How the Stars at Churchill’s Birth Formed the Constellation of His Life.

Speech at the Birthday Dinner for Sir Winston S. Churchill, The Right Honourable Winston Spencer Churchill Society of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, November 30, 2023.

 

The stars I’m talking about tonight have nothing to do with the ones in the sky—with neither astronomy nor astrology. You will be relieved to know that I’m also not talking about the ‘stars’ held up to us by the entertainment industry. I am talking about some prominent individuals born in the year 1874: Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Guglielmo Marconi, Carl Bosch, and Chaim Weizmann. Of these men, all but Weizmann became Nobel Laureates.

That year saw Great Britain at or near the zenith of its long imperial history. Queen Victoria’s empire ruled nearly 25 percent of the land on earth with some 33 percent of its population. And of course, Britannia ‘ruled the waves,’ keeping open the sea lanes in a worldwide commercial as well as military and political empire. It was the newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who had Victoria named Empress of India, a move that rather endeared him to her.

Disraeli was a founder of the modern British Conservative Party. The Conservatives were animated by an aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. In response to the rise of modern democracy in America and elsewhere, Conservatives implemented the second of the two Reform Acts that widened the electoral franchise. Disraeli himself had been instrumental in the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, which doubled the number of British voters in Parliamentary elections. This began what would later be called “Tory Democracy,” a phrase coined by none other than one of Disraeli’s successors in the prime ministry, Randolph Churchill. Under Disraeli, Tories also began, albeit in piecemeal fashion, another characteristic feature of modern politics, the welfare state, which was intended to stave off the more extreme forms of socialism—a strategy Winston Churchill, as Liberal Party Home Secretary prior to the First World War, would continue. Nor would Conservatives move seriously to cut it back until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure, more than a century after Disraeli.

The dominant foreign policy crisis of Disraeli’s term in office derived from what was called the Eastern Question: Who would benefit from the ongoing decline of the Ottoman Empire? Disraeli wanted to make sure it wasn’t Russia, whose czar would invade Ottoman territory in 1877, hunting in wild mountains of the Balkans, where the Bulgarians and the Serbs had revolted against weakening Turkish rule. Russia won that war; Bulgaria and Serbia got out of the empire. Russia’s push southward alarmed the British, for whom the Mediterranean served as the geopolitical buckle between their island and their own imperial holdings in the East. The Disraeli government’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 was one major piece of British strategy in the region, which also included pressuring the Turks to cede Cyprus to Great Britain. These moves all instantiated a strategy aimed at containing Russia in the south. Disraeli had used the British navy to prevent Russian entry into the Dardanelles, and it is arguable that Churchill’s interest in the Dardanelles during both world wars flowed from similar geopolitical considerations, now centered on Germany but very much with an eye on Russia, too. 

One last thing to recall about Disraeli: He was Jewish—thoroughly ‘assimilated,’ to be sure, but a sort of marker for a man like Churchill, who enjoyed cordial relations with British Jewish leaders throughout his career. Would or could Jews be assimilated into British society, and into European society generally? Disraeli’s example said ‘yes’; the Russian czar and, a few decades later, the French Right and then the Hitlerites would say ‘no.’ Churchill supported both Jewish rights in Great Britain and the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. In a 1920 article, “Zionism versus Bolshevism:  As Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” he quoted Disraeli as saying, “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill commended Zionism for providing an alternative to both democratic socialism and communism, movements in which Jewish leaders had gained prominence, following Marx. While Russian czars and, later, the Nazis, would kill Jewish bodies, Churchill worried that Marxism would kill Jewish souls.

In 1874, Herbert Hoover’s America was still recovering from the devastation of the first fully modern war, that new trial of American souls. The French Revolution had begun, and Napoleon had perfected, the democratization of war, following the democratization of civil society, with the mass mobilization of armies that also fought en masse, but the American Civil War had added the devastating power of modern weaponry—long-range rifles, exploding bullets—weapons capable of killing en masse. As it happened, German military strategists denigrated this New-World lesson of slaughter. Americans were incompetent, they said, amateurs at war. When we Germans fight, it is different, as we proved in the Franco-Prussian War, only three years earlier. The German debacles of 1918 and 1944 would prove otherwise, and not only Churchill and Hoover but Marconi, Bosch, and Weizmann would all figure in the world constellation that formed in the twentieth century, as a result of the geopolitical alignment that had crystallized in the last quarter of the nineteenth.

By 1874, however, America was teaching itself another lesson, namely, that the political aftermath of a costly military victory is as important as the victory itself. You must win the peace, too, and Reconstruction of the former rebel states of the South was failing. Churchill would write one of his greatest books on exactly this topic: The Aftermath, part of his monumental history of The Great War. In it, he argued that the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War I left the Eastern Question reconfigured but not resolved—even worsened, given the Bolshevik Revolution—and what might be called the Western Question—What will become of Germany?—resolved, but unsatisfactorily. That is, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the new regime in Russia menaced Germany, Great Britain, and France immediately, given the Soviet network of Communist Party members in those countries, while Germany remained a potential menace to Russia, Great Britain, and France, given Germans’ resentments over the postwar settlement.

When asked what his strategy was for winning the Second World War, Churchill reportedly said, in an uncharacteristically laconic way, “Drag the Americans in.” A dedicated Quaker whose greatest achievement was to organize the American relief effort in Europe during the aftermath of the Great War, hoping to see that the reconstruction of Europe had a chance not to end as the American Reconstruction had done, Herbert Hoover devoted a decade of his life attempting to present Americans from getting dragged into another cataclysm an effort he chronicled in his long-suppressed memoir, Freedom Betrayed. His great work aiming to win the peace began to falter during his presidency, with the ever-increasing weakness of German democratic republicanism and the beginning of the Great Depression, as Stalin’s Russia hovered to take advantage and the Hitler movement marched on in Germany.

Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany: Both Churchill and Hoover understood the greatest moral and political threat of their careers as statemen: the perverse yoking of modern technology with ideologies purporting to justify aggressive war by mass, mechanized militaries, ideologies that justified the tyrannical form of mass politics—taken together, ‘totalitarianism.’ Both men immediately saw the Soviet Union for what it was: a lethal threat to the lives and liberties of citizens, to all human beings who refused to be subjects of a self-styled “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Churchill equally saw Nazi Germany for what it was, the twin brother of Bolshevism, organized not around hatred of a social class, the bourgeoisie and its ‘capitalism,’ but around the hatred of a race, a race Hitler charged with surreptitiously ruling the United States, Great Britain, and all the republics—ruling them from the banking houses of the capitalism Hitler despised as much as Lenin and Stalin did.

