Will Morrisey Reviews

Raymond Aron: Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection. George Holoch translation. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990.

In the school year 1921-22, Raymond Aron took a class in philosophy at his lycée. Plato’s Socrates describes the experience of philosophy as a conversion, a turning-around of the soul, its redirection to a new way of life. Aron confirms this: “The study of philosophy revealed my vocation and the austere pleasures of reflection,” very much in contrast with the life of his brother, Adrian, who “was gifted with exceptional intelligence” and “put it at the service of bridge and stamps”—a decidedly unphilosophic way of life. “The class of philosophie had taught me that we can think our existence rather than submitting to it, we can enrich it by reflection, carry on a dialogue with great minds,” even if we cannot claim to have great minds by nature. In this, he shared the way of life of Léon Brunschvicg, his future colleague on the faculty at the Sorbonne, who described himself as “attached to meditation on and commentary about the greatest geniuses of humanity,” without supposing he numbered among them. “He did not set himself at the level of the greats, but he peopled his life through his contact with them.”

The philosophy class “taught me to think but also, above all, to learn, to study.” In thinking about France in the aftermath of the Great War, in sympathizing with “the oppressed” and “detest[ing] the powerful who were too confident of their rights,” Aron began to recognize that “between philosophy and my feelings there was a gap—ignorance of society as it is as it can be, and as it cannot be.” “Most of my contemporaries have not filled, have not even tried to fill, that gap.” Thinking philosophically about how the human mind knows, or how human beings should act, they did not think seriously about the social and political conditions in which the mind knows itself and the world, conditions within which it deliberates about what actions to take. In seeking knowledge about society, Aron turned to political reflection. His soon-to-be noteworthy classmate at the École Normale Supérieure, Jean-Paul Sartre, read Aron’s first published article on politics and fumed moralistically: “Has my little classmate become a bastard?” But Aron was only attempting to register his discovery that “politics, as such, differs from morality”—that is, from morality as defined by a strict adherence to certain fixed principles of conduct (for example, utility maximization or the categorical imperative). Politics requires prudential thought, a point that would come as no surprise either to Aristotle or Jesus of Nazareth but had been entirely lost in the neo-Kantian atmosphere of French academic philosophy in the 1920s. Although Sartre would depart from Kantian doctrines soon enough, he retained a Kantian ‘attitude’ for the rest of his life. Political philosophy was beyond his range, although he paid plenty of attention to politics in his uncompromising denunciation of ‘bourgeois democracy’ and his ‘existential commitment’ to egalitarianism. “I envied Sartre’s confidence and, in my heart, I accepted his certainties and my doubts, whose authenticity he had difficulty in admitting,” since any uncertainty, any inclination to examine, much less criticize, the sentiments of the Left could, in Sartre’s mindset, only bespeak bad faith. 

Initially, Aron shared Leftist sentiments. “The year 1921-22 coincided with the renewal of the bourgeois, academic left, which had until then been suppressed by nationalist fervor” whipped up by the war against Germany. More, “philosophy in itself provides a lesson in universality”; a way of life devoted to thought partakes of the universal human capacity to think. “War denies the humanity of man because the victory has demonstrated nothing but his superior strength or cleverness”; since the “bourgeois” or non-communist Left had inclined to peaceableness, even to pacifism, in international relations, it seemed more compatible with philosophizing, and philosophizing seemed more compatible with it. Although a philosopher might ‘make war’ by polemicizing in defense of his way of life, when philosophizing he is ‘making love,’ ardently pursuing the wisdom his political regime, perhaps any political regime, can give him only in glimpses, and unphilosophically. As a Jewish man, albeit thoroughly ‘assimilated’ to French life, Aron additionally could “hardly do anything but will himself, feel himself, to be on the left,” given the anti-Semitism of so many on the French Right.

