassing several shorter (if often intense) wars, all of them over regime conflicts. Only when “the dynamic interplay between [military] strategy and the legitimating goals of the state” have been resolved can one say that an epochal war is over. Thucydides, for example, “did not live to see his epochal war carried to its conclusion,” which occurred when Macedon “put an end to the constitutional order of Greek city-states and proved that only a larger empire could maintain itself and defend Greece.” At this point, it is important to notice that what Bobbitt calls a “constitutional order” both is and is not a regime; a regime (rulers, ruling institutions, the way of life, and the primary purpose or purposes of a state) isn’t exactly a state, a category that typically classifies political communities in terms of their size and degree of political centralization (polis or city-state, ancient empire, feudal state, modern state). By “state” Bobbitt means the combination of regime and state. This leads him to classify states in a manner that is neither Aristotelian nor Machiavellian, simply, but, roughly, the combination of the two.

The “Long War,” then was the struggle among fascist, communist, and “parliamentary” regimes that began in 1914 and ended only with the triumph of the commercial republics seen in the of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 and the 1990 Peace of Paris. The Long War “was fought to determine what kind of state would supersede the imperial states of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth century after the end of the wars of the French Revolution,” states whose international order ended in 1914. The Great War, which proved to be only the first ‘world war,’ turned out to be the opening battle of the Long War. Would “parliamentary democracy,” communism, or fascism replace the European imperial order? The conflict centered in Germany and Russia, “within whose domestic societies these three options furiously contended,” and therefore most intensely along the Great European Plain which extends between them and eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. “Germany and the Soviet Union attempted to legitimate their regimes by making their systems the dominant arrangement in world affairs.” The overall state form contested during the Long War was the Nation-State, by which Bobbitt means a modern state organized around the purpose of “better[ing] the well-being of the nation” within it. In reorganizing all but the Austrians among the 37 German states under itself and guaranteeing national well-being by instituting a ‘welfare state’ (the redistribution of wealth in a way that blunted the social dissatisfactions that tempted nations to socialism), Prussia, guided by Otto von Bismarck, founded “the first European nation-state.” Crucially, with respect to the regime of the new German nation-state, Bismarck rejected not only socialism but commercial republicanism or ‘liberalism.’ Through “the adroit use of war,” first defeating Austria-Hungary in 1866, the one obstacle to the unification of the Germans by a rival partially German power, then defeating France and retaking predominantly German Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck appealed neither to socioeconomic egalitarianism nor to civic equality but to nationalism. This was “the prototype for fascism, inasmuch as he settled the ‘who rules?’ question by “plac[ing] at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity,” “delivering German unity under a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism.” (True as far as it goes, although it is also true that the Nazis disposed of the old Prussian aristocracy, as Hitler forged his party out of ‘new men’ and injected genocidal toxins into German nationalism.)

The challenge of socialist revolutionaries to the proto-fascist regime founded by Bismarck (Marx, after all, was a German subject), contributed to precipitation of the First World War, the beginning of the Long War. The Social Democrats won the parliamentary elections in 1912; although the German parliament didn’t amount to much within the institutional structure of the regime, this change of sentiment alarmed the rulers, who countered with “an ambitious strategic program of European conquest,” a program they intended to use to quell the internationalist program of the socialists and to reunite the nation around nationalism. “Germany sought through an attack on the pre-existing empires of Europe a means of vindicating its claim to destiny that would, perforce, also vindicate its autocratic regime’s claim to legitimacy,” to “defeat the movement for parliamentary self-government and the threat of [socialist] revolution, the two other options contending for the future of Europe.” However, in defeating German proto-fascism and in bringing on the parliamentarism the Kaiser Reich detested, the liberal democracies or commercial republics didn’t really settle the regime conflict. Socialists, ruling the Soviet Union as a consequence of the war and threatening parliamentary regimes throughout Europe, were emboldened, many of them attempting to work the parliamentary institutions for their own advantage. Nor did militarist and autocratic nationalism go away. In the end, “World War I did not solve the question of what sort of system would succeed to power; it only generalized that question to virtually all states.” 

Without the war, the Communist Party could not have seized control of the Russian state. As Russia took its losses under the hapless Czar Nicholas, democratic socialists pushed him to abdicate. But the police quit in response to this act of lesé majesté, and the new government couldn’t control the workers’ militia, organized by the communists. What is more, the Provisional Government intended to pursue the war, regarding its alliance obligations to be dispositive. “This attachment to law, so characteristic of the parliamentary democracies that served as models for the Russian Provisional Government, was fatal to its popular position because virtually all elements of the populace were united by an antipathy to the rule of law,” whether they were industrial workers faced with economic hardships, clamoring for the redistribution of wealth the Bolsheviks promised, the peasants, who wanted to end their serfdom and to seize the landlords’ property, or the many national minorities, who hoped for independence, or the soldiers, who were experiencing the misery of frontline trench warfare. “On all these issues the Provisional Government had to repudiate the wishes of the people, and by so doing, it forfeited all popular support for its authority.” It is unlikely that a regime founded on democracy can survive by offending ‘the democracy.’ Civil war broke out between the ‘Whites’—a coalition of the parliamentarians and czarist loyalists, whom Bobbit somewhat unfairly characterizes as Russian proto-fascists, “united by their hatred of communism”—and the ‘Reds,’ the several major dissenting groups organized, crucially, by the Communist Party. The Marxist-Leninist state that prevailed “vigorously and wholly embodied the other option to liberal parliamentary democracy, just as the German state had embodied the [proto]-fascist alternative.” Lenin had won a regime conflict within the overall regime-state conflict of the Great War, a state that “depended upon a ruthless state violence in order to achieve industrialization” under his successor, the “Man of Steel,’ Josef Stalin. 