Hoover understood Hitler as a threat, as well. Unlike Churchill, he met the man, describing how certain topics would ‘trigger’ him into a rage. His thumbnail portrait of Hitler in the pages of Freedom Betrayed is a telling description of what a later writer would call Germany’s “insane tyrants.”

Why, then, did they diverge in their strategies in the 1930s? Hoover hoped and expected that the two brother tyrants would commit fratricide, deadlock militarily over Eastern and Central Europe. If so, America’s best course was to stay out of any future European war, as George Washington had recommended. What Hoover didn’t anticipate, and never fully saw, was the close collaboration of Hitler and Stalin in the years immediately prior to the war; nor did he foresee that Stalin and his generals could do to Hitler what Czar Alexander I and his generals had done to Napoleon—allow the winter to wear down his army, then counterattack with a larger army backed by initially shorter supply line. In a way, Hoover’s hope was the photographic negative of Stalin’s who expected, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, that the capitalist republics of France and Britain and the supposedly capitalist tyranny of Hitler would finish off each other, giving his Soviet Union the opportunity to sweep up the spoils. That is, Hoover and Stalin both indulged in wishful thinking. With his far more realistic analysis of the geopolitics of his time, Churchill frustrated his well-intentioned American rival and his malign Russian enemy—to say nothing of the Axis powers.

A citizen of the least of those future powers, Italy, the class of 1874’s Guglielmo Marconi won a Nobel Prize in 1909 for inventing the first technology that could use radio waves for long-distance communication—radio the only intimate means of mass, democratic communication, the only means by which a stateman can speak to every citizen, every family, one-to-one. Radio enabled Churchill to hold English spirits firm as the RAF and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the English skies. Marconi had acquired funding for his research in London, where he obtained a British patent in 1896 and not incidentally got in touch with the Admiralty, an institution the young Churchill would eventually oversee. The capacity of British naval vessels to communicate over long distances with each other and with bases on shore contributed substantially both to British military preparedness in the years prior to the First World War (in which Italy was an ally) and to the maintenance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, in 1923 Marconi would join the Italian Fascist Party. Mussolini made him president of the Royal Academy of Italy and thereby a member of the Fascist Grand Council. In that post, Marconi went so far as to compare his joining of electric rays into a bundle with the fasces, the joining of rods symbolizing, as Marconi put it, “all the healthy energies of Italy into a bundle, for the future greatness of Italy.” What he didn’t know was that Churchill’s (genuinely) Great Britain and Mussolini’s pseudo-Roman Italy would collide some twenty years later, and that his own discovery would be used by the British statesman to help prevent the future greatness of Italy.

In Germany, the weightier of the Axis powers in Europe, Carl Bosch, another member of the birth-class of 1874, also became a Nobel laureate, in honor of his work in high-pressure industrial chemistry. In the years before World War I, working for the BASF corporation, he figured out how to produce mass quantities of synthetic nitrate, used in manufacturing many products to this day, including the nitrogen fertilizers that helped to feed a substantial portion of the world population. After that war, he extended these techniques to the production of synthetic fuels, which would power German tanks in the next war. Founding and heading the I. G. Farben corporation in 1925, of which BASF became one component, he initially collaborated with the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, receiving a contract to expand production of synthetic fuel. But Nazi anti-Semitism repelled him—a number of his engineer colleagues were Jewish—and this led to his dismissal a few years later, in 1937, after which he descended into depression and alcoholism. He died in 1940. A few years later, I. G. Farben would supply, through a subsidiary firm, Zyklon B gas for the death chambers of the Reich.

The Hitler genocide spurred worldwide support for the Zionist movement, which Churchill had supported for decades. Still another man born in 1874, Chaim Weizmann, became the first president of modern Israel in 1949, after almost exactly a half century’s work on behalf of the Zionism. Born in Russia, Weizmann was a Ph.D. biochemist, an expert on industrial fermentation, especially the process that produces acetone, which is used in the manufacture of cordite explosives. This brought him to the favorable attention of British officials. Churchill, who encouraged Weizmann to mass-produce acetone for use by the Navy in the First World War, had already met Weizmann in 1905 while Churchill was campaigning for a seat in the House of Commons in Manchester, opposing the Conservative Party’s Aliens Bill, which would have excluded Russian Jews fleeing Czarist Russia from Great Britain. Five years later, as Home Secretary, Churchill signed Weizmann’s citizenship papers. More important in Zionist terms, Weizmann became friendly with Arthur Balfour, persuading him to select Palestine as the Jewish homeland in a conversation that occurred in the fateful year of 1914; the Balfour Declaration was issued three years later. The British pushed the Ottomans out of Palestine. In effect, the “Jewish Question” of the twentieth centuries came out of the “Eastern Question” Disraeli had addressed in the previous century. For his part, in a White Paper prepared in 1922, Churchill declared that Jews live in Palestine “of right and not of sufferance,” a right resting upon their “ancient historic connection” to the land.

During the 1930s, anticipating war with Germany, Weizmann wrote a letter assuring British leaders of his firm support in any future conflict, and in 1944 he met with Churchill to discuss the partition of Palestine in the aftermath of that war.

England’s Disraeli, America’s Hoover, Italy’s Marconi, Germany Bosch, the future Israel’s Weizmann: the stars at Churchill’s birth formed the constellation of his life.

 

Postscript

Had Churchill not been Prime Minister during the Second World War, he would be remembered today primarily as a literary figure, author not only of major histories of the world wars but of The River War and The Life of Marlborough. Two other important writers were also born in 1874: G. K. Chesterton and Gertrude Stein, a pair who could scarcely have been more distant from one another in conviction and sensibility. Churchill met Chesterton, although they were never close; the two men concurred in their sympathies with Zionism and their antipathies for Hitler, but Chesterton was a ‘Little Englander,’ not an imperialist, and they took opposite positions on the eugenics controversy that roiled English politics in the years before the First World War. As a Catholic Christian, Chesterton firmly opposed forced sterilization of mentally handicapped persons, whereas Churchill endorsed legislation (which failed) in its favor. The American expatriate Stein, who spent most of her life in Paris, never met Churchill, who traveled in rather different circles. During World War II, Stein became an ardent admirer of Marshall Philip Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. She escaped arrest and detention in a concentration camp because she was friendly with one of the French Nazis, who protected her from persecution. One might be forgiven for suspecting that she liked the Vichyites not for any political reason but simply because she would do anything to remain in her beloved France.

Khaled Hroub: Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Pluto Press, 2010. 