A philosopher or student of philosophers will form friendships on the basis of that love. Among his classmates at the École, Sartre and Paul Nizan “were recognized by their classmates as out the ordinary” in their devotion both “to literature and philosophy”; they became friends with, roommates of, one another and of Aron. Nizan was a young man whose philosophic inclinations brought him to seek the sort of absolute truth in politics as he sought in intellection. Before becoming a dedicated communist, he was “tempted by Action Française,” the principal organization of the postwar Right, led by Charles Maurras. [1] “Beyond his material elegance, beyond his humor, beyond his extraordinarily quick wit, one suspected that he was anguished, determined to overcome his anguish through action or serious thought, despite the intermittent gaiety beneath which he concealed himself.” His commitment to communism became so pure that he opposed the Popular Front of the mid-1930s—he disliked collaborating with non-communists—and would resign from the French Communist Party after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 not because he objected to the treaty but because the French party had lacked the daring of Stalin in proposing it. Some twenty percent of PCF members deserted the party in protest against the Pact; once Germany declared war on France, the party itself lined up in favor of the war against Nazis, only to reverse course when informed by Stalin that the struggle was an excrescence of bourgeois imperialism on both sides. Nizan would have no part of such a wishy-washy bunch. But in Aron’s terms, Nizan was thinking about politics apolitically, an instance of pure, if profoundly mistaken, moral dudgeon.

Adolescent Sartre entertained grander ambitions—to “rise to the level of Hegel” and perhaps “beyond” him, as a philosopher, while enjoying the esteem of men and the adoration of women. “He already scorned the privileged,” those now above him socially but unworthy of their prominence, the sort of men who had a court reserved for their exclusive use at the tennis club. Marxism, mixed with Husserlian and Heideggerian motifs, eventually provided the desired éclat, although there was more to it than doctrine. “Sartre wanted to become a great writer, and he did.” No Hegel, but then Hegel was no great writer. As for philosophy, “his vision of the world is not entirely he own,” as “there is no doubt that he seized ideas as they passed within his grasp”; “in 1945, Merleau-Ponty told me that he was careful not to tell Sartre of his ideas.” 

Young men of philosophic ambition seek older men as mentors or as targets. In the 1920s, in France, the most prominent of these were Brunschvicg, Henri Bergson, and Émile-Auguste Chartier, better known by his pen name, Alain. Bergson had retired and seems not to have interested the ENS trio, and in any event had left before they came along. Brunschvicg was a different story. “A mandarin among mandarins,” he wrote on intellectual life, giving his books such titles as The Stages of Mathematical Thought and The Growth of Consciousness in Western Thought, “shed[ding] light on the history of Western philosophy with parallels from mathematics and physics.” (In the United States, the German emigré Jacob Klein, who taught for decades at St. Johns College, might be a rough parallel.) Brunschvicg “did not break with tradition” but did tend to “reduce philosophy to a theory of knowledge,” as if Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason formed the centerpiece of the philosophic enterprise. In his interpretation and adaptation of Kant, “science leaves to philosophy no specific object other than science itself”; “the mind constructs reality through science, and science consists essentially not in elaborating concepts or deducing their consequences, but in judging.” Such judging should be done by a mind purged of egoism, a religiosity without God. “Moral progress is expressed by detachment from the self, by true dialogue, with everyone putting himself in the other’s place,” even as the scientist qua scientist looks at the phenomena before him without regard to himself and his own ‘interests.’ In this way, “the attitude of the pure scientist would lead to justice.” This is hardly the stuff of political philosophy, and Aron would need to overcome it before he could learn to think politically, but in the meantime, “all the philosophy of the past remained latent, alive, in his books and lectures,” and is that not the crucial thing a professor of philosophy must ensure?