Though defeated, the old regime’s militarist nationalism was not discredited in the eyes of all too many Germans. Although Germans formally accepted war guilt in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, German historians, those custodians of German identity in terms of Bobbitt’s definition, blamed the French and the Russians, rather as pro-Confederacy historians defended the ‘Lost Cause’ in the decades after the American Civil War, redefined by them as ‘The War Between the States.’ Nor did the Soviets accept the explanation of German war guilt, preferring to claim that the war resulted from tensions within ‘late-stage capitalism.’ Their regime strategies intact, fascists in Italy and Germany “saw war as a necessary struggle by means of which stronger states superseded the weak,” while communists in Russia and elsewhere “saw war as the natural outcome of arms races, driven by the industrialists who profited from competition in (and by) arms.” Citizens throughout the world factionalized along these regime lines; “only the complete collapse of actual states, the embodiments of these competing ideas, would answer these questions definitively.” For example, even a statesman of Churchill’s gifts could not convince his countrymen that the Nazi threat was real until it was, well, realized.

These various states, regime enemies, were nonetheless nation-states in that they were welfare states. In that one way, Bismarck’s Germany triumphed around the world. But the regime dimension of the nation-states proved decisive. Hitler “studiedly and publicly pursued the goal of reopening hostilities, aided by “the fact that a decision for parliamentarianism had not been made by the German nation.” Indeed, “all the great fascist powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan,” resorted to war before World War II itself broke out in 1939, lending credence to Bobbitt’s claim that a long war was on. Mussolini, for example, understood “that the true source of his appeal lay in his posing an alternative to parliamentarism,” which in Italy was ineffectual because the liberal bloc was threatened by socialist and communist parties in the parliament itself. He organized terrorist assaults on communists and trade unionists; when the Left called for a general strike, he told the liberals that they would either deal with the Left or his Fascist Party would—a party now well financed by frightened industrialists and landowners. At this, the government collapsed, and the king invited him “to be prime minister on the advice of the very parliamentarians whose ability to form a government he had frustrated.” Hitler imitated these tactics in Germany, with the same success. “Thus neither Hitler nor Mussolini seized power: both were brought to premierships by the calculations of other politicians who realized they needed them” because “the parliamentary states that had ‘won’ the First World War, or been set up by the winners, could not during their fleeting ascension settle the constitutional and moral question at issue, and were thus never secure in their claims of legitimacy in those states where this legitimacy was most closely tested.” Internationally as well, “when the Versailles system proved itself strategically vacuous, the legitimacy of the parliamentary regimes that were its constitutional progeny suffered accordingly.”

Japan took a different path to the same result. After the Western powers had forced open the Chinese market, fatally compromising China’s sovereignty, in the 1842 Opium Wars, Japan faced a similar crisis in 1853, when the United States sent a naval vessel into Japanese waters and demanded that Japan open its market to American trade. The regime of the Meiji Restoration was designed to resist this and other Western threats, taking as its slogan, “A strong economy, a strong army,” aiming to expel the foreigners “once economic self-sufficiency was achieved.” But by 1890, a new constitution, modeled on that of Prussia, formed the foundation not merely for self-defense but imperial expansion, leading to important military victories over China in 1894 and (most shockingly to the Western powers) Russia in 1905. Under that constitution, parliament had no control over the budget, so the military and economic elites ran the country. Firmly anti-communist, they ordered the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, wrecking the Soviet-controlled government there. “These two facts—the role of the protofascist Prussian constitution and the alarm at socialism—are often overlooked in the debates about the relationship of Japanese to European fascism,” but they help to explain both “the expansion of the Long War into Asia, and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States immediately following Pearl Harbor.”

Nor did the Second World War end the Long War. Fascism was crushed, but the Soviet empire was bigger than ever and soon to be nuclear-armed. As early as February 1946, Stalin announced that the Soviet Union was prepared for war against the “capitalist nations.” When the United States responded with aid to anti-communist governments in Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, the “Cold War” was on. “Each side seemed to hope that the other side would collapse of its own internal contradictions,” vindicating the claim to rule of its regime. On the American side, this led to the strategy of containing communism within its existing boundaries, thereby preventing it from shoring up the regime of state socialism—really what soon became a Communist Party oligarchy—with the human and material resources it would need to compete with commercial republicanism, which enjoyed the advantage of generating wealth by encouraging people to work and was accordingly less in need of direct control of foreign nations to exploit. That is, both regimes made their claims to rule dependent upon the nation-states’ underlying purpose, to (in Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev’s words) offer “a better life to the people.” Containment, originally conceived by the U.S. State Department Russia expert George F. Kennan as diplomatic strategy, soon became a military strategy, played out in Korea, Vietnam, and in several other places. These wars succeeded in giving Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore the time to consolidate pro-Western governments and to enable South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan the protection needed to spur economic growth. By the late 1970s, the Soviets again began to build military power vis-à-vis the West, but the competition on the economic and political fronts was going poorly, despite the irresolution of the Carter Administration. Unbeknownst to either rival, the Long War was in its last years.

Instead of proceeding immediately to the conditions following the end of that war, Bobbitt steps back to offer an account of the modern state from its beginnings, showing that such epochal wars are the rule, not the exception, as the modern state has been transformed several times, without ceasing to be the modern state. Such transformations result from epochal wars, themselves triggered by challengers to the existing form of the modern state, even as the Macedonian Empire successfully challenged both the regimes of the Greek city-states and the city-states themselves. Thus, state formation and strategic change interact, not as unilinear cause and effect but as “a field relationship” of “mutually effecting” causes. Moreover, “individual choice and sheer contingency have a role to play that is a necessary part of, not an annoying intrusion on, such field relations.” There is an important role for both statesmanship and for Machiavelli’s nemesis, Lady Fortuna.

Before the modern state, Europe was ruled by Catholic clergy, city burghers, feudal kings and warrior ‘aristocrat’-oligarchs, with peasants occasionally organizing revolts. Feudal states were somewhat analogous to the colloidal suspensions seen in chemistry labs—globs of authority floating in the same liquid, occasionally bumping against one another when agitated. Although “the authoritative heads of one sector might have had a certain legal authority over the members of the other sectors,” as for example Church jurisdiction over royal marriages and judgment over the justice of wars, “vertical power was horizontally limited”; a king had “no direct authority over his vassal’s peasants” and the urban bourgeoisie enjoyed considerable independence from both ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. (Jewish merchants, conspicuously, owed little to aristocrats and even less to the Church.) Bobbitt calls attention to the fluidity of medieval states. The Church provided a bureaucracy that cut across national boundaries and provided administrative assistance to rulers, whose underlings typically lacked the learning, and sometimes the literacy, of the churchmen. Although the Church provided uniformity, the secular rulers and their subjects were decidedly heterogeneous; “the universality of Christendom was coextensive with the radically diverse and disparate ethnic, tribal, and cultural mix seen in Europe. What is now France, for example, consisted of numerous peoples, many with languages that were not French. 