 

Founded in 1987, in 2006 the Iranian-backed Islamist organization Hamas surprised the world, very much including its own members, by winning an impressive electoral victory in Gaza, taking control of the Palestinian Legislative Council, which Hroub describes as a “quasi-parliament with limited sovereign powers.” Hamas defeated its “main rival,” Fatah, the main secular party among Palestinians. In the years between its founding and its election, Hamas had become “deeply entrenched socio-political and popular force,” combining “military confrontation” against what Hroub calls the “Israeli occupation” of Palestine with “grass roots social work, religious and ideological mobilization and public relations networking with other states and movements.” (He eventually concedes that Hamas ties receipt of its social service to Islamic religious conformity.) Hroub, a Palestinian who teaches at Northwestern University in Qatar and serves as a senior research fellow at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, assures his readers that this is no “apologetic treatise about Hamas,” but he could have fooled me. This notwithstanding, he does provide some useful information about the group and, by his own manner of presentation, alerts readers to the rhetorical tactics deployed on university campuses to win sympathizers to the Palestinian ’cause.’ [1]

Seven years after this book’s publication, Hamas published a new iteration of its charter, well worth consulting before reading Hroub’s “guide.” In it, Hamas asserts that Palestine, defined as the land which “extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north (along the Israel-Lebanese border) to Umm al-Rashrash in the south” (a.k.a. the Gulf of Aqaba). It is not only “an Arab Muslim land,” a “blessed sacred land,” it is “the spirit of the Ummah and its central cause” and indeed “the soul of humanity and of its living conscience”—large claims, all.

Since 1948, however, parts of Palestine have been “seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project” founded on “a false promise,” namely, the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a “national home” for Jews in Palestine. Hamas’s “goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project, retaking Jerusalem, “not one stone” of which “can be surrendered or relinquished.” All Palestinians living in other lands have the “natural right” to return to Palestine, an “inalienable right “confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law.” “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” The “Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”

As one might suppose, the truth is somewhat more complicated and difficult to ascertain. ‘Palestine’ itself, originally organized as a unit by the Romans, has seen numerous border changes over the centuries. At least until 2012, Fatah spokesmen defined Palestine to include Jordan, whose Hashemite rulers have said the same thing, although not recently. At the beginning of the last century, the Ottoman Empire ruled the area, but the Ottomans made the mistake of choosing the wrong allies in the First World War, while Jews in Europe and the United States backed the eventual winners. After the Ottoman defeat and the ruin of their empire, the Zionist movement, founded by Theodore Herzl in the 1890s, found a hearing for its proposal to open part of Palestine for Jewish immigration, although Jews had been present on the land for millennia and there already had been a recent influx of Jews from eastern and central Europe, fleeing the pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II, which was blamed on ‘the Jews.’ [2] Numerous other peoples had lived in the area in ancient times, as the Bible records; by contrast, the Arabs are called as the “peoples of the east,” its tribes including the Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and Sabeans. This notwithstanding, according to the Bible, Moses himself married an Arab woman, and “Father Abraham” came from Ur, in southern Mesopotamia. Other distinct peoples, notably the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians—imperialists all—conquered the area and mingled their blood with the conquered. Modern Palestinian Arabs often trace their origin to the Canaanites or to the Philistines, which gives them a stronger claim to at least a share of the land than their ‘Arab’ identity could do. It is hard to resist the suspicion that rival origin stories cannot settle matters, even ‘in theory.’

After the Ottomans ceded the area in 1918, the League of Nations assigned the mandate for its rule to Great Britain in 1920; the border between ‘Palestine’ and ‘Transjordan’ was also established at that time. In the language of the League, the British were to rule the two regions “until such time as they are able to stand alone.” The British awarded rule of Transjordan to the Hashemites, who had administered it under the Ottomans but who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916, sending that empire into its final collapse. The League designated Palestine as a “national home” for the Jews while stipulating that this must in no way prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities or to weaken the rights of Jews who did not choose to emigrate there. The Versailles Treaty had solemnized the principle of national self-determination. As British Foreign Secretary, Winston Churchill oversaw the partition and anticipated that Palestine might become a sovereign Jewish state, over time, as its population grew. 

But before the partition, and indeed before the Balfour Declaration, a wartime exchange of letters occurred between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry McMahon and the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. Hussein wanted an “Arab Caliphate of Islam”; McMahon wanted the Arabs to fight against the regnant Ottomans, a British opponent in the war. The Arab Revolt of June 1916-October 1918 drew Ottoman attention away from the European front and contributed to the empire’s collapse. But although Palestinian Arabs, including Hamas, contend that the Balfour Declaration violated the terms of the agreement, Palestine was mentioned as a proposal by Hussein, and Hussein was a Hashemite, not a Palestinian; further, McMahon never explicitly agreed to turn over control of Palestine to either Arab group. What is more, in still another agreement between British representative T. E. Lawrence, the leader of the Arab Revolt, and Hussein bin Ali’s son, Feisal ibn-Hussein, the two sides agreed to Arab sovereignty over Baghdad, Amman, and Damascus in exchange for Emir Feisal’s relinquishment of his father’s claim to Palestine; in this agreement, Feisal would rule Baghdad as Feisal I of Iraq and his brother, Abdullah Feisal, would rule Transjordan. In a 1922 White Paper, Churchill maintained that Palestinian had been excluded from Arab control, although British Foreign Secretary Lord Grey demurred, a year later, saying that Palestine was indeed included, and a 1939 British report sided with Grey’s position.

What is indisputable is that at the time of the Palestine Mandate Palestine, including Transjordan, had a population of fewer than a million persons, ten percent of whom were Jews. Arabs now enjoyed civil rights, which they did not have under the Ottomans. During the Nehi Musa Riot of 1920, in which Palestinian Arabs attacked Jews in the Old City, chanting, “We will drink the blood of the Jews,” no nice distinction between Jews and Zionists was observed. In 1937, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann proposed what is now called a ‘two-state solution’ to the problem, which would have allocated eighty percent of the land west of the Jordan to Arabs, a suggestion the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler ally, scornfully rejected. Jewish immigration was restricted in the years prior to the Holocaust. Other two-state proposals have foundered on Palestinian Arab ambition. Hamas prefers not to mention much of any this tortured history, and not primarily for nationalist reasons.

Turning from nationality to religion, while the Hamas Charter claims that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance,” the peace and tolerance Muslims have in mind presupposes the subordination of other religious groups—the condition of ‘dhimmitude.’ The distinction between Jews and Zionists is valid in principle, since not all Jews have been, or are now, Zionists. [3] However, all Zionists are Jews and thus subject to dhimmitude, according to the Islamic law upheld by Hamas. “Resisting the [Zionist] occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws”; “at the heart of these lies armed resistance” aimed at the establishment of “a fully sovereign Palestinian state on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.” This is “the central cause” not only for Palestinian Arabs but “for the Arab and Islamic Ummah.”