As for Alain, “I was more impressed by [his] personality than by his philosophy.” A man of courage, he detested war but volunteered for combat at the beginning of hostilities, demanding of himself that he live through it “with the combatants.” “Alain and his students were independent, neither communist nor socialist, but the eternal left, the left that never holds power, since it is defined by the resistance to power, which by its very essence leads to abuses and corrupts those who hold it,” in their estimation. Vis-à-vis Germany, this meant a refusal to “participate in the avalanche of anti-German propaganda” during the war, and the suspicion that Germany did not bear “exclusive or predominant responsibility” for the war. They opposed postwar French revanchisme, as seen in the occupation of the Ruhr by French forces. Aron gives Alain his due: “at least [he] had kept silent in the midst of the collective madness.” But silence isn’t enough. 

“What do I retain from Alain? He helped me to read the major authors, even though I subscribed neither to his method nor to its results.” His students were led into a notion of philosophia perennis, that all philosophers “said more or less the same thing,” although Aron hastens to testify that Alain himself didn’t think that. The reaction was nonetheless understandable, as the master himself “drew a link between Kant, who lifted his hat to temporal authority without morally submitting to it, and Auguste Comte who accepted the rule of force and moderated it through spiritual power.” That is, as Aron remarks, “what both of them had thought, preached, or taught was in the final analysis, the philosophy of Alain himself.”

ENS had its political side, if not its political-philosophic side. The two main groupings were the socialists, led by the librarian Lucien Herr and a student, Georges Lefranc, and the Catholics, led by Professor Pierre-Henri Simon, who “at the time leaned toward the right perhaps in the limited sense that they did not rebel against the virtues and patterns of thought that had ruled wartime France.” Aron understandably had more sympathy with the socialists; regarding Maurras, “several times I tried to develop an interest in this doctrinaire supporter of the monarchy, without success.” But he remained painfully cognizant of his lack of real knowledge of politics, recalling a family discussion of a financial crisis in which a uncle who worked in a brokerage house silenced him by saying, “I’ll listen to you when you speak of philosophy; you know nothing of finance, so keep quiet.” Throughout his life, he remained on the Left in one sense: “I despise everyone who thinks he is of another essence” than other human beings. The “great men of our society…are no different from ordinary mortals, they seem to me neither more human nor more inhuman than their fellows.” There remains, however, a distinction among certain distinguished men. “There remains between us the inevitable, unbridgeable distance between the men of state or economic power and a free intellectual.”

French academic life offered Aron both an apolitical philosophy and an unphilosophic politics. But Kant does address the question of history, however implausibly, and this led Aron to a question: How does one understand history, and particularly one’s own time? This is a Kant-like question of epistemology directed neither at physics nor metaphysics, or at least not at the ‘metaphysics of morals,’ simply. “I gradually grasped my two tasks: to understand or know my time as honestly as possible, without ever losing awareness of the limit of my knowledge; to detach myself from immediate events without, even so, accepting the role of spectator.” He pursued these tasks in what for a French academic of the 1930s was an unusual place: Germany, at the University of Cologne. “As surprising as it may seem today, French and German philosophers were hardly aware of one another” in those days, despite the common legacy of Kant. While there, he immersed himself in Kant, “absorb[ing] a precious, perhaps the most precious, element of Germany philosophy,” namely, “the categorical imperative, the essence of ethics” and Kant’s argument in favor of “religion within the limits of reason.” But could Kantianism be integrated into political thought?

At Cologne, Aron read Marx’s Capital. Hoping to find in Marx “a confirmation of socialism as the next necessary phase of history,” Aron wondered if Marx’s “philosophy of history free[d] us from the heaving obligation that is nevertheless a constituent part of our humanity, of choosing different parties?” Does the dialectic that is class struggle answer that question for us? And did it explain the Great Depression “that was ravaging the world and tragically affecting Germany” while, conversely, “justify[ing] the communist movement, and the Soviet Union as well?” Witness to the rise of Nazis, Aron liked the Soviets no better, and so was both “attracted and repelled” by the philosophy of history that, in its contemporary manifestation, condemned the former as a symptom of ‘bourgeois reaction’ while esteeming the latter as History’s welcome cutting edge.