What could unite the Christian nations were wars against non-Christians, wars readily sanctioned by the Church, but these could not be constant. Kings therefore could not consistently unite their nations. They were not truly “the monarchs of nations,” i.e., the only rulers within them. “The Henry V who fought at Agincourt to recover his property on the continent is unlikely to have spoken the sentiments of a nationalist, Renaissance author like Shakespeare in exhorting his men. For Harry, yes; but not necessarily for England and St. George.” Feudal states weren’t states in the modern sense at all, having only “a rudimentary administrative apparatus that was impermanent and fixed only to the person of the prince.” Given the complexity of the feudal order, it did give its principals an interest in establishing a set of international ‘laws’ or conventions, including the aforementioned rules of just war ‘theorized’ by Church-affiliated scholars.

This changed in Renaissance Italy. When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, scholars of classical Greek literature fled to Italy, where they introduced Italians to the history of Greek city-states and the Roman city-republic, both of which could now be seen as noble precursors of the city states of Italy. The 1494 invasion of Italy by the French king, Charles VIII, armed with mobile light artillery that could be transported across long distances, threatened those city-states, no longer well defended by their walls. Machiavelli saw this; he wrote, and the Italian rulers saw, that city-states would need to reorganize themselves, investing in human defenses more than fortresses—a well-organized, centralized apparatus that could raise revenue, organize logistics, and establish a chain of command, all ruled either by one man, a prince, or a sizeable number of men governing a ‘republic’ (typically, a ruling body of oligarchs). “The modern state originated in the transition from the rule of princes to that of princely states that necessity wrought on the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century.” That is, personal authority began to be replaced by the impersonal ruling institutions of lo stato. Modern states ruled civil societies as entities “quite detachable from the [civil societies] that [they] govern as well as from the leaders who exercise power,” inasmuch as princes or oligarchs might come and go, but the bureaucracies are permanent, the armies standing, and the procedures of rule more legal/formal than personal/arbitrary. Machiavelli’s denial of the legitimacy of “medieval authority,” very much including the authority of the Church, and his assertion of the need for “new modes and orders” were heeded. As an official in Florence, he advocated a conscripted militia to replace the use of mercenaries—men whose loyalties to the state were dubious, as Mr. Putin has recently, and very belatedly, come to suspect; the transfer of the citizens’ loyalties from their liege lords to the state; the insistence that laws must be backed by force (famously, “there must be good laws where there are good arms and where there are good arms there must be good laws”); the use of deception and violence, the specialties of the fox and the lion, respectively; permanent embassies with the capacity to gather ‘intelligence’; and tactics “measured by a rational assessment of the contribution of those tactics to the strategic goals of statecraft,” which might not include the spiritual obligations of Christianity. Indeed, under the Machiavellian-statist dispensation, “the pope became a prince, and the Roman Church his state.” Ragione di stato meant that the prince’s understanding that he was “not acting merely on his own behalf,” like a medieval prince, “but is compelled to act in service of the State,” his commands to be enforced by civil bureaucrats who “would replace the strategic and legal roles of vassals” and by those conscript soldiers. The kingly state (monarchs took to statism more quickly than republicans) soon replaced the feudal orders throughout Europe, given the substantial advantages that political centralization brought to military efforts; it also replaced princely city-states, whose small size put them at a fatal disadvantage against such larger modern states as Spain. Indeed, Machiavelli himself had called for the unification of Italy under one prince—what Bobbitt calls a kingly state. “The kingly state took the Italian constitutional innovation—fundamentally, the objectification of the state—and united this with dynastic legitimacy.”

Machiavelli also called for the use of ‘civil’ religions. The monarchs took his advice, bending Christianity to their own less-than-pious purposes, most obviously in Tudor England, which established its own state church, but also in France under the Bourbons and in Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus. The consequent weakening of the Catholic Church permitted the rise of Protestantism. Further, the Catholic Habsburg dynasty moved “to establish a true imperial realm in Europe.” These moves, taken together, led to the Thirty Years’ War, ending in the Peace of Westphalia, which “ratified the role of the kingly state as the dominant, legitimate form of government in western Europe” in part by denying Hapsburg ambitions. Instead of Machiavelli’s mercenaries, however, the monarchs chose standing armies. Bobbitt counts six institutional structures of kingly states: standing armies, centralized bureaucracy, regularized statewide system of taxation, permanent diplomatic representation abroad; systematic state policies to promote economic wealth and commerce, the replacement of the king as the head of the church.

The political philosopher Jean Bodin saw a problem with any too thorough Machiavellianism pursued by monarchs drawing their authority from law. Law requires ‘legitimacy’; it needs to have right on its side. But if a monarch is seen to be immoral, having learned not to be good, he will be delegitimized, vulnerable to overthrow by rivals, even by the people. And if the state is simply impersonal, can it be moral? In response to these dilemmas, Louis XIV’s great minister, the Cardinal Richelieu, propounded the doctrine of raison d’état. Bobbit distinguishes raison d’état from the Italian ragione di stato. Although the terms are exact equivalents, the meanings differ. “Among the Italian princely states, ragione di stato simply stood for a rational, unprincipled justification for the self-aggrandizement of the State, whereas raison d’état achieved a parallel justification through the personification of the state, and leveraged the imperatives of this justification to impose obligations on the dynastic ruler.” L’État c’est moi, indeed, but the moi had better be respectable, or better still a man of la grandeur. This didn’t mean state policies animated by Christianity. Instead, the State “and therefore the king who embodied the state,” was said to have been divinely appointed to “preserve the peace and the general welfare.” Realpolitik, but sanctified Realpolitik. It was the Thirty Years’ War that gave the Bourbons the opportunity to consolidate a centralized, secularized, and national state under an absolutist monarchy. During the same war, King Gustavus did the same thing in a Protestant country. The Peace of Westphalia stipulated that such states were not to be attacked by other states ‘merely’ because they had established different churches. Pope Innocent X was not amused, calling the treaties “null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.” But European regimes had moved on.

