Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    Why Have There Been No Military Coups in the United States?

    by

    Will Morrisey: “Why Have There Been No Military Coups in the United States?” Article published in Constituting America. May 2, 2022.

     

    Plutarch writes of the life of Gaius Marius, the noted Roman general who seized power in the Roman Republic early in the first century B.C. Marius was no patrician. He was born into the equestrian class— “smallholders,” as Plutarch describes them, a family living outside the great city. He rose to prominence on the strength of his own abilities and of his leading virtue, courage. As a young man, he had disdained the liberal arts education which had entered Rome from Greece. After all, were not Greeks now the slaves of Rome their education corruptive of the manliness that resists enslavement? A real man evidently needed no Aristotelian moderation, in Marius’ judgment: Plutarch cites Marius’ “harsh and bitter character,” his “inordinate love of power,” and “insatiable greed,” along with his inveterately superstitious mid, as markers of his rejection of everything urbane and civil. No gentleman he, and proud of it.

    A great military strategist and tactician, Marius began his rise to prominence by crushing the Teutones and Ambrones at today’s Aix-de-Provence in 102 B.C. Using paupers and slaves as his soldiers, he next defeated and captured the formidable African monarch, Jugurtha. When the Teutones and the Cimbri joined forces to invade Italy, moving towards Rome, the Romans elected Marius consul, empowering him to repel the enemy. In this war, he proved a superb manipulator of the souls of his men, taking them to battle with appeals to their fear, their courage, their shame, their honor—all, sometimes, in the same speech.

    “In a military context,” Plutarch writes, Marius’ “status and power were based on the fact that he was needed, but in political life his preeminence was curtailed, and he took refuge in the goodwill and favor of the masses”—not the patrician senators—and “abandoned any attempt to be the best man in Rome, so long as he could be the most powerful.” To do that, he needed to keep his soldiers satisfied and thereby to maintain his power base. This political necessity mirrored the character of his soul: “He was incapable of just quietly enjoying what he had.” Therefore, when he ran out of foreign wars, he could only turn to civil war. Forced into exile by his even more vicious rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, he regrouped his forces and came back, turning the city into a field of blood. What animates a military man, the love of victory, caused him to derange his country’s civil life.

    For centuries, Rome had been a proud republic, with elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy mixed in rough balance, the senate serving as the balance-wheel. Marius and Sulla overturned that regime temporarily, foreshadowing the end of the republican regime at the hands of Caesars, several decades later. Military overthrow of republics had occurred many times in Greece, as well, and modern history has seen such revolutions in England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), Iraq (Saddam Hussein), and many other countries. If there is any truth to the claim of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the absence of any such coup d’état in our own history undoubtedly ranks among the most striking examples of it. The dogs of war have barked no less frequently for American than at other nations, but the wolf of military takeover has remained silent. And this, despite the fact that we have seen some twelve U.S. generals elevated to the presidency, beginning with George Washington. Unlike Marius, our military men have been able to become first in peace after having been first in war, without bringing a general’s command-and-control temperament with them—at least, not beyond the White House staff. the framers of the Articles of Confederation and the ‘anti-federalist’ opponents of the proposed United States Constitution in the late 1780s had provided for no presidency at all, in large measure to avoid the possibility that an independent executive branch could be seized by a military man, using the equivalent of the Roman consulship as his vehicle.

    As students of the Roman regimes, the Framers of the Constitution recognized the need of energy in the executive as much as the Romans did. They also wanted to make their chief executive a defender of republican liberty, not its subverter. Politically ambitious military officers might channel their vigor and courage into peaceful civilian life, including high office, but no more than that. With this intention, the Framers designed the ruling institutions of the new republic in ways that have kept tyrannical souls like those of Marius and Sulla out of the presidency.

    Marius could not have risen to power in Rome except by exploiting Rome’s factionalism, the inveterate resentment of the many plebeians for the few patricians. In Federalist 10, Publius famously calls faction the characteristic vice of popular governments, as liberty is to faction what air is to fire. Factions typically center on what he calls the various and unequal distribution of property. The regulation of property has become “the principal task of modern legislation,” since “neither moral nor religious motives” adequately moderate factitious passions. As Rome itself had repeatedly proven, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” One way to control faction and thereby to prevent the tyranny that may arise to eradicate it is by designing the republic’s ruling offices not so much along the lines of a mixed regime, as in Rome, but in accordance with the principle of representation. The people will have a voice, but not directly—only through their elected delegates to the bicameral legislature and, much more indirectly, through the Electoral College to the presidency. The most democratic part of the government, the House of Representatives, will consist of persons who know their constituents but do not need simply to register their desires. Representative government enables officials to deliberate, to “refine and enlarge the public views.” The kind of appeal Marius made to the Romans would find itself quickly diluted among the Americans.

    If there is something resembling a ‘mixed-regime republican’ element in the United States government, it can be found in that bicameral legislature. Although, as a democratic republic, America doesn’t have a born-to-rule patrician class as in Rome (and indeed as in most European countries at the time of the Founding), there is no question that Senate members tend to be wealthier than members of the House. In the thirty-fourth Federalist, Publius examines how this kind of legislature will govern military expenditures. Such expenditures, he writes, cannot be limited constitutionally, as it’s impossible to estimate far in advance the cost of wars, “contingencies that must baffle all the efforts of political arithmetic.” As we are not “entirely out of [Europe’s] reach,” and would become less so as naval technology advances, “to model our political systems upon calculations of lasting tranquility would be to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.”

    Rome exemplified this dilemma, Publius observes. Its liberties “proved the final victim of her military triumphs.” As for modern Europe, its “liberties…as far as they have ever existed, have, with few exceptions, been the price of her military establishments” (Federalist 41). This being so, a standing army “is a dangerous, at the same time that it may be a necessary, provision.” Therefore, “a wise nation will combine all these considerations.”

    The federal union, however, “by itself, destroys every pretext for a military establishment which could be dangerous.” Although one or a few states might be easy prey to foreign invaders, “America united,” even without a standing army, “exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited.” “The moment of [the Union’s] dissolution will be the date of a new order of things.” In that event, “the face of American will be but a copy of that of the continent of Europe,” its liberty “crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes.” Worse still, a disunited America would see foreign powers playing divide and rule on this continent, even as they do in Europe. As I write these lines, this has been exactly the strategy followed by Russia in its several invasions of Ukraine, perhaps with more to come, beyond Ukraine.