The 2017 Charter affirms that this sovereign state shall be built on “sound democratic principles, foremost among them [being] free and fair elections.” As Hroub emphasizes, Hamas won such an election in 2006, although he concedes that no such elections have occurred since then, after the military wing of Hamas took over from the civilians in 2008. He explains the electoral victory as the result of Fatah/Palestinian Liberation Organization repeated failures to progress toward rule of Palestine. Founded in 1965, the PLO vowed to retake the land “occupied in the war of 1948” and the war of 1967—i.e., all of modern Israel. Although Hroub carefully avoids mentioning it, the PLO, led for years by Yasr Arafat, aligned itself with the Soviet Union for the first quarter-century of its existence, “recognizing Israel and its right to exist” and “drop[ping] the armed struggle as a strategy” only at the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet empire collapsed. Arafat compounded his folly when he backed yet another loser, Saddam Hussein, in his 1991 war with the United States; this weakened his negotiating position still further. The two Oslo Agreements, negotiated with the United States as the broker, Palestinians won self-government but not statehood in Gaza and elsewhere in the area. The Agreements split Palestinians, with Hamas and other irredentist elements continuing to demand full Palestinian statehood over all lands west of the Jordan River. Meanwhile, “Israel did everything possible to worsen the life of Palestinians and enhance its colonial occupation in the West Bank” (i.e., Judea and Samaria); Hroub makes no mention of the several thousand Israelis killed or wounded by attacks from Hamas and other Palestinian groups who aimed at undermining the Agreements; the first suicide bombing by Hamas occurred in 1994, in retaliation for an attack by “a fanatical Jewish settler” who gunned down twenty-nine worshippers at a mosque in Hebron. Hroub ignores the prompt condemnation of the act by both Prime Minister Itzak Rabin and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and the banning of the far-right Kach organization, to which the mass murderer, beaten to death on the spot by Palestinians, belonged. He also ignores the retaliatory attacks on Jews by Palestinians, including a murderous assault on schoolchildren in Brooklyn, New York, by an individual who shouted “Death to the Jews.” 

Hroub has his moments of honesty. Describing the 2006 election victory, he writes, “Many Palestinians support the nationalist/liberationist and social work of Hamas, but not its religious ideal. Hama purposefully overlooks this fact, and instead considers any vote for its political agenda as a vote for its religious one too.” He recounts that Hamas entered the election period itself with a miscalculation, hoping not to win but to obtain enough seats in the legislature to leave “the ‘dirty’ business of day-to-day governing” to Fatah, while holding effective veto power over Fatah’s attempts to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’ to the Palestinian question with Israel. He acknowledges that Hamas’s governance of Gaza was hobbled by Fatah and “groups in the Gaza Strip”—rival Islamists, he should have remarked—who, along with “Israeli efforts to bring down Hamas’s government”—that is, to police the area in accord with the Oslo Agreements—all “precipitated Hamas’s preemptive, violent military take-over of Gaza in June 2007—displacing the remaining Fatah leadership and controlling all security forces.” He never quite gets around to mentioning that no further elections have been permitted by Hamas since then. In a particularly entertaining formulation, Hroub avows that “Hamas is as genuine in its democratic conviction as any other political party, in a region inexperienced in this form of governance.” As to his complaint that “the United States rejected the outcome of Palestinian democracy,” the very regime change it had long advocated throughout the Middle East, Hroub would do better to understand that Americans founded their regime based on consent of the governed within the framework of the principle of an unalienable right of all human beings to life, liberty, and property—none of which suicide-bombing Islamist terrorists much respect. And given the fact that “Hamas’s political leadership is kept almost in complete darkness about any detailed timing and places of attacks beforehand” by a military wing that “functions virtually independently,” albeit “governed by a political strategy that is drawn and exercised by the political leadership,” prospects for democratic governance by Hamas look dim.

Hroub outlines the origins of Hamas in the Muslim Brotherhood, the first important modern Islamist organization. The Palestine branch was founded in Jerusalem in 1946, “two years before the establishment of the state of Israel.” Hamas derives much of its orientation from the minority, radical elements of the Brotherhood, many of them persuaded by the arguments of Sayyed Qutb, who advocated the founding of Islamic states throughout the Middle East, “with the ultimate utopia of uniting individual Islamic states into one single state representing the Muslim Ummah.” Hamas has positioned itself apart from the more peaceful Brotherhood members but does not go so far as al-Qaeda, which targets not only “foreign occupying powers” in the region but “legitimate national governments.” Hamas has no interest in knocking down buildings and murdering people on American soil. This notwithstanding, the Brotherhood did recognize Hamas as “an adjunct organization with the specific mission of confronting the Israeli occupation” just before the first intifada, which began in December 1987. According to one Hamas document, “Islam is completely Hamas’s ideological frame of reference.” If so, and if the Muslim Brotherhood has allied with it formally for more than three decades, Islam must justify suicide bombing, according not only to Hamas but the Brotherhood. In a 1993 “Introductory Memorandum,” Hamas averred that “confronting and resisting the enemy in Palestine must be continuous until victory and liberation”; the “holy struggle” of confrontation and resistance consist of “fighting and inflicting harm on enemy troops and their instruments”—evidently, the civilians who support those troops. Overall, Hamas has consistently aimed at the “liberation of Palestine” from the Zionist ‘occupation’ and “the Islamization of society (or the establishment of an Islamic state),” both goals consistent with those of the Muslim Brotherhood. Much to Hroub’s relief, Hamas has not hesitated to form “alliances with leftist groups” who are scarcely religious. How long that alliance would last were it victorious, he prefers not to say, although it is noteworthy that the Muslim-secular Left alliance that brought down the Shah of Iran ended with the demise of the leftists, too. Iran is Hamas’s principal backer, as Hroub mentions in passing but takes care not to emphasize, and Hamas depends upon its backing, along with the Iran-based Islamists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, to achieve its stated aims. Iran in turn depends upon these proxies to gain dominance over the rival Sunni Muslims states, especially Saudi Arabia, in its geopolitical effort to reconstitute a caliphate, this time on Shi’a terms. Hroub himself credits Iran with Hezbollah’s “astonishing performance” against the Israelis in the 2006 war.