Upon returning to France, worried about “the nationalistic furor that had seized the entire people and the threat of war that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power would cause to hang over Europe,” Aron expressed these concerns to a French Foreign Ministry undersecretary, Joseph Paganon, whom he met through a friend of his brother. “He listened to me attentively, apparently with interest,” but then asked, with diplomatic courtesy, “You, who have spoken so well about Germany and the dangers appearing on the horizon, what would you do if you were in [the minister of foreign affairs’] place?” Philosophy, even genuinely political philosophy, takes one only so far; to think about politics, theoretical reasoning needs the supplement of prudential reasoning. When it came to the political question of understanding the politics of his time, Aron had reached a double impasse: ni Marx, ni Immanuel [Kant]. 

What, then, did the sociologists offer? “Max Weber provoked my sometimes passionate interest,” as his studies of religion “preserved the best elements of its philosophic origins” by reconstructing “the meaning men had given to their existence and of the institutions that had preserved religious messages, had transmitted or ritualized them, and the ways in which the prophets had shaken, revitalized, and renewed them.” In the contemporary world, Weber’s approach thus took account of both the modern system of transmitting and ritualizing messages, the bureaucracy of the modern state, and the modern ‘prophets,’ “the charismatic authority of the demagogue.” In Weber, “I glimpsed for the first time, in the constructions of the sociologist who was also a philosopher, my ethical dilemmas and my hopes.” And Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” also addressed the undersecretary’s polite demand for a bit of practicality. “I was linked to him by an elective affinity.”

Nor did Aron ignore Germany’s ongoing philosophic ferment, with Husserl and Heidegger on one hand, the “Hegelianized Marxism” of the Frankfurt School on the other. These two poles interacted to disarm German intellectuals: “The threat of death hovered over this Republic without republicans, over a marxisant left-wing intelligentsia that hated capitalism too much and did not fear Nazism enough to come to the defense of the Weimar regime. A few years later, the sign of death was inscribed on France.” In France, Aron reported on Husserl to Sartre, “awaken[ing] in him a feverish curiosity.” Both for Sartre and Aron, Husserl’s phenomenology proved a liberation from their “neo-Kantian training.” But in Sartre’s case, this turn of attention to ‘the things themselves’ was accompanied by no subsequent turn to sober Max Weber. He chose Marx as his guide to politics.

What of the ordinary Germans? “I heard Goebbels and Hitler several times.” Their audience cut across lines of social and economic class—a phenomenon Marx could not predict and Stalin (for one) would never understand. “They nodded in approbation to Hitler’s diatribes against the Jews, the French, or the capitalists,” likely without taking “the insults and pronouncements of Nazi orators literally.” After all, before the Holocaust, “how can one believe the unbelievable?” 

In the Germany of the early 1930s, Aron “passed a threshold in my political education—an education that will last as long as I do.” He “had understood and accepted politics as such, irreducible to morality” as conceived by Kant and expressed by the categorical imperative. As a result, “I would no longer attempt, through statements of signatures, to demonstrate my fine feelings” but rather “to think about politics,” think about it in terms of “political agents,” and “hence to analyze their decisions, their goals, their means, their mental universe.” If Nazism “had taught me the power of irrational forces,” easily obscured in the then-polite domain of the universities, “Weber had taught me the responsibility of each individual, not so much with respect to intentions,” the purity of one’s ‘imperatives,’ “as to the consequences of his choices,” most notably the consequences of whipping up irrational forces for the sake of political mobilization. Even as he learned that those lessons, the world in which he lived had shifted from the postwar atmosphere of a Europe confident that Germany had been pacified, now ruled by a commercial republican regime that would not threaten its neighbors, to a prewar atmosphere, in which a new regime in Germany, far worse than the Kaiserreich. Unlike most of his contemporaries in France, Aron understood that “beyond the left and antifascism, it was now a question of France and its salvation.” “The patriotism of my childhood, of my family, of all my ancestors won out over the pacifism and badly defined socialism to which I had been led by philosophy and by the postwar atmosphere.” 