    The fact that all spending bills must originate in the House—again, the most democratic branch of the democratic republic—will limit such spending nonetheless, as the people have won the battle against taxation without representation. At the same time, the more nearly patrician, or at least richer, Senators, with their longer terms in office, will moderate any impassioned rush into war. Congress as a whole can check and balance ambitious presidents, if only by exercising the power of the purse. Further, Congress must limit its funding, as “the Constitution ties down the legislature to two years as the longest admissible term” for military appropriations.

    The Framers built additional constraints into the office of the executive itself. Publius forthrightly remarks that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government”—a character the Articles of Confederation lacked. “A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” which is one way of having “a bad government.” This, he continues, is especially true in war, which is why the American president is commander in chief of the armed forces. In Federalist 70, Publius pays considerable attention to the executive offices of the Roman republic.

    The “ingredients” of executive energy are unity, duration in office, financial support, and competent power.” Safety in the executive depends upon a due dependence upon the people and due responsibility for one’s conduct in office. How did Rome measure up to these standards?

    In its frequent wars, Rome “was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of dictator, as well as against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasion of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.” The dictator had little or no dependence upon the patricians, let alone on the people as a whole. And he made sure that he could not be prosecuted for anything he did while dictator.

    When it did not suffer under dictatorship, however, Rome had not one but two co-equal executives, the consuls. That is, if something went wrong, each blamed the other. Responsibility was lacking. This executive dualism might well have led to even more rivalry than it did, except that the patricians were so frequently in conflict with the plebeians at the same time they faced foreign wars and invasions. This led the Romans to give one consul authority over foreign policy, the other over domestic policy, keeping the two men distracted from one another. “This expedient must no doubt have had great influence in preventing those collisions and rivalships which might otherwise have embroiled the peace of the republic.”

    In the American republic, by contrast, the executive enjoys the unity of a Roman dictatorship along with the powers of commander in chief, while at the same time being constrained by four-year terms in office and by dependency on Congress for financial support. Publius knows that an executive might be tempted to undertake a life of Marius. “Self-love” often causes “the great interests of society [to be] sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, to the obstinacy of individuals who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind.” Against this, the Framers designed a regime that frustrates such passions, while recognizing that they will never be extirpated so long as human beings are what they are.

    In addition to the institutional structures ordained in the Constitution, one must notice that the way of life in republican Rome differed from that of America. Rome had begun as a military monarchy, then became a military republic. Even in its founding legend, Romulus overpowered Remus and, as Roman historians from Livy to Tacitus testify, it fought its way through the centuries. Because it was so good at pursuing that way of life, its great generals became its principal heroes. More, as those men ranged farther afield in the republic’s extensive empire, their troops became more attached to their generals than to Rome and its republic. A military republic thus encourages not only habits of obedience to one commander but the geopolitical circumstances in which such a regime might easily threaten the civilian-ruled capital.

    America’s commercial republic is as extensive as many of the ancient empires, but the American way of life inclines us to think of territory less in terms of military rule than of free trade. From the start, Americans have understood their political union as a vast free-trade zone. Ambitious citizens most often devote their lives and energies to peaceful commercial competition, not military rivalry. The best accounts of the distinction between military and commercial republics remain Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline and his massive and authoritative The Spirit of the Laws—both works well known to the American Founders.

    Finally, the purpose of the American republic differs from that of Rome. The Declaration of Independence maintains that government should aim at securing the safety and happiness of the people. Romans most assuredly sought their own safety, but it wasn’t happiness so much as glory that its leading men prized. War did not only seek them out; they sought it. And so have many rulers and many peoples, before and since—America (mostly) excepted. Our presidents have sometimes conquered for territory—invoking our ‘Manifest Destiny’ to rule from sea to shining sea on this continent—but seldom for fame, which Alexander Hamilton called “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” Thanks to the Framers’ work, that ruling passion has stayed within the boundaries of reason, along with the men whose minds are ruled by it.

     

    The Roman Cato with the Soul of Washington

    by

    Joseph Addison: Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, eds. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.

     

    Legend has it that General George Washington had Addison’s Cato performed for his soldiers at Valley Forge. This should be true, whether it is or not. Addison’s portrayal of Cato depicts the soul of a great Stoic with all its austere nobility but also its limitations and the errors that follow from them. Cato’s gravest error is his suicide when his cause seems hopeless. By presenting the play to his men at the nadir of America’s hopes in the War for Independence, Washington was telling them, ‘I shall not desert you.’ And, by implication, ‘Do not desert me, or your country.’ The play’s epigraph, from Seneca’s On Divine Providence, suggests as much: “A brave man, standing erect amid the ruins of the res publica.” British troops under the command George III and his generals seemed likely to ruin the American republics, to bring the rebellious ‘Whigs’ to heel. Souls steeled for Stoic self-rule informed by a sense of divine providence, which seldom announces its moves in advance, can yet emerge victorious from trials of fire.

    Addison wrote the Cato in 1712, and it enjoyed immediate success on the London stage. In Britain’s North American colonies, it had been performed frequently since 1730s and it would remain popular for another generation after the Revolution. Addison was a Whig, a partisan of the Hanoverian succession seen in the person of Queen Anne and her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, whom the Whigs compared to Cato. The Tories, loyal to the Hanoverian line of English monarchs, regarded Marlborough as a usurping Julius Caesar. By asking the great Tory poet, Alexander Pope, to write the Prologue, Addison made an overture across the parties, asking both sides in Britain’s factitious politics to consider human greatness in a Christian light.

    Cato is Cato the Younger, grandson of the eminent Cato the Elder—both courageous opponents of tyranny and defenders of the Roman republic. The younger Cato had allied with Pompey against Julius Caesar. The republican forces lost the Battle of Pharsalus and fled to north Africa, where Pompey was assassinated. Cato now heads the Roman forces, along with the remnant of the Senate. Now exiled in Utica, he has formed an alliance with King Juba I of Numidia. Pope, too, admires Cato, finding in him a fit hero for the tragic stage, which from the first has been intended “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, / To raise the genius and to mend the heart, / To make mankind in conscious virtue bold, / Live oe’er each scene and be what they behold.” Not only in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans but “through every age,” even “tyrants no more their savage nature kept, / And foes to virtue wonder’d how they wept” at such dramas. Neither weak and pitying love nor “wild ambition” finds favor in the tragedies: “Here tears shall flow from a more gen’rous cause, / Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws,” as “ancient ardor” rises in modern, British hearts. “What Plato thought” “godlike Cato was,” namely “a brave man struggling in the storms of fate, / And greatly falling with a falling state!”  but finally honored more than triumphant Caesar. 

