Booklist | The Essence of War – The Chronicle of Higher Education

If you would study peace, it makes sense to start with war.  And if you would study the conflict among nations, you must look at Clausewitz.

Alarmed by war, Clausewitz made two fundamental contributions to its study. First, he insisted on the importance of thinking over doctrine; and second, he believed that such thinking could be taught.

The great military theorist–author of the oft-cited book, On War, recognized that conflict was an essential part of statecraft and inexorably linked to the rise and fall of civilziations.

Clausewitz valued history, taught and wrote about it as something vital for making sense of the world, but never thought history was enough. To study war the Clausewitz way, a warrior must go to war. But I would like to believe that On War makes casualties no longer necessary. What is painfully learned in battle might instead be learned from Clausewitz.

via The Essence of War: Clausewitz as Educator – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Booklist | Why We Cooperate – The MIT Press

This new book looks at the biology and psychology of human cooperation–an important concept premise for multilateralism:

Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she’s likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to.

As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.

via Why We Cooperate – The MIT Press.

Tea Time at BYU | More On Af-Pak, Development, and the Education of Girls

In honor of the Book of the Semester/Forum lecture today by Greg Mortenson, a critical review of his–and two other books–addressing Afghanistan.  (This topic won’t go away until we can figure this critical region out, I promise.)  What are your thoughts on Mortensen beyond the inspiring (which he is), idealistic (something we do need more of), and humble (a rare thing in authors/scholars/public figures)?  Even if you didn’t hear the lecture, what is the takeaway from such a messenger?

But the strongest part of his book is its account of how his single-minded pursuit of his plan to build a school inspired a wide and unlikely cast of characters to join him in his ventures. Among these, for example, are the tribal elders who befriended him, a taxi driver who became his guardian angel, and the Wazirs from Waziristan who kidnapped him while they were high on hashish. At one point, Mortenson was called before Pakistan’s Shia clerics, who had been deliberating about whether his school-building work could be permitted under Islamic law:

The drawback of Mortenson’s story, as told by Relin, is that it says little about the wider background of world events. While Jones’s book goes on at too great a length about regional history, Three Cups of Tea does too little. The tumultuous political climate in which Mortenson found himself is rarely explained sufficiently, and when events are described, there are numerous mistakes in names and dates, as, for example, in the account of the Afghan factions fighting the civil war in the 1990s. Too much is said about Mortenson’s attempts to raise money and too little about the far more interesting period following September 11, when Mortenson took on the task of helping Afghans build schools. Inevitably, Mortenson’s book has much to say about the American failures in Afghanistan. “Everywhere we went, we saw US planes and helicopters,” says Julia Bergman, one of Mortenson’s supporters who visits Afghanistan with him after September 11. “And I can only imagine the money we were spending on our military. But where was the aid? I’d heard so much about what America promised Afghanistan’s people—how rebuilding the country was one of our top priorities….”

Both Mortenson and Jones make a plea for Americans to learn from history, something the Bush administration has consistently refused to do. Bush visited Kabul for the first time on March 1, 2006, for a few hours, where he remarked on how brilliantly everything was going. In his more lucid moments, Zahir Shah, the former king of Afghanistan, now ninety-two years old, recalls the first US president to visit Kabul. That was President Dwight Eisenhower, who also came for a one-day visit, on December 9, 1959, when, at forty-five, the King ruled the country and was considered young. Shah remembers that he asked Eisenhower for more economic aid for his impoverished country, as well as diplomatic help to improve Afghanistan’s deteriorating relationship with Pakistan, and a sustained US presence to protect the country. The help he received was meager and ineptly supplied. Some things never change.

via Afghanistan: On the Brink – The New York Review of Books.

Booklist | Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. – By Anthony Grafton – Slate Magazine

The Greeks were essential to Nietzsche.