The kingly state was not yet the same kind of modern state we are accustomed to. Mercenary armies remained numerically predominant, despite being reduced. The bureaucracies consisted of officeholders who purchased their positions, which monarchs considered a good source of revenue. Diplomacy still centered on negotiating marriage contracts for monarchs’ families. And regulation of commerce and industry aimed not at enriching monarchs’ subjects but to empower the state, which “often reneged on its debts.” To these weaknesses, the kingly state added an unforeseen problem at Westphalia: territoriality. To say that states shall not interfere in the internal affairs of other states requires the fixing of borders which define regions of political authority with geographic clarity. This led to the “identification of a particular population with a particular state.” Territoriality shifted the center of the state from the person of the monarch to the defense of borders. “For the territorial state, its borders were everything—its legitimacy, its defense perimeter, its tax base.” This put even more importance on mutual recognition of states’ territories, on “an active and engaged society of states” ready to trade with one another, uphold freedom of the seas, and maintain a balance of power in Europe. 

That balance was maintained in the War of the Spanish Succession, in which England frustrated Louis XIV’s bid for continental hegemony. “The importance of the Treaty of Utrecht cannot be overstated,” being “the first European treaty that explicitly establishes a balance of power as the objective of the treaty regime.” The treaty established a principle that not only hereditary right, but balance-of-power considerations would contribute to the recognition or refusal of recognition of any new state by the existing European states. Wars would henceforth be undertaken for purposes of border adjustment, but those adjustments too would need to “be ratified by the society of states.” Accordingly, wars in eighteenth century Europe were frequent but small, fought by well-disciplined professional troops who could be expected to resist the temptation to rampage. The Treaty was understood at the time as the Paix d’Anglais; not only did the Brits win the war, but the peace terms were decidedly British—enforcing restraint and encouraging commerce. Although victorious, England demanded no territorial prizes, only circumstances wherein (in the words of Queen Anne) the nation could “aggrandize itself by trade.” 

Although European wars were limited, overseas wars over colonies were an entirely different matter, since colonies buttressed the commerce that all regimes pursued. In the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, “America was the stake.” The British victory proved short-lived, since the defeated French soon helped the American colonists to win their independence, providing the land and sea forces that tipped the scales in the Battle of Yorktown. Meanwhile, on the continent, Prussia, organized as a territorial state under King Frederick Wilhelm, gathered strength with a rigorously centralized bureaucracy and a well-trained standing army, to which “virtually all state resources” flowed. The German phrase Staats raison appears identical to ragione di stato and raison d’état but again has a different shade of meaning, namely, “a rationale given on behalf of the state, an imperative that compels its strategic designs” in terms of territory, not in terms of an ‘amoral’ prince’ or a ‘responsible’ king. By the time of Frederick’s great-grandson, Frederick the Great, Prussia had been “transformed into a territorial state of singular intensity” whose monarch “described himself not as the incarnation of the State but as its ‘first servant.'” Frederick’s military officers were made to understand that they were fighting not for himself or for themselves but for Prussia. “His objectives were territorial and statist, rather than dynastic and personal or religious.” His methods included economic strength for the State as a whole, not for the Crown; careful maintenance of balance between socioeconomic classes within the State, ensuring that nobles alone would serve as army officers, that the noble lands would not be sold to other classes, but that peasant lands too must not be acquired by the nobles or by the bourgeoisie. Peasants could be recruited to the army only if they “could be spared from agricultural duties,” and bourgeois city-dwellers would be protected as producers of the wealth needed to sustain the army. That army, composed of “men who were the least necessary, economically, to the well-being of the state,” remained firmly under the control of the monarch, making it “into an instrument that could respond to a single strategic will.” “No one reasons, everyone executes,” Frederick explained. This enabled Frederick’s army to achieve a mobility, the capacity to turn on the proverbial dime, lacking in other armies of the eighteenth century. 

Military professionalism suggests that troops be disciplined, calm, men of unenthused efficiency. Their morale depended upon being well supplied, not on being roused to moral or political excitement; “Frederick dared not excite the energy that lay dormant in nationalism,” since that might encourage them, and eventually the civilians, “to claim the State as their own.” In this, Frederick the Great contrasts dramatically from Napoleon, his “successor as the leading commander in Europe.” Left undisturbed by such passions, civilians would go about their business, barely knowing that their country was at war. And the soldiers, housed in barracks, were well “isolated from the surrounding populations.” Later, Clausewitz would describe European armies of the eighteenth century as States within States.

It was Napoleon who would devise the next form of the modern state, which Bobbitt calls the “state-nation.” “But for Napoleon, France would have joined the society of territorial states instead of attempting to supplant it.” A state-nation (as distinguished from the later nation-state) is a state that “mobilizes a nation—a national, ethnocultural group—to act on behalf of the State,” “call[ing] upon the revenues of all society and on the human talent of all persons,” but never “taking direction from them,” as the nation-state does when it establishes a state “in order to benefit the nation it governs.” Oddly, Bobbitt classifies the American state of the Founding era as a state-nation, although the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution explicitly set down the safety and happiness of the people as the purpose of government. (It must be said that Bobbitt’s knowledge of European and Asian states exceeds his knowledge of America, at least until he gets to the Progressives.) [1] By invoking nationalist sentiment, Napoleon could raise mass armies without needing parliamentary support and with no dynastic legitimacy, needing only the occasional plebiscite to enhance his authority. His foreign policy exploited the old technique of divide-and-conquer; appealing to the self-interest of the surrounding territorial states, he could split the several coalitions they raised against him by offering major territorial cessions to one of them at the cost of seeing him extend his empire over the others. “Only when each of Napoleon’s victim-states had become persuaded that it must change in order to save itself, did a society come into being that can properly called a society of state-nations.”