He returned to Paris in 1934. At the Center for Social Documentation at ENS, he delivered a lecture on the Nazi regime, carefully identifying himself not only as a Frenchman but as a Jew. “I had understood that German anti-Semitism would call into question the existence of French Jews; I adopted once and for all the only attitude that seems to me appropriate: never to conceal my origins, without ostentation, without humility, without compensatory pride.” Although some French specialists on Germany had justified Nazism as Germany’s means of recovery from the Depression (which it was), Aron pointed to the larger political and military implications. Nazism, he told them, “is a catastrophe for Europe because it has revived an almost religious hostility between peoples, because it has propelled Germany toward its ancient dream and its perennial sin: in the guise of defining itself proudly in its singularity, Germany is lost in its myths, a myth about itself and about the hostile world.”

Having separated himself morally and intellectually from the French Left, the threat of Nazism nonetheless required contact and indeed alliance with elements of the Left throughout the remainder of the decade. Of these personalities, Aron emphasizes his relations with the members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, André Malraux, and Alexander Kojève. Of the Frankfurt group, he found Theodor Adorno “the most impressive of all because of his culture, his knowledge of music, and the difficulty of his style.” On the other hand, “I must admit…thirty years later, I was not convinced of the genius of Marcuse.” They were all “followers, in one way or another, of Marx” but supported neither of the two principal Marxist factions in European politics, the Social Democrats and the Communists. “They did nothing to save the Republic,” eventually fleeing to America, where they enjoyed much success in influencing students in the safety America had helped to win for them in the 1940s and sustained for them ever since. 

Malraux was, publicly at least, a ‘fellow-traveler’ with Marxists, but never a Marxist. Unlike the Frankfurters, he became a good friend of Aron, and their wives and daughters befriended one another, as well. Malraux had already published four novels and was writing Man’s Fate. “I felt his superiority and admitted it to myself without bitterness.” Aron is quick to vindicate Malraux’s self-taught knowledge, which would be ridiculed in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. “When I was able to verify, I was almost always struck by the precision and the pertinence of his knowledge of literature and history.” Politically, both men accepted the Soviet Union as an ally against fascism (“Hitler represented the immediate and therefore primary danger”)— Malraux with characteristically more enthusiasm, in public. “In private, Malraux spoke neither as a communist nor a fellow traveler. He concealed neither from himself nor from others the harshness and the crimes of the regime, but he also praised its social accomplishments.” Unfortunately, his public support for the Soviet regime, though tactical, “converted to the Party many young men in search of a cause to which they could devote themselves,” even as “Marxism had never subjugated” his own soul, and he consequently “never went through the conversion of ex-communist or ex-Maoists.” As a result, in the years immediately after the liberation of France he could ally himself with General de Gaulle; “his nationalism and Gaullism were much deeper than his quasi-Marxism.” He “understood more quickly and clearly than Sartre that the revolutionary spirit was no longer embodied in the East; the subjection of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Rumanians, was an expression of Realpolitik.” In one volume of his ‘anti-memoir,’ The Mirror of Limbo, Malraux quoted de Gaulle as remarking, “I was the real revolutionary,” with no objection. Aron suggests that once again Malraux was not so much wrong as too enthusiastic: “Perhaps the General gave his ministers [including Malraux, who served in his cabinet as Minister of Culture] the feeling that they were living in History and not in everyday life, but the impression was deceptive,” inasmuch as de Gaulle’s real political achievement was to found the Fifth Republic, a substantial improvement over the Fourth to be sure, a political revolution or regime change, but one unlikely to have stirred the soul of Hegel. The friendship of Malraux and Aron sustained itself on similarity of interests and allegiances, with sometimes complementary differences of temperament. (I recall a couple of college students, one of whom had the motto, “I. A. P.,” meaning, “It’s all poetry,” to which his pal countered with “I. M. P.”: “It’s mostly prose.”)