Courage in the face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality–consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has  himself under control–consequently he retains control over things.  Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1)

A new book by the Yale modern historian Donald Kagan offers a new interpretation of the essential IR text and the author who forms the starting point in the field for political realism:

What lesson or lessons did Thucydides hope to teach? And did his desire to draw lessons conflict with his professed belief that historians should tell the truth? Over the centuries, scholarship has grown like kudzu over the text. Older generations collated Thucydides’ work with other sources and debated the order in which parts of it were composed or revised. More recently, scholars have updated an approach put forward by F.M. Cornford in 1907. They have taken the existing text as a coherent whole and used literary techniques to analyze it. From this standpoint, it looks as if when Thucydides composed the Melian dialogue, he modeled history partly on tragedy. Did he mean this distinctive episode as a comment on the war as a whole? …

Kagan emphasizes, and shows sympathy for, Thucydides’ claim that his book would offer indispensable guidance for those engaged in future wars, for centuries to come. But he argues that we should not trust Thucydides too far—not, in fact, very far at all—when it comes to understanding the Peloponnesian War.

via Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. – By Anthony Grafton – Slate Magazine.

Book Reviews – ‘Stripping Bare the Body’ & ‘Worse Than War’

Diplomacy doesn’t always work.  Violence in Haiti, Serbia, El Salvador, Iraq, and now Af-Pak continues.  Two writers who dig deeper–if you are ready to take the heart of darkness tour–are Mark Danner, a prolific journalist and rhetorical jujitsu deconstructionist, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose doctoral dissertation-turned-book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, was a must discussed Holocaust book on how average Germans were complicit.  But first, a review of Danner’s Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War:

What interests Danner, in Haiti and the other brutal, brutalized countries described in this collection, isn’t people — other than the leaders interviewed, individuals are mostly absent — but the landscape of political violence. He pays minute attention to the details of mutilation on the bodies that appear overnight around Port-au-Prince, and he devotes thousands of erudite words to the history that led to the murderous rule of the Duvaliers. Danner’s title is meant to convey the notion that atrocities expose both the innards of a society and its power structure. Throughout these three articles, descriptive realism and political analysis are in perfect balance, and Haiti is permanently revealed.

Most of the book is a relentless exposure of American hypocrisy, weakness and illusion across three administrations and at least five wars. Danner’s dissections of the corruption of government language are devastating: he’s a great exegete of official mendacity, with apparently endless material on hand. But all this anatomizing of Washington is performed by way of Serbia, Bosnia and Iraq. Since Danner the essayist doesn’t take the care to understand these societies the way that Danner the reporter did in Haiti, violence in no way strips them bare. Without individual stories or political analysis to accompany the horrifying (and numbingly repeated) descriptions, violence reveals nothing — it’s jus

via Book Review – ‘Stripping Bare the Body – Politics Violence War,’ by Mark Danner – Review – NYTimes.com.

And for the other book–an exploration of how its hard for all of us to stand outside of the “banality of evil” but rather the hard fact that we must act or be responsible for conflicts and violence–even if its elsewhere:

Goldhagen insists that even the worst atrocities originate with, and are then propelled by, a series of quite conscious calculations by followers as much as by leaders. “We must stop detaching mass elimination and its mass-murder variant from our understanding of politics,” Goldhagen writes. “Eliminationist politics, like the politics of war, is a politics of purposive acts to achieve political outcomes, often of ultimate ends and often of desired power redistribution.” “Worse Than War” is, in effect, “Everyone’s Willing Executioners.”

via Book Review – “Worse Than War – Genocide, Eliminationaism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity” – review – NYTmes.com

Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com

Meet two giants in the field of U.S. foreign policy, Nitze and Kennan, or the “Hawk” and the “Dove.”  Herein originated the policy of containment, as well as a vigorous debate:

Who was right? Did the United States put too much stock in military preparedness, unnecessarily antagonizing the Soviets while guaranteeing that the East-West rivalry would play out in the sole arena where Moscow could compete? Or did Americans act sensibly in response to a clear and present danger of Soviet aggression? Nicholas Thompson insists in “The Hawk and the Dove,” his thoroughly engrossing, if not altogether satisfying, dual biography of Nitze and Kennan, that both men had valid points.

“Each was profoundly right at some moments and profoundly wrong at others,” Thompson asserts of their long, inter­twined careers as statesmen, policy makers and public intellectuals. The two men “pulled in different directions” but “complemented each other” and, Thompson suggests, contributed in distinct ways to America’s victory in the cold war. They even managed to remain friends despite their differences.

via Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com.