That, however, took a decade and a half of continent-wide warfare. During those years, Napoleon introduced a series of strategic innovations: the levée en masse; an efficient, mobile artillery; autonomous, self-sufficient army divisions; troops of light skirmishers to probe for enemy weaknesses and to deceive the enemy with feints; the attacking column, replacing the defensive firing line. For the first time, infantry, cavalry, and artillery could be coordinated in a mobile, mass army designed “to crush the enemy in one state-shattering battle.” “All energies are bent to the triumph of the state as apotheosis of the nation, and thus the champion of the people,” but without that pesky need for elected parliamentary representatives of the people wielding real power. State-shattering: Napoleon’s military campaigns “compelled the other side to give battle with armies sufficiently strong that their destruction would mean political collapse, threatening the very State itself.” Lest that happen, his enemies very often surrendered, hoping to live to fight another day. Napoleon lost his campaign in Russia because he couldn’t provoke the Russians to fight such a “climactic battle.” Russia wasn’t a territorial state, and it willingly sacrificed its capital city itself, its generals confident that the supreme commander, General Winter, would kill the French. The Epochal War that the French had fought against territorial states was over.

“Despite Napoleon’s loss, however, the state-nation had triumphed and its imperatives were to govern not only the Peace Settlement but the peace itself.” That is, after Napoleon passed from the scene, several of the state-nations of Europe, wary of despotism, “promote[d] liberty and equality, constitutionalism, and the rule of law” but retained the new form of the modern state, the state-nation, that the Napoleonic Wars had induced them to imitate, along with the imperialist ambitions Napoleon exemplified. Here, Bobbitt points to the achievements of the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. 

“It was Castlereagh’s strategic innovation to use the wartime coalition to maintain the peace” after the war was over. After changing the Napoleonic regime without ruining the French state itself (lest the new regime be dismissed by the French as a “collaborationist party that had sold out France to her enemies,” as many Germans would deem the Weimar Republic, a century later), he won the trust of his continental allies by demanding no territorial gains for his own country. (He even “concluded a treaty with the United States that ended the War of 1812 on terms so generous in light of the British capture of Washington that American students are routinely taught that the United States actually won the war.”) He wanted the states that met in congress at Vienna to continue to meet regularly, continue their collaboration, but without instituting anything that looked like a European superstate that might violate the terms of the Westphalian settlement. At the same time, he needed to obtain “credible commitments of armed force of such overwhelming magnitude that no single power or coalition of two of the five great powers could be reasonably hopeful of success through war.” And he had no shortage of contrary purposes working against him, beginning with George Canning, a dissenting member of his own party in Parliament, but extending to the Prussians, who wanted to ruin the French once and for all, the Russians, “who were entertaining the idea of a continental hegemony at German expense,” the Austrians, who didn’t like the state-nation form, being unable to attain it in their polyglot empire, and of course the French, whose animosity toward perfidious Albion had not abated in their defeat.

Fortunately for Castlereagh’s design, all of the state-nations feared a repeat of the devastating mass-army war they had just survived. The rulers of the regimes of those states also feared the possibility of political democracy, the assertion of popular sovereignty already triumphant in America, soon to be described in brilliant detail by Tocqueville. They didn’t need Tocqueville to alert them; “wherever the war had been taken, large and hostile popular insurrections had been touched off”—Belgium in 1798, Naples in 1799 and 1806, Spain in 1808, the Netherlands in 1811-1812. This is why Castlereagh was able to replace the old balance-of-power European society of nations with an arrangement of collective security. The regimes were anti-democratic, which made them vulnerable to violent popular revolution but also capable of quick decisions when it came to self-defense. In the event, each partner committed 60,000 soldiers to any future coalition against a state that violated the settlement. Castlereagh thus needed to resist the Russian-inspired Holy Alliance, which sought to preserve monarchic regimes in Europe by intervention against popular revolutions, along with the Austrian claim that the British-backed coalition could undertake similar interventions. Castlereagh regarded such a policy as ruinous to the maintenance of a concert of state-nations, a revolution in the European society of states rather than either revolutions in the regimes of those states or the prevention of such revolutions. This interstate equilibrium “amounted to an imaginative transformation of the power politics of the territorial states,” and it endured until Prussia consolidated the many Germanies into one and moved successfully against France, more than half a century later. And the state-nation itself survived until the First World War.

Overseas, the European state-nations triumphed spectacularly. At the beginning of the century, they ruled one-third of the world’s land mass but by 1878 they ruled two-thirds. Although modern technology usually gets credit for this, it was the state-nations’ “superior strategic habits” (battle discipline credit and financing, efficient supply lines and long-distant communication, “and above all, political cohesion”) that empowered European countries to rule most of the world. 

Tremors there nonetheless were. Although the state-nation form survived the revolutions of 1848, concessions to assertions of popular sovereignty began to be made. In France, Napoleon III used the plebiscite not to legitimate his own rulership, as his more formidable namesake had done, but to ratify a new constitution. “It is one thing to suppose that a vote of the people legitimates a particular policy or ruler; this implies that, within a state, the people of that state have a say in the political directions of the state. It is something else altogether to say that a vote of the people legitimates a state within the society of states,” which implies “not simply a role for self-government, but a right of self-government.” [2] Bismarck proceeded to found a true nation-state in Europe—not, to be sure, with a republican regime, but with a regime now dedicated to “the welfare of the national people,” including universal education and what would later be called a ‘social safety net.’ “If revolution there is to be,” Bismarck intoned, eyes fixed on his socialist enemies, “let us rather undertake it than undergo it.” He could unify the Germanies partly on the basis of such a shift in benefits promised by the state. “Bismarck’s championing of the first state welfare systems in modern Europe, including the first social security program, was crucial to the perception of the State as deliverer of the people’s welfare…. The legitimation of the nation-state thus depends upon its success at maintaining modern life,” as “a severe economic depression will undermine its legitimacy in a way that far more severe financial crises scarcely shook earlier regimes.”