    Pope would never overlook the literary dimension of the struggle, concluding with an evocation not only of Cato the Younger but of his grandfather. “Britons, attend”: “With honest scorn the first fam’d Cato view’d / Rome learning arts from Greece, whom she subdu’ed; / Our scene precariously subsists too long / On French translation and Italian song.” Have we not defeated the French and their absolute monarch, Louis XIV? Instead, “Dare to have sense yourselves; assert the stage, / Be justly warm’d with your own native rage. / Such plays alone should please a British ear, / As Cato’s self had not disdain’d to hear.” Not Racine or Petrarch so much as Shakespeare and Marlowe. And surely Mr. Addison’s Roman Cato, seen through English eyes for English men.

    At the Governor’s Palace at Utica, Cato’s sons, Portius and Marcus, deplore Caesar’s military triumphs. “Ye Gods, what havoc does ambition make / Among your works!” Portius exclaims (I.11-12). Yet Marcus finds him too calm, too ‘Stoic’: “Thy steady temper, Portius, / Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar, / In the calm lights of mild philosophy,” but “I’m tortured” by the image of “Th’insulting tyrant prancing o’er the field” at Pharsalia, “his horse’s hoofs wet with patrician blood,” the blood of Roman senators hurled from their positions of rightful authority (I.12-19). To Marcus’ hope that Heaven will punish the insolent victor, Portius points instead to their father—a man “greatly unfortunate” but still fighting for “the cause / Of honor, virtue, liberty, and Rome” with a sword unstained with any but the blood of the guilty, of tyrannical usurpers (I.30-31). The thumotic brother relies on the gods; the philosophic brother relies on a man who embodies the best of Rome and of human nature understood as ethical and political nature.

    Marcus is having none of it. “What can Cato do / Against a world, a base, degenerate world / That courts the yoke and bows the neck to Caesar?” (I.i.36-38). Trapped at Utica, guarded by Numidians, his own army feeble and the Senate ruined, he presents “a poor epitome of Roman greatness”—so much so that my soul is distracted, tempted “to renounce his precepts” (I.i.40-45). Portius adjures him to “remember what our father oft has told us,” that “the ways of heav’n are dark and intricate” and “our understanding traces ’em in vain” (I.i.46-49). Marcus admits that more than their father’s circumstance torments him. He is in love with Lucia, the daughter of one of the exiled Roman senators, but his passion is “unpity’d” by her, his love “successless” (I.i.56). He does not know that Portius shares his passion for the girl but, knowing his temper, dares not reveal himself as a rival, contenting himself with advising his brother to “call up all thy father in thy soul: / to quell the tyrant love”—the soul’s equivalent to political injustice—and “guard thy heart / On this weak side, where most our nature fails” ((I.74-77). [1] Such Stoic self-rule is not for the impassioned soul of Marcus, who determines instead to throw himself into the quest for honor in war, “to rush on certain death” (I.i.81); “Love is not to be reason’d down, or lost / In high ambition and a thirst of greatness” (I.i.84). Not thought but action can redirect his thumoerotic nature from despair. 

    Prince Juba appears, and Portius reflects on “how much he forms himself to glory / And breaks the fierceness of his native temper / To copy my father’s bright example” (I.i.79-82). He too is an exile, his father having been killed by Caesar at the Battle of Thepsur. The prince, in contrast to the Roman usurper, exhibits a virtue that is Roman but not merely Roman, a virtue unconfined to any particular nation, the virtue of human nature itself. And he stands as an example for brother Marcus in another way: He loves Cato’s daughter, Marcia, but, “no sport of passions,” his “sense of honor and desire for fame” bridle his love for the sake of the nobler aim of political liberty (I.i.86). 

    Juba too has a rival in love, the Roman senator Sempronius, a traitor in their midst. Before Portius heads for the meeting of the Senate-in-exile, he promises to “animate the soldiers’ drooping courage, / With love of freedom and contempt of life,” telling Sempronius that although we cannot “command success,” “we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.” Sempronius fumes, “Curse on the stripling! how he apes his sire! / Ambitiously sententious!” (I.ii.40-47). Sempronius plans to betray Cato and seize his daughter after Caesar rewards him for handing Cato over.

    There is a traitor among the Numidians, too: Syphax, who is preparing a revolt among his people—who, he claims, “Complain aloud of Cato’s discipline” (I.iii.4). Sempronius wishes that he could turn Juba against Cato, as well, at which urging Syphax laments that the young man is “lost,” his thoughts “full of Cato’s virtues” (I.iii.22). “Of faith, of honor, and I know not what, / That have corrupted his Numidian temper, / And struck th’ infection into all his soul” (I.iii.25-27). Nonetheless, Syphax promises to make another attempt. As for Sempronius, he heads for the Senate as well, scheming to “conceal my thoughts in passion” by “bellow[ing] out for Rome and my country” even as he schemes to ruin the men he will address.

    True to his word, Syphax tries Juba again, appealing to his national pride, his Numidian patriotism, which might be turned to rebellion against Roman rule. Juba will have none of it. He esteems the “Roman soul,” which aims to civilize the world, “lay it under the restraint of laws,” and “make man mild and sociable to man” by means of “wisdom, discipline, and lib’ral arts” (I.iv.30-35). Only “virtues like these” will “make human nature shine, reform the soul, / And break our fierce barbarians into men” (I.iv.37-38). No, Juba, Syphax counters, “this Roman polish” only “render[s] man…tractable and time,” covering over natural passion, “set[ting] our looks at variance with our thoughts” and thereby “chang[ing] us into other creatures / Than the Gods design’d us” (I.iv.41-43, 46-47). Any Numidian better practices Cato’s “boasted virtues” (I.iv.62). Juba has his answer ready: the Numidian hunter’s virtues do not grow from choice, as Cato’s do, from “steadiness of mind,” not ignorance and necessity (I.iv.77). This is why Cato can endure suffering without resentment and even “thank the Gods that throw the weight upon him” (I.iv.80). The foundation of Roman civility is the rule of reason, innate to human beings as such, the right criterion for judging national customs and laws.