Is Hamas anti-Semitic? After observing that Arabs are as much Semites as Jews, Hroub invokes the claim that Muslims, Christians, and Jews of the Middle East “lived together with a remarkable degree of coexistence” for centuries, a veritable “‘golden era’ of centuries-long peaceful living under Islamic rule, in what is known now as the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly in Andalusia,” acknowledging the “common roots of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the Old Testament.” There is “in principle…no theological basis for religious (as well as ethnic or racial) discrimination that could lead to European-type anti-Semitism and its manifestations.” As mentioned above, this did not prevent Islam’s own form of anti-Judaism and its manifestations, perhaps most notoriously during the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the expulsion of approximately 800,000 Jews from Muslim countries in 1948. In 1990, Hamas published a document quoted by Hroub distinguishing Judaism from Zionism, promising not to “adopt a hostile position in practice against anyone because of his ideas or his creed,” except when “those ideas and creed are translated into hostile or damaging actions against our people.” He also admits that “ordinary people, including Hamas members, do use the terms ‘Jew,’ ‘Zionist’ and ‘Israeli’ interchangeably.” 

How, then, could Jews be allowed to survive in a future Palestine, were it ruled by Muslims? By making Palestine part of an Arab-Muslim caliphate in which Jews “would lose any numerical superiority” they might continue to live in Palestine itself, Hroub suggests. Obviously, this “one-state solution,” as opposed to the ‘two-state solution’ envisioned by many in the United States and Europe, and indeed by some Palestinians, would result in a new dhimmitude. More modestly, “a treaty in which Palestinian rights were acknowledged and granted in a manner likely to be satisfactory to the Palestinians” would satisfy Hamas, Hamas spokesmen say; “the democratically elected Hamas will abide by whatever the Palestinian people concerning their own fate, in a free and democratic referendum.” Hroub affects to believe that, while admitting that Hamas and “the Palestinian left” haven’t played nice with one another: “In the end, suspicion and ideological differences overrode common cause and pragmatism.” It seems unlikely that either Palestinian secularists or Palestinian Islamist will tolerate a government of the other.

Contending that its strategy of armed resistance caused Israelis to withdraw from Gaza in 2006, and from southern Lebanon in 2000, after Hezbollah employed the same strategy, Hamas extends the lesson to the West Bank. There, “Hamas believes that carrying out cycles of confrontation against the occupation will make the cost of the Israeli presence there unsustainable; that multiplying Israeli costs in terms of human loss, draining of resources, mounting internal tension and deteriorating image worldwide will eventually bear fruit.” This was the rationale behind the several intifadas, the many suicide bombings, and indeed the raid-massacres of October 2023. So far, the strategy has been ineffective.

It may be that prior to their vicious terror raid in 2023 Hamas officers assumed that Israel could do little to injure them, based upon their experience with the Israeli counterattacks on them in December 2008, in which the Israeli Defense Forces killed only 400 of an estimated 15,000 “Hamas strong fighters,” leaving Hamas leadership largely unscathed and increasing its prestige both in Gaza itself and in the region. Most casualties were civilians, most of them women and children. This seems not to have fazed Hamas, and indeed rather to have encouraged its militants. Israel’s crushing assault on Gaza in response to the 2023 attack has killed many more civilian deaths and injuries than in 2008, a humanitarian crisis indeed, and one that could be ended if Hamas surrendered. The fact that no one even conceives of such a possibility, much less proposes it, may be taken as a measure of the world’s estimation of the character of Hamas.

Writing in 2010, Hroub hangs his hat on future moderation of Hamas both with respect to its demand for Islamization of Arabs, its practice of jihad, and its resistance to a two-state solution. As he puts it, “Hamas in power felt the burning need to repackage its positions in a more political format.” He gives no evidence that this is any more than rhetoric, and none has been forthcoming in subsequent years. After all, “the route to Palestinian legitimacy and leadership has always hinged upon offering a plausible strategy to resist and reverse the Israeli occupation,” but neither negotiation nor warfare has achieved any such thing. Indeed, Israel has gotten bigger and more powerful with each decade of its existence. 

 

Notes

1. His publisher, London-based Pluto Press, describes itself as an “anti-capitalist, internationalist and independent publisher,” “emerging from the Marxist tradition.” It was originally associated with the Socialist Workers Party. Hroub himself is decidedly a ‘man of the Left.’ He explains his otherwise anomalous support for Hamas thusly: “As a secular person myself, my aspiration is for Palestine, and for all other Arab countries for that matter, to be governed by human-made laws. However, I see Hamas as a natural outcome of un-natural, brutal occupational conditions,” the “predictable result of the ongoing Israeli colonial project in Palestine.” The enemies of his enemies—the United States, Britain, ‘the West’ generally—are his friends, at least for now.
2. Anti-Jewish sentiments had been weak or nonexistent in Russia for centuries, but the conquest of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a portion of the Ottoman Empire in the period 1772-1815, places where important Jewish settlements existed, fired antagonisms, making conspiracy theories concerning the assassination plausible to Russians.
3. The first, 1988 Hamas Charter contained what Hroub called and “embarrassing” passage condemning Jewish bankers for the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the First World War “in which they destroyed the Islamic Caliphate” (the Ottoman Empire), the League of Nations, and the Second World War. Such claims have been excised from subsequent iterations of the Charter.

 

 

 

Michael Mann: On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.  Chapter 10-Conclusion

 

Although “most European writers since the Enlightenment have claimed that war was declining or was about to decline,” Mann considers this wishful thinking. By his reckoning warfare has waxed and waned from one region to another and from one time to another, with no discernible trend. Some modern writers expect peace to result from the adoption of a favored political regime—typically, republicanism or socialism—or a favored economic system—free trade, industrialism. Another candidate for peace has been imperialism, whether the liberal imperialism of John Stuart Mill and Max Weber (the English and German varieties of the doctrine eventually would clash on, well, the battlefield), or the mission civilisatrice of the French. In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinists added ‘race science’ to such claims, whether on the basis of Caucasian superiority or of the disappearance of races via “assimilation and miscegenation.” And, it should be noted, the tyrannical, then oligarchic form of socialism, once seen in the Soviet Union, engaged in imperialism without calling itself that. Today’s Communist China may have similar ambitions.

Nor have casualties declined. Death rates have declined only because the global population is bigger, major wars have become shorter, and medical treatment has improved. World War II saw the deaths of a smaller percentage of the world population than did the Mongol conquests, but the Mongol conquests went on for a hundred years, World War II less than a decade. The two world wars of the twentieth century caused higher annual rates of killing than any other wars in human history. Whether considered in terms of societies structured to make war or the fatalities caused by war, “history is not a divide between modern and pre-modern states and armies,” even if modern science and its technology does constitute such a divide.

