Surprise, Security, and the American Experience Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The surprise attack of September 11 brought about, in the eyes of many learned observers, a radical shift in American national security policy. Since World War II and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a policy of containment and deterrence. During the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse, there was a feeling that democracy and capitalism would eventually triumph everywhere; the Clinton administration reasoned that the US "only needed to engage and the rest of the world would enlarge the process."
In response the 9/11 attack the Bush administration formulated a new strategy, outlined in the national security speech at West Point on June 1, 2002. This speech called for a new strategy which looked like a departure from American tradition. The key elements of this new strategy were preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony. In the beginning, it was little noticed; however, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, people began to examine this strategy more closely.
Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, in this short and well-written little book, argues that this was not a new policy, in fact it had deep roots in American history that go back to the earliest days of the republic. Gaddis demonstrates that after the British attack on Washington DC during the War of 1812, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams asserted the same three principles. Preemption was the rationale for Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, the "failed state" of its day being a haven for marauding Seminoles, runaway slaves and profiteering pirates. With the diminishing authority of the Spanish in Latin America, the US sought to restrict the influence of other European powers in the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateralist declaration even though the US did not have the means to enforce it without the backing of the British navy. And in the end, the policy of John Quincy Adams was to be the predominant power in the Western Hemisphere, or at least on the North American continent - a hegemon in all but name.
Preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony was indeed a US strategy up until World War II. The US was seeking merely to assure its security by keeping the European powers out of the hemisphere. Most Americans believed it was a mistake to seek an oversees empire as the brief foray into the Phillipines proved in the early part of the 20th century.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was forced the build alliances with the Soviet Union and other great powers in order to defeat Germany and Japan. It was thus necessary to forgo preemption and unilateralism in deference to the alliance. During and after World War II, the US took the lead in building multilateralism institutions - a multilateral system that not only ensured American hegemony, but made it desirable at the same time. Forgoing preemption gave the US the moral high ground, which it maintained until the invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq had all the elements of a grand strategy: preemption, unilateralsim - when multilateralism failed - and American hegemony. There was also an innovation to this strategy: there would be an active promotion of democracy in the Middle East. This idea swayed many liberals to the cause, including members of the media and the academic community.
The problems with this strategy became apparent after the invasion. They are too numerous to go into and obvious to anyone following the news. The mistakes made during the occupation leaves the Bush Doctine with only a few remaining supporters. The failure to enlist the great powers, not to mention many of the smaller powers, destroyed our status as a benign hegemon and jepardizes our moral high ground.
Gaddis does an excellent job of explaining the grand strategy and showing that it has precedents in history, better than Bush or anyone in his administration. However, he does not show that this strategy is justified, morally or legally, and he does not seem to fully appreciate that many of our friends and allies find this strategy frightening and repugnant. They do not call us arrogant for nothing.
Nevertheless, the jury is still out. Immediately after the invasion, it looked as though one regime after another would fall in the region, along the lines of the dominoes of Eastern Europe. At the present writing, with the Iraqi elections approaching, a decent outcome seems remote and a civil war possible. Yet, there are stirrings of hope and change elsewhere in the Middle East, such as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The upheaval in Iraq is also creating debate that did not exist before in Egypt and the Gulf States. The pendulum may again swing the other way and the grand strategy may be working inspite of itself.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

Get 4% OFF

Click here for more information about Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

Read More...