    Syphax insists that Cato’s “rank pride” and “haughtiness of soul” mesmerized Juba’s father, leading him to an inglorious death at the hands of a slave (I.iv.81-85). You should “abandon Cato” (I.iv.89). You don’t really esteem him at all, nor do you honor your father; you merely wish to marry his daughter. You are not man of honor, only a boy in love. Yes, I do love her, the young man admits, but for honorable reasons and indeed for her honorableness: “The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex” in her “inward greatness,” her “unaffected wisdom,” and her “sanctity of manners” (I.iv.150-151). That is, he loves her for her natural virtues, as these have been cultivated by her family and her country.

    We soon see Marcia and Lucia for ourselves. Of her two suitors, Lucia prefers Portius, the philosophic brother, to Marcus. As for Marcia, she of course prefers Juba to Semponius, but she remains very much Cato’s worthy daughter, telling her beloved Juba to go off to the war in support of her father and advising Lucia to wait until after the war to confer her love on Portius, lest she spread disarray in Cato’s household by openly favoring one brother over the other. “Let us not, Lucia, aggravate our sorrows, / But to the Gods permit th’ event of things,” as “the pure limpid stream, when foul with stains / Of rushing torrents and descending rains, / Works itself clear, and as it runs, refines” (I.vi.78-79, 82-84). 

    Act II begins with Cato before the Utican Senate, warning of Caesar’s advancing army. Sempronius makes his calculatedly fiery speech, only to have Cato reprove him. “Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal / Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason,” as “true fortitude is seen in great exploits, / That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides; / All else is tow’ring frenzy and distraction” (II.i.43-47). Lucius then makes a pacific speech, claiming that the gods oppose us, that Caesar is only their chosen scourge, than no more Roman blood should be shed. Cato positions himself as the virtuous mean between the extremes of Sempronius’ apparent “immodest valor” and Lucius’ “fear” (II.81-82). His moderation should not be mistaken for mediocrity, however. “A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty / Is worth a whole eternity in bondage” (II.i.100)—a judgment said to have inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” And in answer to a peace overture from Caesar himself, Cato replies to his ambassador, “My life is grafted on the fate of Rome”; if Caesar would save Cato, “bid him spare his country” (II.ii.8-9). As for himself, I “disdain a life” that “your dictator” “has pow’r to offer” me (II.ii.8-10). Asked what terms he will accept, Cato accordingly replies, “Bid him disband his legions, / Restore the commonwealth to liberty, / submit his actions to the public censure, / And stand the judgment of a Roman senate. Bid him do this, and Cato is his friend.” (II.ii.29-33). But for now, I am no friend of Caesar but “a friend to virtue”—the truly Roman characteristic that Romans share with human nature itself, bringing their civilizing empire of liberty to those they conquer (II.ii.41). Caesar’s conquests have only “made Rome’s senate little”—the Senate, lynchpin and moderating balance wheel of the republic (II.ii.47). “By the Gods I swear, millions of worlds / Should never buy me to be like that Caesar” (II.ii.57).

    To Juba, Cato confides his understanding of divine providence. The “misfortune and affliction” the gods impose “are not ills; else would they never fall / On heav’n’s first fav’rites, and the best of men” II.iv.51-53). No, “The Gods, in bounty, work up storms about us, / That give mankind occasion to exert / Their hidden strength, and throw out into practice / Virtues that shun the day, and lie conceal’d / In the smooth seasons and the calms of life” (II.iv.54-58). He disappoints his young ally by refusing his daughter’s hand in marriage; Roman, all-too-Roman, he does not think a Numidian a worthy suitor, despite Juba’s evident ‘Romanness,’ which is really humanitas. Syphax swoops in, attempting once again to turn the prince against Cato, urging him to eschew honor as a “fine imaginary notion” and to kidnap the girl, even as the early Romans seized the Sabine women (II.v. 89). But Juba calls him “a false old traitor,” intending to redeem the Carthaginians’ reputation for faithlessness and to vindicate his honor in the eyes of Cato (II.v.61). Furious at the insult, perhaps because it is true, Syphax returns to Sempronius, who assures his that factious Roman troops “will bear no more / This medley of philosophy and war,” Stoicism and Achilles, from Cato. Syphax vows to rally his Numidian troops to aid the revolt.

    The third Act begins where the play began, with the sons of Cato in dialogue. Portius knows that Marcus loves his beloved, Lucia, but Marcus does not know of Portius’ love for her. He asks Portius to plead his cause to her, “With all the strength and heats of eloquence / Fraternal love and friendship can inspire” (III.i.34-35). When he leaves and Lucia arrives, he does just that (“Oh, Lucia, language is to faint to show / His rage of love; it preys upon his life; / He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies,” his “noble soul” ravaged (III.ii.3-5, 10). Kind Lucia, who knows of Portius’ love for her, and who requites it, worries that if Marcus knew of their love it “might perhaps destroy” him (III.29). For his part, Portius counsels her not to reject Marcus’ suit outright but “hold him up in life, and cheer his soul / With the faint glimm’ring of a doubtful hope” (III.ii.24-25). Lucia refuses. She vows to the gods to refuse them both, denying her own love to prevent “thy sister’s tears, / Thy father’s anguish, and thy brother’s death” (III.ii.28-29). She offers him the faint glimmering of a doubtful hope, saying that she will hold fast in her decision “while such a cloud of mischiefs hangs about us” (III.ii.34). Understandably “thunderstruck” at first, philosophic Portius then sees her virtue, her prudential foresight of the evils his suit would have incurred, had it succeeded (III.ii.37). That does little to console him, but Lucia holds firm in her vow. When she leaves and Marcus returns, Portius tells him that she “compassionates your pains, and pities you”—no comfort to the passionate brother, who regrets what a “fool that I was to choose so cold a friend / To urge my cause!” (III.iii.13-17). 

    The noise of Sempronius’ mutiny interrupt them. He has decided to carry Marcia off and join Caesar, frustrated at the continued loyalty of Juba and his Numidians—Romans in the core of their nature, after all. But Cato overawes the Roman rebels, shaming them, reminding them of his virtue, and telling to go join Caesar, if that is what they desire. [2] Ever-perfidious Sempronius recommends the death penalty for the rebels, which Cato, changing his mind, mistakenly agrees to inflict, never suspecting his colleague’s treachery. Sempronius immediately has them executed, irate at their uselessness to his scheme. He continues to desire Sempronius, and when Syphax cannot understand how he could “turn a woman’s slave” (III.vii. 11), he assures her that he only intends to kidnap and rape her (“bend her stubborn virtue to my passion”), then “cast her off” (III.vii.15-16). This reassures his henchman: “Well said! that’s spoken like thyself, Sempronius.” (III.vii.17). Syphax recommends that he dress himself as Juba to get past the Numidians who guard her. In his own way, Sempronius emulates the gods—specifically, Pluto, who seized Proserpine and carried “to hell’s tremendous gloom the affrighted maid, / There grimly smiled, pleas’d with the beauteous prize, / Nor envy’d Jove his sunshine and his skies” (III.vii.31-34).