What about the world since 1945? Although (or perhaps because of) nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction have threatened states, no major war has occurred, despite the sharp regime differences between commercial republics and their several enemies. Although “optimism is understandable within recent Western Europe,” the Russian invasion of Ukraine “blasted apart such European complacency.” As to smaller wars, Africa alone has seen ten of them, with over 700,000 battlefield deaths and millions more dead of slaughter, disease, and malnutrition. The United Nations “peacekeeping troops,” numbering 110,000 soldiers in fourteen countries, have kept the peace for more than a dozen years in about half of their interventions. “Unfortunately, peace achieved through negotiated settlement does not last as long as peace achieved by the victory of one side,” possibly (although Mann doesn’t claim this) because the loser’s regime may change into one more favorable to the winner. 

It is true that “internally the West has become fairly pacific.” Mann ascribes this outcome to the institution of the modern state, which wields the “infrastructural power” to “penetrate civil society and logistically implement its decisions through the realm”—quite unlike the much less efficient pre-modern states, whose rulers “relied on repression, including killing,” to maintain order. “Modern rulers have infrastructural power whose institutions routinely preserve order without inflicting lethal violence,” unless of course the regime itself intends to inflict violence, as in the modern tyrannies, wherein things can get very bloody, indeed. “Yet overall, there has been a decline in militarism in the principal institutions of society” in the West, despite the growth of military spending in “both liberal and illiberal countries.” However, such spending is a smaller percentage of the GDP of twenty-first century countries, never exceeding 4.1 percent in the West. Mann chastises the United States nonetheless; “never has a single country had such military overpreparedness, its bases spread over the globe, prepared for and launching military interventions across the world.” He prefers not to recognize that America’s international system of military bases was designed by the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an alternative to the imperialism then prevailing among European countries; as those empires collapsed between the years 1915 and 1990, the United States was left with the responsibility of keeping sea and air lanes open to international commerce—an expensive policy to which there may be no palatable alternatives for a commercial republic. Mann also complains that Western capitalists, especially American firms, sell arms to “the regimes and rebels of poorer countries; “addiction to militarism by southern warlords is fueled by northern arms lords in a symbolic relationship,” rather in the manner of the relations between slave-owning planters of the American South and textile mills of the North, and of Great Britain. This violence is compounded by the use of foreign regimes as proxy forces in great-power struggles. As a result, “many poor countries remain beset by wars, especially civil wars, which show little sign of decline.” Although Mann claims that “rich countries have exported militarism far from the attention span and the well-being of their citizens,” who pay little attention to wars that do not involve them directly, it is far from clear that the militarism has actually been exported, that it has not rather provided an indigenous market for the arms exports Mann deplores.

From these statistics-based arguments, Mann turns to an analysis of the effects of wars on the soldiers who fight them, beginning with the American Civil War, the first in which ordinary soldiers wrote down their experiences—that is, the first war in which one of the effects of democratic republicanism, widespread literacy, could be registered. Before that, scholars can only draw conclusions from the ways in which armies were organized to force soldiers to stand and fight instead of fleeing at their first experience of combat. An example of this was Wellington’s manner of deploying his troops at the Battle of Waterloo in squares or rectangles with each side consisting of two or more rows of infantry; “an enemy attack on the square then trapped the soldiers into fighting.” As modern technology improved the lethality of weapons and the distance from which they could be fired, rulers and often the higher-ranking military commanders removed themselves from the front lines, distancing themselves from the terror of warfighting. Meanwhile, soldiers were recruited by appeals to patriotism and the “sense of adventure,” obviously not by warnings of the dangers they would face. 

In the American Civil War, Union soldiers were motivated primarily by “duty backed by conscience,” Confederate soldiers by “honor backed by public reputation.” “This was a war between transcendent ideologies deriving from the key American contradiction, a country of white male democracy and mass slavery,” Mann contends, somewhat inaccurately. More precisely, the Civil War was indeed civil, a war fought by rival regimes: commercial and democratic republicanism in the North, slave-based oligarchy in the South (the latter regime a contradiction of Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). It is in this sense, as Mann does write, that “no matter which side of the divide a Civil war soldier stood on, he knew that the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was the other side’s stance on slavery,” as indeed Lincoln maintained in his Second Inaugural Address. Once in the war, soldiers fought because they were in it together, dependent upon one another for survival, self-respect, and victory. 

Mann denies that the war was worth tens of thousands dead and wounded, millions of traumatized survivors. “A better solution would have been two American countries,” sparing those lives. Mann claims that the slaves would have fled north, the North would never have needed to pay attention to “racist politicians” in the halls of Congress, and slavery “would have collapsed anyway near the end of the century, as soil erosion and boll-weevil infestation destroyed the cotton industry and the profitability of slavery.” While it is touching to see Professor Mann upholding the opinions of the Civil War era British political class, which also wanted the American Union to split, it must be observed that (a) most slaves could have been prevented from crossing the North-South border, once it had been militarized; (b) slaves could have been employed in tasks other than cotton harvesting, if cotton itself were no longer a viable crop; (c)the Confederates intended to expand southward, colonizing parts of Latin America; (d) a divided America might well have fought subsequent wars on that continent; (e) the two countries might well have taken opposite sides in both world wars of the next century, throwing Europe’s democratic-republican future into question. Lincoln’s primary intention, to save the Union, made sense for Americans and quite possibly for Europeans as well. In this, he followed the arguments of The Federalist and of George Washington.

In those world wars, soldiers’ motives for fighting differed. In the First World War, men signed up for duty supposing warfare to be an honorable, even heroic endeavor; both sides claimed self-defense; soldiers fought in units drawn from their home regions, which increased social pressure to enlist; and finally, many men liked the pay. Once in the war, continued social pressure, now felt within the unit, a sense of duty, absorption in daily tasks (very much including survival), drilling and training, punishment of the disobedient, and “a claim of self-defense” all contributed to steadfastness throughout the years of combat, although sheer physical and psychic exhaustion began to prevail in the end. Heedless of the lessons the American Civil War should have taught them about the devastating effects of modern military technology (what did Americans know about warfare?), commanders and civilian rulers alike grossly underestimated the casualties they would incur. Given the ruin, “this now seems a pointless war, fought neither for genuine national interests nor for high ideals, but for ‘reasons of state’ mediated by the survival interests of dynastic monarchies and the diplomatic incompetence and cult of ‘honor’ of upper-class leaders who did not themselves fight.” But does this criticism apply equally to the monarchs and the republicans? Is it clear that the republicans were not defending a better regime for the soldiers and their families? It would have been far better, had the Central Powers not started the war in the first place, or if they had sued for peace much earlier, once the kind of war they were fighting was obvious, but they didn’t do either of those things.