This very much included a revolution in the society of European nations. “If the nation governed the state, and the nation’s welfare provided the state’s reason for being, then the enemy’s nation must be destroyed” in order destroy the state by “annihilat[ing] the vast resources in men and materiel that a nation could throw into the field” in defense of that state. There was to be no return to Frederick’s professional armies fighting limited wars, nor to the Westphalian principle of noninterference in states’ internal affairs, which the Congress of Vienna had reaffirmed. In 1871, Benjamin Disraeli told Parliament that the German war with France “represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century,” an assertion of German nationalism that would now inflame, in Bobbitt’s words, “nationalism and ethnic truculence” and indeed “ethnomania” throughout Europe. International law followed in the wake of this regime-state change. “How a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established.” most immediately for Bismarck’s nationalist strategy, his main rival for dominance over the Germanies, Austria, could not invoke nationalism because it ruled a multinational empire, a fact that later resulted in its disintegration and ultimately to the disintegration of all the European overseas empires, as well.

The “Long War” Bobbitt described in his opening chapters set the three regimes of the nation-state against one another, with republicanism winning. But that very triumph has put the nation-state into decline, he argues. In the final section of Book I he plays Tocqueville, as it were, offering his projections concerning the state form he expects to replace it, the “market-state.” Abandoning much of the nation-state’s guarantee of national welfare, the market state “promises instead to maximize the opportunity of the people and thus tends to privatize many state activities and to make voting and representative government less influential and more responsible to the market.” As of 2002, the nation-state’s capacity to deliver on its promises of economic and personal security along with an impressive array of public goods had declined. This brought on a crisis of legitimacy in that state, one Bobbitt predicts will intensify, as many more states, and perhaps ‘non-state actors,’ will possess weapons of mass destruction, as the transnational market for commercial products, including currency, circulates through states in ways difficult for states to control, and ease of population movements multiply transnational threats, including epidemics, environmental disasters, population shifts, and ideas subversive both to particular states and to states as such. Accordingly, states will need to spend more to counter such threats, throwing themselves into debt and consequently abandoning “the objective of the government’s maintaining the ever-improving welfare of its citizens,” “the crucial element of the basis for its legitimacy as a nation-state.” Non-material goods also will be harder to sustain, as global communications purvey materials that undermine national cultures. Since each state has a dominant culture from which it derives the principles that legitimate it, this trend, too, will undermine the nation-state. 

“What would a new constitutional order look like?” The market-state will be nothing more than “a minimal provider or redistributor” of goods and services, relying instead upon international capital markets and multinational business networks. Electronic referenda will increasingly replace representative government, and the market-state itself will be “largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter to any particular set of moral values so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition.” Citizenship will decline, since populations that know the state to be morally indifferent to themselves will incline toward moral indifference to it, reluctant “to risk their lives and fortunes on behalf of a state that is no longer the champion of their cultural values.” Not only soldiers but nurses, teachers, and other self-sacrificing professionals will be harder to recruit. ‘Multiculturalism’ will prevail, perhaps buttressed by sheer moral indifference. Demi-citizens of the market state will expect it to take up policies that maximize individual choices. Because the state no longer sets purposes, politics will be understood simply as a matter of power, a tendency seen in such “recent movements in American jurisprudence” as feminism and critical legal studies. 

Bobbitt predicts three “paradoxes” that will bedevil the market state: first, “it will require more centralized authority for government, but all governments will be weaker”; citizens will become spectators of government; and while the ‘welfare’ aspects of the state will diminish, “infrastructure security, epidemiological surveillance, and environmental protection…will be promoted by the State as never before.” Life in the United States had already gone further toward the market-state than had life in most other countries, with its multiculturalism, free market, and religious diversity, all of which exhibited a “habit of tolerance for diversity [which] give it an advantage over other countries in adapting its state to this new constitutional order.”

Beyond these general characteristics, what more precise forms of legitimation will be available to the United States as a market-state? Bobbitt cites five policies then extant, novel forms of familiar American themes: nationalism, internationalism, realism evangelism, and leadership. 

The “new nationalism,” already seen in the writings of the academic, Alan Tonelson, and the journalist-politician, Patrick Buchanan, holds that the United States should reduce its foreign commitments, confronting only those risks that “truly put the United States itself at risk.” Nuclear deterrence, conventional-force defense of the American landmass, and protection of critical oil sources and transportation networks will put “America First,” as the saying goes. Because “the principal threat to the United States is thought to be economic,” America Firsters “tend to adopt an essentially mercantilist view of international economic competition,” relying on tariffs to protect American industry and jobs. The new nationalism favors populism, complaining that internationalism has been the fashion of elites who blithely rely upon working-class Americans to do the grunt work at home and in foreign wars. More, internationalism requires more economic resources than we can afford. So, cut taxes and military spending, thereby spurring economic growth for all the people, get out of international alliances that engage us in wars that have little or nothing to do with our own immediate safety, work to achieve energy independence and build defenses against intercontinental missiles. America faces no more major geopolitical threats; start acting like it. Bobbitt generously doesn’t bring up the fact of China, which already was seeking to take the place of the Soviet Union as the enemy of the United States. In 2002, America Firsters inclined to wave it away, a pose that would become increasingly difficult to strike.

The “new internationalism” opposes the “new nationalism” at almost every turn, although they share the nationalists’ assumption that the United States can no longer sustain itself as the global ‘superpower.’ Internationalists call for collective security in the cause of “world peace,” resting its case on the assumption that “the enemy is war itself,” not any state or combination of states that might wage war. To achieve collective security, Americans must come to understand that “the well-being of others is and should be treated as a fundamental national goal for Americans.” Modern communications media assist in fostering such understanding, making us “conscious of the identity and conditions of people around the world,” changing and enlarging “the objectives we care about,” notably the protection of human rights. Although we can’t do the work ourselves, “multilateral collective institutions can multiply the weight of our own policies,” both in terms of cost sharing and in terms of international legitimation of humanitarian goals. New internationalist policies will include lower trade barriers, worldwide, curtailing weapons proliferation, environmental protection, conflict resolution, strengthening the military power of the United Nations Organization, aid to impoverished countries, and a supranational central bank empowered to allocate financial resources more equitably. 