    Not suspecting this vile scheme, Marcia fears rather that her father will give her in marriage to Sempronius. She too is a Stoic, however: “While Cato lives, his daughter has no right / To love or hate, but as his choice directs” (IV.i.20-21). She refuses to trust her passions, telling Lucia, “When love once pleads admission to our hearts, / (In spite of all the virtue we can boast) / The woman who deliberates is lost” (IV.i.29-31). Her own reason will not suffice in that circumstance, so her father’s reason ought to prevail. When Sempronius arrives, deceiving the guards, and prepares to play out his sinister version of the rape of the Sabine women, a deus ex machina in the person of Juba discovers him and kills the “proud, barbarous man” (IV.ii.19), who dies in fury “by a boy’s hand,” attired in “a vile / Numidian dress, and for a worthless woman,” one he desired chiefly to spite Cato and Juba (IV.ii.21-22). He is the real barbarian, the false Roman, Juba the true one. 

    Marcia remains steadfast in her civic Stoicism. When she and Juba discover their love for one another, she nonetheless continues to insist that Juba “prosper in the paths of honor” (IViii.88)—go off to fight Caesar at her father’s side. But Cato himself has begun to despair, telling Lucius, “The torrent bears too hard upon me: / Justice gives way to force: the conquer’d world / Is Caesar’s: Cato has no business in it.” (IV.iv.22-24). On the contrary, his friend insists, “While pride, oppression, and injustice reign, / The world will still demand her Cato’s presence” (IV.25-26). To Cato’s objection, that he will never submit to be ruled by a tyrant, however, Lucius can only respond that Caesar will not impose “ungen’rous terms” upon the defeated rival, as “the virtues of humanity are Caesar’s” (IV.33-34). This earns him the riposte, “Such popular humanity is treason” (IV.iv.33-36). Cato’s Stoic willingness to suffer draws the line at submission to tyranny. That is, the clementia of Caesar, whether sincere or feigned, bespeaks the superiority of a man who acts like a god toward a fellow man and citizen. Cato is, finally, a citizen-Stoic, not a philosopher-Stoic. The problem will turn out to be not so much Cato’s morality but his misunderstanding of providence. He expects defeat because precisely because he does not foresee the providential plan. He does not foresee the providential plan because it is given to no one to see that.

    Juba arrives, confessing his shame at being a Numidian—that is, a prince of a nation whose soldiers were ready to desert their ally. No matter, Cato assures him: “Thou hast a Roman soul” (IV.iv.43). What is more, “Falsehood and fraud shoot up in every soil, / The produce of all climes–Rome has its Caesars” (IV.iv.45-46). Juba “has stood the test of fortune” (IV.iv.49).

    Learning next that his son Marcus has died in battle, though not before killing Syphax, Cato pronounces himself “satisfied,” as “my boy has done his duty” (IV.iv.70). Upon seeing the corpse, he simply remarks, “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue” and “what pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!” (IV.iv.80-83). The first aphorism is Stoic, the second Roman. He turns to his surviving son, the philosophic one, telling him to remember that “thy life is not thy own, when Rome demands it” (IV.iv.87). It is Rome, “not a private loss,” that “requires our tears” (IV.iv.89-90). Rome had subdued the world thanks to her virtue, but with her virtue gone, having submitted tamely to its rapist, Caesar—who has reversed one of the original founding acts of Rome, the so-called rape which in fact brought wives to young Roman men—the Empire has fallen, “fall’n into Caesar’s hands” (IV.iv.105). He calmly grants Lucius the right to sue for peace from ‘humane’ Julius and advises his son to retire to “thy paternal seat, the Sabine field,” where he may live virtuously in a private life, which is “the post of honor” under a tyrannical regime (IV.iv.135, 142). If the kidnapping of the Sabine women enabled the earliest Romans to sustain themselves as a civil society, perhaps a retreat to the family, a retreat to the Sabine field, will form the foundation of a new Rome, if such can be restored after the barbarous tyrant, the criminal rapist, has had his day.

    But Cato has a different plan for himself. Having satisfied himself that he foresees the intention of Providence, he reads the Phaedo, what Addison in his stage direction calls “Plato’s book on the immortality of the soul”; “Plato,” Cato says, “thou reason’st well!” (V.i.1). Plato’s Socrates had reasoned that the prospect of the soul’s immortal life on the Isles of the Blessed removes the sting of death. Given what he takes to be the equally certain prospect of Caesar’s tyranny in this world, a “world made for Caesar,” Cato pronounces himself “weary of conjecture,” weary of philosophizing, ready to the action of suicide, which will end conjecture (V.i.19-20). “Let guilt or fear / Disturb man’s rest. Cato knows neither of ’em, / Indifferent in his choice to sleep or die,” given Plato’s proof that we awaken from death as surely as we awaken from sleep (V.i.38-40). Addison’s Christian audience might well think the same thing, under similar circumstances. If God’s Providence ordains life in Paradise after death, why prolong life in this world, known to be a vail of tears? This would become Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity, that it loves an imagined life and therefore real death more than real life. By Addison’s time, Machiavelli had already anticipated that thought.

    Portius joins his father, who assures him that all is well, as “I’m master of myself,” never to be mastered by Caesar (V.ii.13). Having convinced his son that he won’t commit suicide, having allowed Portius, Lucia, and Lucius that he retires to sleep—what he must regard as an instance of the noble lie—Cato prepares to execute himself, even as Lucius assures the women, “While Cato lives—his presence will protect us” (V.iv.38). His presence is needed, as Juba brings news of an impending battle with Caesar’s forces. Portius joins them with the news that Pompey’s son has unexpectedly brought reinforcements from Spain. “Call[ing] out for vengeance on his father’s death”—the very filial piety that Cato understands to be the foundation of Roman civil order—he “rouses the whole nation up to arms” (V.iv.55-57). “Were Cato at their head, once more might Rome / Assert her rights and claim her liberty” (V.iv.58-59). 