Mann judges the Second World War to have been “very different,” a war not “caused by confusion and miscalculation” but by “ideology,” a “war of aggression created by the militaristic ideologies of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy,” a war of self-defense by the Allies, whose soldiers “were not cannon fodder in the power ploys of rulers,” as Mann supposes the Allies to have been in World War I. He goes much too far in blaming British and French statesmen for “their ideological anti-Bolshevism,” which, he claims, “prevented them from allying with the Soviets to deter Hitler in 1938 and 1939.” In fact, Stalin, operating under his Marxist illusions that Nazis and republicans would exhaust one another in an inter-capitalist war, was already conniving with Hitler in a vain attempt to keep the Soviet Union out. “We can also blame the Roosevelt administration for its provocative sanctions against Japan”—equally nonsensical, given Japan’s imperial intentions in the Pacific. At most, one can blame FDR for failing to anticipate and prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, but the geopolitical regime struggle was on, and had been on, for a long time before that. These considerations notwithstanding, Mann affirms that “Allied soldiers viewed this as a legitimate war, and it was.” The republican allies fought “a just war in defense of their way of life,” whereas the German, Japanese, and “above all the Red Army” soldiers fought on behalf of “transcendent ideologies” that ginned them up for self-sacrifice in a manner not unlike that of Muslim jihadis before and since. In the Red Army, such ideological commitment was reinforced by the presence of Communist Party agents in each unit, leading ideological instruction of the soldiers in between the battles. “The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement in military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies.” Mann tries to claim that the contrast between Communist and Nazi morale and the more low-key spirit of republican soldiers “makes a mockery” of the claim that democratic armies were more intensely motivated than the soldiers of tyranny. This ignores what would surely have been Tocqueville’s point: If by democracy one means social egalitarianism, not political republicanism, then modern tyrants can rule societies as democratic as societies ruled by representatives elected by the people. 

The non-transcendent “ideology” of the Allied soldiers enabled them to be “massaged into willingness to kill, although rarely with enthusiasm.” “Sadism was rare and few frontline soldiers were motivated by deep hatred for the enemy.” They were probably less capable warriors than their enemies, “being overly dependent on air and artillery superiority.” For the Americans, loyalty and solidarity centered not on “country, army, or regiment, but to the small group of comrades with whom they shared their life in and out of battle.” It might be suggested that the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism fostered all of these things: American soldiers thought of their enemies as fellow human beings; American politicians and military commanders were ‘economical’ in organizing their forces, preferring to spare the men unnecessary risks; soldiers thought of their buddies as fellow citizens, conscripts in a war against regimes that denied the citizenship rights that conscription itself limited in that war. “Of course, Islamist terrorists also experience this” sense of comradery,” as Mann cannot resist to add, proving only that one can feel solidarity with partners in any ’cause,’ good or evil. 

All of this “tells us little about human nature, except how malleable it is,” confirming rather what a sociologist is likely to think, “how mighty social power relations are, capable of disciplining men into behavior that would be unthinkable to them in peacetime,” namely, “repeatedly trying to kill others while exposing themselves to risk of death or mutilations” in “a socially induced hell.” Then again, what the mightiness of social relations may tell us about human nature is that human beings are naturally social, even political.

Mann next considers wars fought against Communist regimes. Both the United States and the Soviet Union intervened against one another and, in the Soviet case, to keep their eastern and central European allies in line. Many of these interventions consisted of aid to proxy warriors. The United States succeeded in nearly three-quarters of their direct interventions that lasted no more than six months, less than fifty percent in interventions lasting longer than that—Vietnam being the primary example of failure. “But attaining American or Soviet objectives did not necessarily benefit the peoples at the receiving end,” a comment that is obvious enough, although one might add that Soviet objectives were much less often beneficial. Mann’s analysis highlights the American wars in Korea and Vietnam, betraying an intention, increasingly evident in this second half of his book, to influence American readers more than any others. In Korea, he claims, “vital American interests were not at stake” but internal politics “obstructed rational thinking.” Although the American commander, General Matthew Ridgeway, wanted to retake the whole of the Korean peninsula, he knew he could only do that “with casualties acceptable to the American people,” a point that “has remained an American weakness,” albeit “a healthy sign of declining militarism in American society,” as might be expected in the American regime’s way of life. 

The Vietnamese jungles made fighting more difficult for the Americans than it had been in Korea, giving the advantage to the Communist guerrillas, despite copious use of defoliants and artillery. Crucially, the Vietcong saw reinforcements from North Vietnam, Communist China, and the Soviet Union along with support from much of the peasantry. The ‘People’s Liberation Front” “could replace their casualties from village militias and northern regiments and fight on indefinitely,” buoyed by the ideological fervor similar to that of the Soviets in World War II, similarly reinforced by Party members embedded in military units. As a result, “the soldiers of the democracies performed worse, not better,” winning only when “advanced technology and firepower” could get a fix on the enemy. This didn’t happen often enough to save America’s South Vietnamese allies. 

Mann concludes this set of chapters by calling soldiers, not proletarians, “the most truly exploited persons on the planet,” and their ruling exploiters “callous desk killers, inflicting fear, death, and mutilation from afar on those they define as the enemy, on their own soldiers, and on nearby civilians.” He considers this perhaps “the greatest inequality in life chances in the world today.” 

Evidently, many Muslims disagree that they are being exploited by their warlike rulers. Islamism—not simply Islam—is “popularly rooted in the everyday practices of the people.” Meanwhile, the bad Soviets and Americans, seeking “global grandeur and oil” while “claim[ing] their missions were defensive,” should never have fought the Muslims. This ignores what Mann himself had said about ideological motivation in the Soviet Union, but that was in earlier chapters. 

Muslims have fought four kinds of war: Muslim states against non-Muslim, non-imperial states; Islamic sects against one another; jihadists against “more secular Muslims”; and wars fought against “foreign imperialists initiating wars against both Islamic jihadists and unfriendly Muslim states.” In the first category, he places Muslim wars against Israel, in which he takes the side of the Palestinians, ignoring their irredentist claims not only to the ‘West Bank’ but to Israel and Jordan—to all of what was Palestine, claims based either on the supposition that Palestinian Arabs somehow descend from the ancient Philistines, predating Jews on the land, or on the Islamic claim that any territory once conquered by Muslims remains rightfully Muslim land forever after. The sectarian wars have pitted Sunni Muslims against Shi’a Muslims centered in Iran. Mann claims that these conflicts “reflected geopolitical more than religious motives,” although it is quite doubtful that the participants separated the two so neatly. He is more critical of the jihadis, saying that their reading of the Koran ignores its stipulation that jihad refers “only to wars of defense against unbelievers,” who must be given time to repent. This overlooks the jihadists’ insistence that heretics are unbelievers and the fact that wars that have broken out over many centuries have afforded both sides ample opportunity for repentance. 