President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This is a great and important book. It was not Beard's last book, but one that subjected him to a veritable witch hunt and his removal from his position in historical societies and organization. A progressive of the old LaFollette type, Beard simply sought to tell the truth about how Roosevelt plunged the USA into World War II before any declaration of war or attacks on the USA by Germany, Italy, or Japan.
Most of the material here comes from hearings in the US congress, some during World War II, and other shortly afterward.
It is unfortunate that Beard did not have access to the materials that have been available in the last 10 or 20 years as war time records has become declassified. His concentration is on Pearl Harbor and the naval war against Italy and Germany (most who write about submarine warfare in the Atlantic neglect the fact that there was a substantial force of Italian submarines as well as German submrines), that Roosevelt launched in 1940. Yet, this is but the tip of the iceberg in Roosevelt's illegal war against Germany and Italy and Japan in 1940 and in 1941.
Roosevelt ran the 1940 election under the slogan "I hate war" and on his many pledges not to send Americans to fight in the Second World War. As soon as Roosevelt won the 1940 election he secretly began to send American sailors, marines, and soldiers into the war.
In November 1940, Roosevelt sent the US navy into the Atlantic to attack and sink German and Italian submarines in complete cooperation with the British. This was despite the fact that the German and Italian submariners were ordered to stay out of the Western Atalantic and to avoid American ports and ships so they would not provoke US public opinion. What the Axis submariners could have done if they targeted American shipping was shown in 1941 and 1942 after Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of ships were sunk within sight of the East Coast. Britain was seriously threatened with strangulation.
The evidence that Beard prints in this book chiefly from Congressional hearings explains major incidents like the sinking of the Reuben James and the Kearny that were used to claim Germany was sinking American ships without provocation. Congressional hearings reported on in this book show both incidents were provoked by aggressive US Navy attacks on German submarines either separate from or in direct cooperation with the British and Canadian navies.
Roosevelt had the US in a world-wide naval war with Germany and Italy by 1941. American Navy pilots worked directly with the British. In fact it was an US Navy pilot, not a British pilot who flew the plane that torpedoed the Bismark and left it unable to steer. The destroyer for bases deal not only supplied the British with destroyers, but sent US troops to the bases that protected British colonies in the Americas and Africa so British troops there could be sent to the war in the Arab East.
The US Navy began to build a major base in Northern Ireland. By 1941 US Navy ships would attack, sink, or seize any German vessel they encountered on the high seas, not just in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific and Indian Ocean as well. The US fleet and "neutral" American shipping were used to convoy Australian, New Zealand, and British colonial troops from the Pacific to the US and Canada to be shipped to the British war in North Africa.
American Marines relieved the British troops who had essentially invaded and occupied Iceland, an action not really favored by the Icelandic government which had tried to stay neutral. Those same Marines were originally to have invaded Vichy-controlled Martinique and Guadeloupe, but the Vichy governor of the islands agreed to allow US Navy officers to control passage of naval vessels to those islands, keeping French warships in port on these islands until the end of the War.
In Asia, Roosevelt launched the Flying Tigers. Rather than being a mercenary program paid for by the Chaing Kai Shek government as the public was told until the relevant documents were released in the 1980s, the Flying Tigers were totally financed by the United States Army Air Force. All of the Tigers were serving Navy or Army pilots who were ordered to leave the Navy and the Army to accept positions with the Tigers. Generally, Army and Navy officers are not usually allowed to simply quit and take other positions before the end of their service, let alone in a period of coming war. Plans for the Tigers included building a huge American-staffed and paid for air force that would possess long range bombers to attack Japan. They barely had begun functioning in China before WWII began.
In late 1940 joint commissions of the US military and naval general staffs and their British counterparts were set up in both Washington and London to plan a US-British war against both Germany and Japan. Similar arrangements were worked out with Britain, Canada, and the Dutch colonial government of whatr is now knows as Indonesia for naval and military action against Japan.
Those who do not know the information Beard provides and the rest that has come out since his times, wonder why Germany declared war on the USA. They picture the German declaration of war as an erroneous and gratuitous act of solidarity with Japan. They miss the real question. The real question is why did Germany wait so long to declare war on the USA when the USA had been carrying on what American and international law clearly defined as illegal warfare against Germany since the fall of 1940.
Beard's courage on this issue was symptomatic of his rigor and independence, his relentless desire to find the truth. Just as we are ignorant of the real origins of US involvement in WWII without this pioneering work, we are ignorant of who the founders of the US government were, and what they were afraid of unless we read his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Beard was not just a learned man, a dilegent scholar, and pretty good writer, he was a brave man who demanded to tell the truth no matter how unpopular it was. We should all be more like Beard!


Click Here to see more reviews about: President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities

Get 31% OFF

Click here for more information about President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: Appearances and Realities

Read More...