    There will be no human version of a deus ex machina, this time. They hear the death-cry of Cato in the next room. Mortally wounded, he blesses his friend, Lucius, his son and his son’s future wife, Marcus and Lucia, and his daughter and her future husband, Marcia and Juba. Of Juba, he says, “A senator of Rome, while Rome surviv’d, / Would not have match’d his daughter with a king,” were the king a foreigner, “but Caesar’s arms have thrown down all distinction,” all conventional distinction: “Whoe’er is brave and virtuous, is a Roman.” (V.iv.88-91). In his civic despair, he has made two philosophic discoveries, the first a distinction, the distinction between convention and nature, the second the uncovering of a just filial and political order in light of a criterion set by nature, the criterion of virtue, of human nature undisfigured by passion. “Methinks a beam of light breaks in / On my departing soul” (V.iv.94-95). Dying, what he cannot do is to act in accordance with that beam of light. His ascent from the cave of convention isn’t comic, as it is in Plato’s Republic, but tragic. “Alas, I fear / I’ve been too hasty” (V.iv.95-96), he admits, with Stoic understatement. He can only ask forgiveness. Forgiveness, above all, for his failure to do what he wanted most to do, to save Rome from a regime of tyranny. Forgiveness also, perhaps, for his failure to heed his own advice to his sons, which Portius had remarked in the play’s first scene: We do not know what heaven has traced out for us; the ways of heaven are dark and intricate.

    It is left to the ranking surviving Roman in his camp, his friend Lucius, to set the new policy. With Cato, they might have won. Without him, no one believes they can. 

    “Let us bear this awful corpse to Caesar,

    And lay it in his sight, that it may stand

    A fence betwixt us and the victor’s wrath; 

    Cato, though dead, shall still protect his friends.” (V.iv.103-106).

    And Lucius adds a properly Stoic, sententious final thought, saying that these events show the malign effects of “civil discord” not only to Romans but “to all nations,” namely, “fraud, and cruelty, and strife,” along with what is not the least evil, “rob[bing] the guilty world of Cato’s life,” the life of one of the best in the world, one of the best examples of human nature his countrymen had ever seen (V.iv.108, 111-112). 

     

    Notes

    1. George Washington will counsel his niece in exactly the same way. See his letter to letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 1, 1795.
    2. In facing down the rebellious officers at Newburgh, New York, Washington was enacting a similar scene in real life, supremely imitating Addison’s art in his life. See his Speech to the Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783.

     

    Grand Strategy for the Philippines

    by

    Chester B. Cabalza, Joshua Bernard B. Espeña and Don McLain Gill: The Rise of Philippinedization: Philippinedization Is Not Finlandization. Manila: International Development Security Cooporation, 2021.

     

    The authors [1] define “Philippinedization” as “the process whereby a weaker state” (in this case, the Philippines), “backed by a powerful country” (the United States), “goes to great lengths in temporarily refraining from opposing a neighboring great power” (China) “by resorting to economic and diplomatic rapprochements at the strategic level but strengthening its national security infrastructure on the operational level with an eye for potential conflict in the foreseeable future” (such as attempts by China to dominate the seas of Southeast Asia). This can be accomplished, if the weaker state strengthens and diversifies both its domestic economic and military capacity and its international alliances, especially with other states in the region which are also threatened by China. This resembles but is not identical to ‘Finlandization,’ a policy whereby a weaker state retains self-government, its own regime, while agreeing not to oppose a stronger, neighboring state’s foreign policy. The senior co-author conceived of the idea of Philippinedization while visiting Finland in 2019, having become impressed by Finland’s “success story” in resisting Russian expansion while recognizing that the term ‘Finlandization” bears a pejorative connotation among the Western republics. As the book’s cautionary subtitle announces, he and his co-authors do not intend either the connotation or the substance of Finlandization to take hold in the Philippines.

    As an archipelago (hence the Philippines) separated from China by more than a thousand nautical miles of ocean, with a commercial republican regime near strategic chokepoints within that ocean, the country will always find itself in contention with stronger Asian powers—China today, Japan yesterday. Its relations with China have become especially vexed in this generation. Geography dictates that the Philippines, if it is to maintain its territorial integrity and political sovereignty, must protect itself with naval and air forces. 

    This it did. After U.S. military forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines from Japan in World War II, the two countries signed a Military Bases Agreement, which established a major American naval base at Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base in Luzon Province. These bases put teeth into the Mutual Defense Treaty signed by the two countries in 1951. For many years, the local strongman, Ferdinand Marcos, maintained a strong alliance with the United States. So long as Communist China remained largely self-isolated, preoccupied by Mao Zedong’s genocidal machinations and then by post-Maoist economic development, these arrangements sufficed to defend the Philippines against any encroachments from the naval forces of the Soviet Union. Marcos felt sufficiently confident to normalize bilateral relations with the Chinese regime in 1975, as the United States had done in the waning years of the Nixon Administration.

    With the end of the Marcos regime, the 1987 Constitution stipulated that the Philippines would “pursue an independent foreign policy”; with the end of the Cold War a few years later, the United States became amenable to lessening its military presence in the country. This arrangement might have worked well over time, had China not begun to loom larger. As long as Communist China had remained preoccupied with domestic roils (Mao’s genocidal policies of the 1950s and 1960s) and toils (the post-Mao efforts at economic development), neither the Philippines nor the United States had any cause for alarm. At the end of the Cold War, the United States closed Clark Air Base and reduced its military presence in the Philippines generally, at the behest of the Philippine Senate. China wasn’t slow to react, however. As early as 1992, China passed its Law on Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone and enforcing it by occupying the Mischief Reef in 1995. The Philippines responded quickly, moving to modernize its “neglected navy and air force.” It also negotiated a new Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States in 1998. This failed to deter Chinese advances, as the ruling Communist Party announced the Nine-Dash line in 2009. With this, China effectively claimed sovereignty over approximately ninety percent of the South China Sea in an area encompassing the Paracel Islands in the northwest, the Spratly Islands in the southwest, and a few miles off the west coast of the Philippines in the east. (Indeed, some of what China calls the South China Sea the Philippines calls the West Philippine Sea.) “China cleverly seeks anti-access / area denial through the grey zone where Beijing operates between the war an peace spectrum, enabling China to achieve its objectives without resorting to a regional strategic war with the US and regional states. This endeavor would make it difficult and costly for the US and its allies to deploy their militaries” in the South China Sea.