As to the wars of defense against foreign imperialists, Mann zeroes in on the two Gulf Wars. He doesn’t mind the First Gulf War, which “had the UN seal of approval,” which “brought genuine global legitimacy” to the enterprise and was supported by Muslim state allies in the region, threatened by Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions. President George H. W. Bush wisely saw he “lacked the political power to form a stable alternative government in Iraq,” and so did not attempt to change its regime. Not so, his son, who equally lacked “substantial local allies on the ground,” except for the Kurds—who, Mann comes around to conceding, have shown the capacity to found a decent, self-governing state-within-the-state. After the jihadist ISIS movement was “crushed, for the moment,” Iraqi “ethnic-religious tensions are currently simmering rather than exploding,” making the war “only a minor disaster,” in his estimation. 

When it comes to fighting wars, Mann points to two “enduring domestic weaknesses” of the United States: squeamishness about the loss of life and “fragile popular support for wars.” Americans can’t stomach the long haul. Politicians continue to enter wars despite these weaknesses because they suffer from three “blind spots”: belief in “an imperial civilizing mission,” by which he means regime change, which he deems “unachievable” in “an age of rising nationalist and religion resistance”; ignorance of the long-lasting resentment of American intervention (“North Koreans hate America with good reason,” having suffered two million wartime deaths at its hands); and “conservatism,” by which he means retaining alliances (with Israel and Saudi Arabia, especially) and antagonisms (Iran) that are no longer in American interests. “The solution is not war. It is to moderate U.S. policies in the region.” To this it may be counter-argued, first, that regimes working at cross purposes may temporize, but they remain enemies until one or both principals change; rising nationalist and religious resistance may or may not make forced regime change unachievable, as seen in Iraq, in which the Americans did in fact change the regime, for better in one region, not necessarily for the worse in the others. Long-lasting resentment of American intervention can in fact be ameliorated, if the rulers want it to be, as seen in today’s Vietnam. And it is by no means clear that Israel and Saudi Arabia are no longer useful allies of the United States, or that Iran can be induced to “change tack on Israel,” which it currently has targeted for destruction, even as it has long chanted, “Death to America.” Mann urges America to act as “a neutral referee” among warring Middle East states, “helping settle these disputes through conciliation laced with incentives.” But there are no neutral referees when major ‘powers’ (now, the United States, China, and Russia) contend for superiority, as they will continue to do, given their regime differences and conflicting geopolitical objectives.

Looking to the future, Mann turns his attention to those three major powers. He deprecates both the NATO expansion that enraged Vladimir Putin and Putin’s overreaction to it. Identifying himself with the Russian state and people, Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in a spirit of military overconfidence, expectation of increased popularity at home, fear that the republicanism of Ukraine might spread to Russia, contempt for the character of Ukrainians, and expectation that NATO would do nothing much to stop him. His fears were mostly groundless, his hopes disappointed thus far. 

Mann reckons China to have understood its clear military inferiority to the United States and to have responded by putting resources into developing cyber weapons designed to paralyze American weaponry and communications. It “plans expansion to restore the full extent of former Chinese empires,” which means rule over Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, along with some small sections along its border with India. And it intends to secure “predominance in the South China Sea.” “Past imperial glory is important in modern Chinese nationalism,” an element maintaining the authority of the Communist oligarchy. The Chinese narrative features three stages: “Mao made China free” of imperial domination by foreign powers, “Deng made China wealthy, and Xi is giving China global strength.” Like the Russians, the Chinese rulers engage in a regime struggle against the democratic republics although, in Mann’s generous estimation, “the failings of American democracy pale beside the repression exercised by the CCP.” This notwithstanding, “other powers need not fear war with China unless they provoke it,” except when it comes to Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan. He recommends that the United States “hold the existing level of defense over Taiwan and counter the Belt and Road program with its own aid and development program,” both of which policies are currently in place. Mann takes this sanguine view because, although trade between Germany and Britain (to say nothing of Germany and France) was robust in the years before 1914, proving that commercial relations do not prevent war, “today’s interdependence is orders of magnitude greater”; “autarky no longer exists for any country,” and “for Chinese or American rulers to ignore such an unprecedented level of mutual material interests would be stupidity of the highest order.” It would, but of course one might go to war for reasons that have nothing to do with material interests, and one devise a war strategy that would not ruin the economic assets of the enemy in any long-lasting way. In past centuries, the Chinese were quite good at that sort of thing. 

What to do about the world of today? Mann absurdly imagines that an international push to reverse climate change—a “far more serious crisis” than any other humanity faces, according to him—might unite the countries of the world in a peaceful struggle not to conquer nature but to protect and restore it. “Rulers should fully commit to international institutions to combat war and climate change, consider undertaking wars only in self-defense” as defined by—whom? (According to Mann, Americans carry out “self-defense” by “aggression to the whole world,” making their country into “a great white shark thrashing helplessly in the shallows.” Not promising.) Will the international institutions define defense? Who will rule them? And if no one does and deadlock ensues, how will that prevent wars?

If “war is neither genetically hardwired into humans, nor quite as important as it is often represented,” and if “fixed agrarian settlements generated states and social classes,” leading to war,” and if Mann’s version of William James’s “moral equivalent[s] of war” are likely to be as ineffectual as James’s have been, this would mean that we can prevent war only by going back to the nomadism of pre-agrarian communities or by acceding to the worldwide hegemony of an unprecedentedly great power. “The best antidote to war would be direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies to decide war or peace. Alas, this is also utopian.” It is also wrong. Did direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies prevent Athenians from embarking on empire? 

War began in border disputes between and among states; with their characteristic socioeconomic classes struggling for authority, warfare could unite peoples so ruled and augment their territories, serving the interests of the rulers. This induced neighboring peoples to found their own states. “The militaristic institutions and culture that had grown up on profitable little wars were then turned on bigger wars,” state against state. Losers seldom write histories (the American ex-Confederates being a notable exception), so interstate war was made to seem more practical and glorious than it is. Today, however, “the whole world is filled up with states whose legitimacy is supported by international institutions” and war between “the major states can no longer be rational.” This won’t stop wars from happening, since “the perennial intervention of emotions and ideological and political motives weakens the rationality of both means and ends.” With his distinguished sociological predecessor, Max Weber, Mann believes that ideological and political motives are non-rational—mere ‘values’ as distinguished from the ‘facts’ pragmatists attend to. One may doubt this.

In the end, in his final response to Raymond Aron’s claim that there can be no general theory of war causation, Mann admits that “human nature does matter, if indirectly.” “Part rational, part emotional, part ideological,” human nature’s “tripartite character” makes war “an intermittent outcome” in the course of human events. “Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.”