The “new realism” regards both the neo-isolationism of the nationalists and the collective security hopes of the internationalists as utopian. “They”—their most eminent thinker has been Henry Kissinger—aim “merely to prevent the primacy of any other state” in the world, while taking such actions as will promote not worldwide change but “world stability.” America’s domestic and foreign policies alike should act to preserve our freedom of action in a dangerous world, a world in which “our vital interests are only threatened when a state, or coalition of states, is sufficiently powerful to successfully destabilize” the system of sovereign states.” Unlike the internationalists, the new realists are “disinclined to see every atrocity as a threat to our security.” Unlike the nationalists, they regard America as “too strong to have to content itself with passively wait in for hostile forces outside our control to coalesce against us.” While they agree with both internationalists and nationalists that America lacks the power “to impose world peace,” they insist that we do have the power to prevent “the emergence of any state (or alliance of states) that would dominate the Eurasian landmass.” That is, they understand the implications of China’s so-called ‘peaceful rise.’ Nonetheless, they hope that America can successfully “encourage” China “to develop as a trading state,” “loosen[ing] the grip of the totalitarian party and armed forces that currently rule the country”; they would strengthen NATO and attempt to set Russia on the path toward liberal democracy; they would maintain US. forces in Korea, so that Japan needn’t militarize itself further than it has already done; it would keep U.S. markets open to East Asian trade; and, like the nationalists, it would keep the oil flowing from the Middle East to North America and Europe. 

Bobbitt rightly doubts the realism of the new realists: “It is a philosophy for the Talleyrand in every statesman, and it requires an adroitness and coolness of calculation, to say nothing of a dispassion toward the problems of other states, that the American public has seldom exhibited.” It also requires a Talleyrand-like command of intelligence gathering and analysis, “intimate knowledge of the political locale and a surefootedness in dealing with subtle and sometimes surprising shifts,” as had been seen in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Bobbitt also dislikes the ‘conservativism’ of the realists; they would align the United States too closely to existing regimes (for example, that of Iran’s shah), making “the United States a locus of animosity among reformers whose values we may in fact share.” And he doubts that “any system that attempts to enshrine favorable terms of trade for the United States [will be] likely to endure for long.” One might add, with the hindsight of twenty years, that the hope of changing the regimes of China and Russia toward commercial republicanism, while it may be indispensable to world peace, has proven wan.

That hope was strongest among proponents of the “new evangelism,” exemplified by the Clinton Administration’s stated policy of “democratic engagement,” the attempt “to bring as many nations as possible into the fold of practicing free-market economies and limited-government democracies,” on the grounds of both justice and the promotion of world peace. Bobbitt cautions, “Establishing democratic regimes, however, is a far more ambitious agenda than simply encouraging them,” as the realists recommend. Modern states still guard their sovereignty, market-state or no market-state. The new evangelists contend, first, that “democracies do not go to war against one another,” second, that democracy is the best regime for securing its citizens’ human rights, and third, that free markets and democracy are synergistic, perhaps even “indispensable to the longevity of either.” They hope for “a world of like-minded communities sharing the universal values of liberty and freedom.” Against these arguments, realists observe that “it is difficult to know what the right political system is for non-Western cultures”; nationalists deny that democracies don’t fight one another, citing the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, India’s attack on East Pakistan, and the tensions between such countries as Turkey and Greece, Ecuador and Peru. Internationalists deny that regimes matter so much in international relations, preferring to rely on such organizations as the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity. 

Finally, the “new leadership” stance, articulated in the early years of this century by the journalist Charles Krauthammer, holds up the United States as the sole remaining ‘superpower,’ with the commensurate moral responsibility to preside over the now more widely acknowledged legitimacy of commercial republicanism. During the Cold War, America had been, as the saying went, the “Leader of the Free World.” Now that freedom has defeated the Soviet oligarchy, it must step into the role of Leader of the World—forging alliances, to be sure, but across the globe, suppressing challenges to the decent regimes and working to change the regimes of the remaining tyrannies and oligarchies, where possible.

Bobbitt challenges all of these policies on the grounds that they assume the continuance of nation-states, missing the ongoing transition to market-states. “The twenty-first century American state will exist to reflect, implement, inform, and diversify individual choice,” upholding the principles of the market-state. That will require a foreign policy that none of the currently proffered policies fully anticipates. This brings him to describe the market-state’s internal possibilities more fully.

Market-states will need to choose between mercantilism (the state’s attempt “to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means”), entrepreneurialism (attempting “to improve its absolute position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means”) or managerialism (attempting “to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means” such as trading bloc). Mercantile states tend to miss the advantages conferred by economic cooperation and risk retaliatory trade restrictions by their competitors; entrepreneurial states may become too trusting, missing rising challengers to their own prosperity; managerial states overlook the danger of dilution of responsibility among their partners, each ally expecting the others to ‘do something’ in the face of threats, with no one actually stepping up to act in time. More generally, “we will have to find a way to compensate for the market-state’s inherent weaknesses,” whatever policy it may adopt, “its lack of community, its extreme meritocracy, its essential materialism and indifference to heroism, spirituality, and tradition.” All market-states “must cope with citizenries that are increasingly alienated from the State itself” and from the civil societies ruled by the State—increasingly uncivil societies.

Of the three, Bobbitt prefers the entrepreneurial market-state, at least for the United States. “Only it offers the chance, through constant and costly vigilance, steadily to release the pressures attendant in the shifting distributions of global power among competitive states.” He believes, for example, that entrepreneurial sharing will “stave off competition” among states, heading off wars of trade and indeed military wars. He admits that mercantile market-states, having “cultivate[d] self-sufficiency,” make it more likely that the State will endure “such an apocalypse should it come” (hence the Chinese policy of the years since Bobbitt wrote) and managerial market-states, with their emphasis on institution-building, will best “recover from such a conflict.” An American entrepreneurial state, he recommends, should take from the realists their insistence on preserving freedom of action by strengthening its defenses, while adopting the evangelists’ policy of acting “consistently with its traditional moral aspirations” by acting to “maximize the degree to which the persons of the world are able to choose their own destinies.” 