    Under the Benigno Aquino administration, the Philippines answered these claims by publishing a new national security policy, a strategy intended to back up its intention to defend its coastline against Chinese claims, keeping it free for its maritime commerce and fishing interests, as well as maintaining its territorial integrity. “Convinced” that “China has relentless ambitions to revise the status quo regional order,” the Philippines “used every available option to stand up” to China’s “heavy-handed behavior.” Meanwhile, although U.S. President Barack Obama announced a foreign-policy ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2011, China went ahead and took de facto control over the Scarborough Shoal. President Aquino called upon what the authors (perhaps with some irony) call “the international community” to resist such “Chinese assertiveness,” comparing the seizure to Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938. He was gravely disappointed by the Obama Administration’s declaration of neutrality in that conflict. However, he did win a major juridical victory in 2016, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that China’s maritime claims were illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This provided small comfort, however, as the Chinese regime simply declared the ruling “null and void,” continuing its policy of constructing artificial islands for its military operations in the South China Sea, a policy it had begun in 2013. 

    The election of Roderigo Duterte to the presidency brought a new strategy into play. Distrusting American reliability, Duterte imagined that “befriending Beijing and not rocking the boat would save Manila from the hegemonic rivalry of the two superpowers in the region and protect some features in the West Philippine Sea.” He downplayed the Court’s ruling and moved to strengthen bilateral ties with China, hoping to begin a joint exploration in the Sea’s seabed and to attract Chinese investments in Philippine infrastructure—a “defeatist” stance “that is tantamount to complete surrender of Manila’s claims” to its territorial waters, as recognized internationally. He understood this policy as a concession to geopolitical reality. As is so often the case, Chinese action hasn’t matched Chinese verbiage and, as anyone who takes a look knows, when the Chinese Communist Party actually does get around to ‘investing’ in a foreign country, it bakes political infiltration and self-interest into the cake. 

    Accordingly, the authors propose a new strategy. They base it on a comprehensive view, combining considerations of “the geopolitical setting of the nation-state,” its military and political history, current military technologies and, above all, its regime: the rulers, ruling institutions, way of life, and its purposes. China fields an increasingly powerful array of naval, ground, and air forces, aiming at control of “the busiest sea lanes of communications in the South China Sea.” It also deploys “finesse wolf diplomacy” (as Mr. Cabalza well phrases it) along with economic influence. That is, like the Germans and the Russians before them, modern Chinese rulers have read their Clausewitz. Given President Duterte’s previous overtures, the Chinese were surprised in Spring 2021 when he revived military relations with the United States. This makes the authors’ proposals timely. 

    To defend itself against China, the Philippines needs more than a strengthened alliance with America, however. It needs additional allies, some beyond the borders of the South China Sea, the “Asia-Pacific” region. Philippine strategists should think rather of the “Indo-Pacific,” considering an alliance (most notably) with India itself. And given “the interdependence of sea power and land power,” “the emerging strategic architecture in the Indo-Pacific cannot ignore the developments on the Asian landmass.” Chinese rulers assume “that promoting the Indo-Pacific region will serve as a platform used to contain its rise.” They are not wrong. Given the unbenevolent intentions of China’s regime, that is exactly what such republics as Taiwan, Japan, India, Australia, and the Philippines need to do.

    Four factors affect the Philippines’ strategic posture in the Indo-Pacific. First, the strategic partnership with the United States will continue, regardless of what President Duterte may say in his speeches. Reality is reality. Second, some sort of economic relations with China, a huge market, should be undertaken, if cautiously and without high expectation that the Chinese will necessarily follow through on their contractual commitments. Third, China’s expansive claims regarding the South China Sea should be resisted, as China “continues to maintain artificial islands in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone,” as determined by the 2019 Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. Finally, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) cannot be relied on to back the Philippines, given China’s economic influence over so many of its member states.

    How can the Philippines strengthen these somewhat weak reeds? The authors suggest that the solution may be found in geography. Their country is “a natural gateway to the East Asian economies,” located at “the crossroads of eastern and western businesses.” “Maintaining robust relations with Manila is thereby crucial for major states that seek to maximize their economic gains.” Further, the same goes for military operations, as “the strategic location of the Philippines serves as a tipping point in the great power rivalry between the US and China.” The Philippines “can play a critical role in forwarding US strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific vis-à-vis China,” especially in view of American “economic and military decline,” which has forced it to rely more on such allied states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India in the region. 

    Given the fact of China’s rise, simultaneous with American decline, the Philippines will need to balance the two powers more skillfully than Duterte has done. Fortunately, Filipino military and media elites have criticized Duterte’s tilt toward China. Indeed, military officers consider it their duty under the Constitution to “secure the state’s sovereign rights” against hostile foreign forces. Given the recent election of Ferdinand Marcos’s son to the presidency, these groups may stand ready to implement a tougher policy in conjunction with the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, all governed by commercial-republican regimes, as is the Philippines. Although this is true, the authors do not want such an alliance to go so far as to “upset the balance between Manila and Beijing.” They prefer bilateral relations with those countries, whereby Filipino statesmen could determine the mixture of economic, military, and diplomatic ties with each, severally. For example, “forging closer cooperation with Japan and India can serve as a formidable middle ground between balancing China and not risking any backlash or pressure on its behalf, since the multidimensional Indo-Japanese partnership is a significantly softer and more indirect version of a confrontational and exclusive China-containment strategy between the US and its traditional allies.” That is, if the Philippines established the same ‘hard’ military relationship with Japan and India that it has had with the United States, China might indeed complain of ‘encirclement.’ By calibrating its relations with those countries (which in any event are not militarily impressive powers) toward primarily economic and diplomatic actions, the Philippines might walk a safer path. And also a more lucrative one, as Japan and India might serve to enhance the Philippines’ other links in the region, particularly in light of the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, a venture intended to serve “as an inclusive counterweight to the notorious Belt and Road Initiative” undertaken by China. The presidents of Japan and India have both pointed to the regime similarities between their two countries as the political basis for this project; China may call itself the “People’s Republic” of China, but it isn’t a republic and the Chinese people don’t rule it. [2]

    The challenge posed by the Chinese regime remains formidable, and it will intensify in the decades to come. The People’s Liberation Army (as it is called) is on the path for a thorough modernization by 2035. It’s estimated that “by 2049, the PLA together with the People’s Armed Police, coast Guard, and Maritime Militia [will] become a ‘world class’ armed force,” giving China the capacity “to compete with the US military in a future scenario.” This will mean a ‘blue water’ navy—one capable of projecting power on the high seas, as the British imperial navy once did and as the United States now does—along with the ability to seize Taiwan, the one remaining Chinese republic and therefore an enemy of the Communist regime in Beijing. Finally, as noted, the Chinese intend to control the South China Sea, as they have been visibly moving to do since the mid-1990s. China’s grand strategy is “to reassert China’s international status in the principle of tianxia or ‘everything under the heavens'”—surely a grand thing, if not necessarily a good one.