Another friendly acquaintance of the Thirties, Alexandre Kojève, called himself “a strict Stalinist,” although Aron wonders what he meant by that. Unlike Malraux, Kojève (a Russian, his real name was Kojevnikoff) was a philosopher and a Hegelian who regarded ‘History’ as having reached its end in the “universal and homogeneous empire” of Stalin. “That red Russia was governed by brutes, its very language vulgarized, its culture degraded—he admitted all this, in private.” The Soviets’ rival, the United States, was unacceptable because “he considered the United States the most radically unphilosophical country in the world.” Accordingly, after the war he worked to establish the European Economic Community in an attempt to preserve “the autonomy of France and Europe.” Before and after the war, “if I may risk a comparison that some will consider sacrilegious, he seemed to me, in a sense, more intelligent than Sartre,” whose “passions and his moralism, often inverted, limited his angle of vision.” Malraux and Kojève, whose political judgment Aron respected, both excelled Sartre in prudence, the leading virtue of Aron.

That prudence, wedded to moderation, guarded Aron from the excesses of Malraux and Kojève. He rejected the latter’s historicism, along with both the “rationalist progressivism” that “still dominated the Left of the Sorbonne,” and the Spenglerian pessimism seen among many on the Right. In his 1938 study, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, he “made explicit the mode of political thought that I adopted from then on.” Political thought requires, first, a choice between various forms of historical determinism—what he calls the “sociodicies” that have replaced the theodocies of earlier times—and an acceptance of “the existing order.” Theodicy aims at wiping out the existing order altogether; the revolutionary “has an ideology, that is, the representation of another system, transcending the present and probably unrealizable.” Ideology is a temptation characteristic of modern democracies, democracies in Tocqueville’s sense, which “invoke ideals that are to a large extent unrealizable and through the voice of their leaders”—demagogues—and aspire “to an inaccessible mastery over their fate.” The political thinker who instead chooses to accept the existing order begins with where he is; “it has its origin and its object in my own existence” in this time and place. Such a thinker has not chosen ‘conservativism’ but rather undertakes “the most rigorous possible study of reality and the possible regime that might replace the existing one.” Such is “rational choice in political history as I understand it.” One can then choose one realizable regime over another on the basis of multiple criteria: “effectiveness of institutions, individual liberty, equitable distribution, perhaps above all the kind of person created by the regime.” If the Soviet Union produces a brutal human type, as Kojève saw, then its supposed status as ‘History’s’ end-state is not worthy of choice. Put another way, the “politician of Reason” claims to know which way ‘History’ is going, “foresee[ing] at least the next stage of evolution”; “the Marxist knows that the disappearance of capitalism is inevitable and that the only problem is to adapt tactics to strategy, to harmonize accommodation with the current regimes with preparation for the future regime.” The “politician of understanding,” by contrast, “seeks to preserve certain goods—peace and freedom—or to reach a unique goal, national greatness, in situations that are always new and that follow one another without organized patterns.” The politician of Reason imports theory into practice by means of choosing to believe in certain ‘laws of History,’ said to be scientifically discernible; the politician of understanding doubts that any such laws exist, instead deploying investigation of existing conditions and prudential reasoning about possible future conditions.

Following this choice between ways of thinking about politics, a prudential political thinker next makes a decision about “a way of living,” what Aristotle calls the regime as a Bios ti. Given the limits of political life, a regime that will give scope to “a certain idea of man,” one who recognizes the limitations of human knowledge, will be his preference. True, “man has a history,” but it is “an unfinished history” and its end is unpredictable. “Existence is dialectical, that is dramatic, since it operates in an incoherent world, commits itself despite time, seeks a fugitive truth, without any assurance beyond a fragmentary science and formal reflection.” This suggests a preference for the regimes of liberty over the certitudes offered by ideologies Left and Right, ideologies that contended for worldwide dominance in the coming Second World War. In writing his book, “I was experiencing in advance the world war that my judges”—often “fanatics” whose sociodicies “divid[ed] the world into two opposed kingdoms”—did “not see coming.”