But how? Bobbitt identifies four strategic fields for policy: technology, force structure, criteria for intervention in foreign disputes, and priority of threats. With regard to technology, he recognizes the “radically new military capabilities” offered by the combination of computer and communications technology, which will cut costs and increase firepower. “Miniaturized aerial weapons would replace fighter planes and tanks” and non-nuclear weapons will prove more deadly than tactical nukes. The U.S. force structure will need a thorough review and overhaul, as it seemed to Bobbitt that little thought was being given to the safety of and access to our forward bases, to attacks on space-based systems, computer systems, and other infrastructure or to military attacks carried out by foreign assets who may infiltrate American territory. Policymakers had set no criteria for military intervention, having only identified various circumstances in which we might intervene. Finally, threats need to be prioritized more systematically. America faces three sets of potential competitors or outright enemies: “peers” such as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, and France; “mid-level developing states” armed with weapons of mass destruction, such as Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan and North Korea; and “militarily modest” states such as Libya, Serbia, and Cuba and non-states that “pose threats to American national interests,” often because they are located in geopolitically important areas. Should America as a market-state concentrate on outstripping the peers, concentrating on regional threats, or worrying about the ‘rogues’? Bobbitt wants the flexibility to do some of all of these things, which will require the United States to invest heavily in “the development of high technology as an arbitrageur of, and even a substitute for, human risk,” technology deployed against “critical nodes” of enemy forces, “including leadership cadres.” Presumably, he would have applauded the long-distance assassination of the terrorist Osama bin Laden, in 2011, for example.) Such a strategy would respect the reluctance of market-state demi-citizens to put their own lives at risk on battlefields and would also prove cost-effective if technological advances allowed us to reduce the costs of maintaining our armed forces abroad. Such forces should be designed as expeditionary units “configured for small scale, rapid interventions,” leaving the military heavy lifting to the machines. Since “it is the very antithesis” of intelligent planning “to assume that our main competitors in the world are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Libya,” and since “conflict with a power such as Russia (over a dispute in Eastern Europe or one of the states of the former Soviet Union or China (over Taiwan)” may provoke a nuclear-weapons response by those powers. “One wonders how many defense intellectuals and planners are thinking about major-state competition and conflict.” 

Bobbitt was thinking about it, with the following results. He would reform NATO, although his notion that “Russia has the potential to be a uniquely valuable security partner” with whom joint military exercises with NATO might be arranged has turned out to be far-fetched. The same goes for his hope of including China in a North Asia Security Council. He would continue to defend “important regional states,” if they are attacked, and to resist the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He advocates the establishment of an interagency Strategic Planning Group, modeled on the The Inquiry, a planning group organized by Wilson Administration adviser Colonel E. M. House in 1918, a figure he discusses extensively in Book II. Thankfully, he emphasizes that “I am not proposing that the main force of the United States be converted from a large conventional army into a boutique force, capable only of high-tech special operations and humanitarian interventions,” since “the greatest threats to American security in the early twenty-first century will come from powerful, technologically sophisticated states—not from ‘rogues,’ whether they be small states or large groups of bandits.” He wants our high-tech, precise weaponry designed to counter those more formidable powers, first and foremost.

Regarding tactics, he regards economic sanctions as dubious if too severe, since they leave an enemy with less to lose if they retaliate militarily—as may have occurred when the United States embargoed oil shipments to Japan in 1941. He has no objection to covert operations as such, although he cautions that we cannot legally use privately funded operations, as seen in the Iran-Contra Affair, when Reagan Administration “was insufficiently attentive to the rules of the American constitution.” He advocates the use of sustained precision bombing, which had recently become feasible, and information warfare. He also urges a more serious effort at developing an effective defense against intercontinental missiles, another possibility that contemporary technology might be making possible. For a market-state, market solutions will be attractive, and these may include mercenary forces if subordinated to the command structure of a U.S.-led coalition, although Bobbitt understands the unreliability of such forces. He somewhat naively writes that “persuading others of our modesty, our benign intent, our deference to the preferences of other societies will be an indispensable element in maintaining peace,” inasmuch as those other societies include regime enemies likely to define benignity rather differently than Americans do. And not only regime enemies: the coalition of powers seeking to overturn American financial dominance, BRICS, is an acronym standing not only for Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia but Brazil and India.

Now that the epochal Long War has ended, the modern state will not wither away, “but its form—its constitutional order—will undergo a historic change.” The market-state is emerging, but market-states themselves will feature different and indeed rival regimes. Further, in the international sphere non-governmental organizations, criminal networks, terrorist groups, philanthropies, and special-interest lobbies will thrive among the market-states; “it will therefore be crucial for the United States and other great powers to create global networks of non-governmental resources they can draw on.” Reformed international law might set the standard for the conduct of such networks, one of Bobbitt’s topics in Book II. “The epochal war we are about to enter will either be as series of low-intensity, information-guided wars linked by a commitment to re-enforcing world order, or a gradually increasing anarchy that leads to intervention at the much costlier level or even a cataclysm of global proportions preceded by a period of relative if deceptive peace.” “It is ours to choose,” he concludes, which might be true only if “ours” means “America’s.” Since Bobbitt wrote the book, it has become obvious that other great powers have also made their choices.

 

Note

1. Another example of this may be seen in his citation of The Federalist #63, in which Publius observes that representative or republican government differs from the democracies of ancient Greece by “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share” in lawmaking, which Bobbitt takes as a denial of popular sovereignty. Madison means no such thing, and the Constitution he was explicating begins, “We the People.” Madison’s successor in the presidency, his Virginia political ally James Monroe, went so far as to write a book titled, The People the Sovereigns. And of course, the Declaration of Independence had said the same thing. 
2. Once again, Bobbitt mistakes the American stance on the matter, claiming that Lincoln at Gettysburg broke with the Founders when he described the American regime as government of, by, and for the people. But at no time did Lincoln call for a new constitution, much less its ratification; he understood himself to be defending the regime of the Founders and to be vindicating the principles of the Declaration of Independence by fighting a war that would emancipate the slaves. And that self-understanding was correct. See Will Morrisey: Self-Government, the American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003).