    Will the average Filipina consent to the authors’ proposed counter-strategy? Possibly so. President Duterte thought he had worked out some 24 billion U.S dollars’ worth of deals with Beijing. “Only a trickle of those deals has been seen to take shape on the ground.” Before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Manila, opinion polls showed that more than half of Filipinos regarded China as “a good ally,” but that has changed since a Chinese tourist brought the virus to their country in February 2020. This, along with environmental damage caused by Chinese activities in fishing grounds worked by Filipinos, “certainly has helped galvanize tough anti-Chinese sentiments among Filipinos.” Another source of legitimate vexation is the proliferation of Chinese-controlled offshore gambling operations (gambling is illegal on mainland China); the foreign workers engage in criminal and espionage activities—a “Trojan horse” or more accurately a Chinese dragon in the Philippines. As in the United States, Beijing has also set up a number of its “Confucius Institutes” on university campuses in the Philippines. These too serve as cells of espionage and of influence throughout the country. “To be sure, Beijing intends to fill the vacuum that America” left during the COVID crisis. 

    In light of all this, the Philippines faces the imperative of strengthening its own military defenses. Military cooperation with the United States remains “important,” but “there are concerns about whether [America’s] commitments are hollow because of the geographical constraints and the capacity to rapidly deploy the needed number of forces” during a crisis. Although 80% of Filipinos view the U.S. favorably, especially since America was the main supplier of COVID vaccines in the past two years, President Trump’s neo-isolationism and President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan quite understandably make them nervous. “The Philippines must continue to prioritize its own capacity building in order to lessen its dependence on the alliance,” undertaking a vigorous campaign to arm its sailors and soldiers in order “to achieve a respectable territorial defense strategy to save the archipelagic nation’s undefended features in the west Philippine Sea and maritime domains from the Philippine Rise to the Sulu Sea.” The Philippines has already put in place the Philippine Air Force Flight Plan 2028, which aims at establishing air bases at key geographic points in the country. None of these tasks will be easy. “The Philippine [military] capability notably lacks air capability, sea and air transport, and command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.” The authors cite as a precedent South Korea’s successful military buildup after the Nixon Administration reduce U.S. troop presence in that country in the 1970s. This has “inspired the Philippines to come up with the same plan of self-reliance.”

    Thanks to the United States, “an unprecedented era of wealth and peace has been created by free and open access to the world’s oceans. Unfortunately, the system is now in danger. The US Maritime Strategy targets the two major threats to maintain[ing] global peace and prosperity: China and Russia.” The US “needs to be aggressive to compete with China,” which is “rapidly expanding militarily and poised to alter the global order.” It can no longer “be assumed that the US has control of the unrestricted access operations [in] the world’s oceans during times of conflict” requires. For this reason, the Philippines should foster a “long-term vision and nationalistic mindset in developing its [own] self-reliant navy,” a force indispensable “for an archipelagic country.” Accordingly, the Philippines should diversify its arms suppliers, purchasing high-tech equipment from India and France as well as the U.S. This will require “massive investments.” They will be worth it. ASEAN has diplomatic utility but “the international system is anarchic,” with “no global government to protect weaker states from the more powerful ones.” Member states have different regimes and different interests as a consequence, including different policies regarding China. No solid unity is likely. “Self-help” is “the name of the game.” 

    The authors foresee three likely scenarios in world politics during the decades to come. There might be a “dichotomy of power and influence between the US. and its allies and China, where other states will have to pick a side.” There might also be a world in which China and Russia collaborate to dominate the Eurasian land mass (including Africa)—what Halford Mackinder called the World Island—with the United States isolated or ‘contained’ within the Americas, and eventually within North America. Or the United States might ally with Russia and Europe in opposition to China. Whichever scenario prevails, “the Philippines can be taken to account as a rising middle power if given the right direction for statecraft.” The Philippines must strengthen its military without abandoning its republican regime; this will give needed heft to its regional diplomatic efforts in countering the Chinese threat. For this to happen, weapons purchases from foreign countries, however friendly those countries may be, cannot serve as a long-term substitute for a domestic defense industry. In the meantime, junior and mid-level officers of the Philippines’ military “should become familiar with the strategic value of the alliance with the US.” Finally, the Philippines must also enhance its strategic intelligence operations “to provide real-time and effective information on adversaries.” Too many of China’s hostile activities of recent decades to Filipino officials by surprise. That needs to stop.

    Mssrs. Cabalza, Espeña, and Gill have provided a valuable, realistic analysis of the strategic circumstances faced by the Philippines today. It must be said that their book would have benefited from better editing, especially with a view toward organization (there is considerable repetition) and English grammar. If they continue their collaboration in subsequent books, as I hope they do, they should avail themselves of one of the many expatriates now living in the Philippines for whom English is the native language. Their insights are too important to be obscured by their prose. 

    The people of the Philippines emerged from Spanish and American colonial rule, then from Japanese occupation, and finally from an overbearing domestic regime as a proud and independent people who have earned the respect of all those acquainted with them. They continue to struggle with infrastructure development, political factions, and with yet another imperialist presence avid to control their strategic location in the South Pacific. With prudent strategic thinkers to advise them, they may yet prevail in their intention to govern themselves.

     

    Note

    1. Chester B. Cabalza is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Philippines, Diliman Campus; he also teaches at the National Defense College of the Philippines. Joshua Bernard B. Espeña is a defense analyst at the Office of Strategic Studies and Strategy Management for the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Don McLain Gills is Resident Fellow at International Development and Security Cooperation in Manila and Director for South and Southeast Studies at the Philippine-Middle East Studies Association (PMESA) in Quezon City.
    2. Regarding India, a cautionary note: While it can surely maintain a strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean, it is perennially constrained from substantial further power projection by the presence of Pakistan on its western border. It is unlikely to be capable of very substantial naval assistance to any South China Sea country.