I Wanna Be A Diplomat….

Great book on the foreign service for budding diplomats.  Juicy anecdote:

Q: Do you have a favorite anecdote from your time as a diplomat?Kopp: I once spent ten hours in a sealed railway car in the People’s Republic of Poland playing penny-ante poker with Senator Hubert Humphrey and three Minnesota journalists. I didn’t get to commit much diplomacy during the train ride, but I learned a lot of politics. Ten hours with Hubert Humphrey is a powerful antidote to cynicism.

Booklist | History as a Key for Policymakers in Foreign Affairs

Too often the long view or the hard questions lose out–perhaps because of process but also likely due to lack of awareness.  Kudos to the late Harvard professor Ernest May.  The idea that those making the big decisions need to consider the past is praised by Stephen Walt on FP.com:

His book “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Abuse of History in American Foreign Policy in one of the first IR courses I ever took, and its central message — about the ways that historical interpretations shape (and more often, distort) policymaking — has resonated with me ever since.

…leading into his other important work on this idea…

Professor May developed a course on the systematic use of historical comparisons to determine current public policy choices. They also wrote a book on the subject, “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers” (Free Press, 1986), whose methodology has since been used by “a cadre of historians” and students.  [via Ernest May, International Relations Expert, Dies at 80 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com.]

One brief synopsis in Foreign Affairs 1986, notes:

Professional historians, enjoying the luxury of unhurried reflection, might say that the book’s “method” is no more than a systematic and common-sense statement of the obvious-but the authors demonstrate that the “obvious” has too often been ignored, with unfortunate results.

Its also wonderful to find the public/private qualities of May’s greatness in sync, with some of his former students praising his name as a gentleman and a scholar.

Imagining the Others Side as a Strategy for Middle East Peace

Peace in the Middle East? A common question addressed by Amos Oz, the prickly but essential Israeli author.  His approach is centered on trying to understand the Other:

“I get up in the morning, I drink a cup of coffee, I sit down at my desk and I start to ask myself: ‘What if I were him? What if I were her? How would I feel? What would I say? How would I react?’ ”

He is controversial but esteemed in Israel–in part, because of his lack of buy in to the national identity story:

“I tried my hardest to feel in East Jerusalem like a man who has driven out his enemies and recovered his ancestral inheritance,” he wrote in a 1968 essay included in the new collection. “But I couldn’t.”

To put a finger on the problem, according to Oz, is a central task of his writing and a use of literature:

Considering the continuing Israeli-­Palestinian struggles, contrasted against the bitter record of World War II, he suggested that “The ultimate evil in the world is not war itself, but aggression.” How to fight it? “I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred,” he said. “It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative.”

via Books by Amos Oz – ‘Rhyming Life and Death’ and ‘The Amos Oz Reader’ – Review – NYTimes.com.

Book List – ‘Plain, Honest Men – The Making of the American Constitution,’ by Richard Beeman – Review – NYTimes.com

Let’s switch disciplines to American Constitutional history to consider what made the messy and necessary process of creating (“inventing” to use Gary Wills term) a country.   In Richard Beeman’s new book, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constition, this scholar from the University of Pennsylvania “offers a scholarly yet lively account of the Constitutional Convention that emphasizes the craftiness and craftsmanship that went into each of the compromises.”

Indeed, we tend to prepare for negotiations on the issue of interests, positions, etc. through briefing books and matrices.  This is important–but what makes outcomes that are acceptable to both parties is flexibility, “craftiness” and compromise.  If you’ve read up on your history (or watched 1776 lately) you will recognize the three challenges facing Constitutional delegates, outlined in this review by Walter Isaacson:

1. The extent to which they were going to retain a confederation of 13 sovereign states or create a true national government — or concoct some magical combination of both.
2. Should every state get an equal vote in the new national legislature or should their votes be proportional to their population?
3. If the apportionment was to be based on population, Southerners argued, then slaves should be counted. No one was proposing that slaves (or for that matter women) be allowed to vote; the question was whether they should count as part of a state’s population.

This is a great fresh view of an essential period of American history–and a great case study for diplomats.