This principled factionalism prevented France from uniting to defend itself against the tyrannical regime now in Germany, forcibly and demagogically unified. To this principled factionalism, France soon added an economic division. The first few years of the Great Depression saw no mass unemployment in France, unlike in Great Britain, Germany, or the United States. But, in a display of “the absurdity of monetary patriotism,” French politicians refused to devalue the currency in response to currency deflation. This “condemned our economy to a prolonged case of lowering prices and to gradual weakening,” which “sharply affected the condition of the workers.” The crisis pushed them into opposition to the regime itself. But “how could we resist against Hitler’s threat if the government was supported by only half the nation?” French intellectuals were no help, both sets of ideologues rejecting preparation for war—that ‘What should the minister do?’ question. While the Catholic-Christian Right veered off into “the rhetoric of unreality,” the moderate Left invoked “international law,” while the less-than-moderate Left organized to fight in the Spanish Civil War. “I refused to join the committee of vigilance of antifascist intellectuals,” since “there was no fascist peril in France, in the sense given to the term because of the examples of Italy and Germany,” and because leftists themselves could not agree on whether the Soviets intended to prevent war or turn it against the republics of the West. They refused to think geopolitically, and therefore realistically. “It is easy to think about politics, but on one condition, recognition and submission to its rules.” At the same time, given France’s factionalism, they could not act realistically even if they had thought realistically: “Can the leader of a democratic government commit his country to an action that involves a risk of war and that half the country does not consider to be in the national interest?” 

And so, when Hitler invaded the Rhineland in March 1936, “the French government had to say yes or know, to act or to accept: all the rest was only words, words, words.” The words hid a refusal to take responsibility for the reality in front of Europe. Similarly, in the Spanish Civil War, “behind Franco could be seen Hitler and Mussolini; behind the Republicans, Stalin and his GPU, active behind the lines and already engaged in the task of the purge.” Germany’s seizure of the Rhineland “had radically changed the balance of forces in Europe,” preventing the French from helping “our allies east of the Reich.” To resist the Germans at that time would have put France at little risk, as Hitler wasn’t ready for a wider confrontation. But France did nothing, Hitler soon occupied the Sudetenland, and “after his peaceful triumph, Hitler informed the world of the magnitude of the booty.” At the time, “what struck all of us—appropriately—was the contrast between the paralysis of democratic regimes and the spectacular recovery of Hitler’s Germany, as well as the rates of growth published by the Soviet Union.” Parliamentary republicanism was failing. “At times I even thought, and perhaps said aloud, that if we need an authoritarian regime to save France, fine, let us accept it, while simultaneously detesting it.” Authoritarianism, perhaps yes; fascism, certainly no, nor communism. Although Kojève declared his ‘Stalinism,’ Malraux his commitment to the ‘one big Left’ of the Popular Front, Kojève “seemed to me in spite of everything a White Russian, a communist perhaps for world-historical reasons, but very distant from the Party,” whereas as Malraux “in no way attempted to put pressure on me and considered me, I suppose, destined by nature for moderate opinions.” It was left to de Gaulle to understand that French republicanism need not be parliamentary, indefensible against foreign enemies. The remainder of Aron’s life would be lived in the light of that insight and in the shadow cast by the eventual founder of the Fifth Republic. [2]

Notes

1. For a consideration of Maurras’s thought, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website under “Nations.”
2. See “Aron on de Gaulle: Wartime and Postwar” and “Aron on de Gaulle: The Fifth Republic,” on this website under “Nations.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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