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Although I am a large fan of America's Secret War and respect Mr. Friedman's logical thinking and intelligence, this book is an undertaking so far beyond the capability of man -trying to outline how the next 100 years of history will look- that even though it started off captivating it ultimately left me feeling like the whole thing was a fool's errand. It's not that the author is illogical or a nutcase as some of the negative reviewers have suggested, it's just that there's no way to meaningfully try to predict the simply unpredictable, regardless of the complexity of your analysis. And as the author stretches his future history farther and farther away from the present it simply becomes an implausibility on top of an implausibility on top of another implausibility to the point that any value the reader could derive nearly evaporates and I wish I had spent my time reading actual history.
Of course the author believes some rough prediction of the future is possible based on trends analysis, an understanding of strategic nature, and other such information. I immediately concede that trying to predict the future is not only necessary as a basis for security planning but can be done profitably over maybe 10 years, 20 at the extreme, but only if you build in a huge amount of risk management / "reserve" into your planning results to account for the inevitable unexpected. Thus my critique is simply with the overly ambitious timeline of the author rather than the endeavor itself.
There are some positives of the book which were informative and argue in favor of reading perhaps the first half for pertinent information and analysis. This information revolves around such things as brief overviews of European history and it's rise to power, a brief and plausible (though not necessarily entirely convincing) theory of a cyclical nature of American politics/economics/history, explanations of Russia's geostrategic challenge and how it has historically approached it, global demographics (birth rates declining, the reasons why they are declining and the possible results) and some highlights of the Chinese economy and political system in addition to some other fascinating minor topics. Frankly these topics could have easily formed the basis for an excellent book that tries to project what they could mean over a more modest timeframe, which coupled with Mr. Friedman's direct and straight to the point writing style would have been well worth it. But beyond this the book is more interesting as a work of science fiction than a source of illumination or fuel for strategic analysis.
Even over the relatively strong first half of the book or so there were some things that struck me as cautionary flags with regards to the author's conclusions. Mr. Friedman is Bismarckian to a very high degree, and pretty much limits his assumptions of state behavior to each state trying to enforce a balance of power amongst all other states within its means. There is seemingly no consideration of moral factors, such as alignment of like minded cultures or political/economic systems because they are like minded, in his analysis. His explanation of US grand strategy culminates in what strikes me, as an active duty US Navy Officer, as incongruous. (Which I can't figure since he has close military ties and his son is also in the military.) He essentially claims that US grand strategy is to ensure dominance of the oceans, which is correct but only a single facet of a much more variegated and complex animal. But in his analysis of how this grand strategy has influenced American action he tries to explain that this has motivated America to intervene in Kosovo and Iraq, i.e. to forestall an eventual Eurasian power from building a Navy that can challenge ours! Serbia and Al-Qaeda seemed pretty far from that goal to provide the clarifying rational of American behavior, and this explanation fails to account why we are doing nothing to forestall Chinese and Indian naval developments, and why the previous CNO and current CJCS, Adm. Mike Mullen, launched the "1,000 ship Navy" designed to reduce the need for enlarging the US Navy size by leveraging closer ties with allied nations' navies and developing their naval capabilities synergistically. He also claims that as part of our strategy of preventing a dominant Eurasian continental power we went into Iraq to intentionally de-stabilize central Asia. Again, this flies completely in the face of my entire personal experience in the military, as so many of our forces are working themselves to the bone to try to re-stabilize the region away from weak and antagonistic states that allowed the growth of radical Islam to stronger, more functioning entities that can integrate better with the world and root out Islamic fundamentalism on its home territory. Such a change requires a period of instability to go from a "bad" regime to a "good" one, but that necessary instability is a daunting obstacle being actively tackled and not a goal. (Whether what we are doing is a pipe dream or not is an entirely different matter, but I personally find his explanation of our current strategy simply false, if not quixotic.) Instead it is the overtly stated belief of the US strategic community that it is exactly instability and/or weak autocratic based regimes that causes groups like Al-Qaeda to operate. Other concerns I have with his analysis are that Iran, especially a nuclear Iran, makes virtually no appearance, nor does India. Also, in my subjective opinion, he completely under-rates the strength and staying power of radical Islam essentially claiming that is already defeated and won't even be a factor beyond the mid 2010's, and thus he more or less ignores it.
And although it is probably ridiculous to critique an absurdity, there were some issues I had with his analysis of the period of the 2040's and beyond. He envisions an American space based strategy with three very large (i.e. hundreds to thousands of crewmembers) space stations he calls "battle stars" forming its core. Each would be a command and control node as well as being armed with directed energy and kinetic weapons, and he claims that they will be built under the assumption that they are invulnerable. Yet given the delicate nature of lightweight space structures (in order to be able to get them into space at an affordable cost) and the relative ease of anti-satellite weapons to wreak massive damage on such a system cheaply, his assumption that the US will think they are invulnerable flies completely in the face of a technological reality that is already widely recognized in the US space community. Last, he also envisions hypersonic aircraft providing close air support for ground forces, which is frankly ridiculous. There is more I could quibble with his far out year predictions, but honestly what would be the point?
An odd book. Mr. Friedman has some formidable strengths that shone brilliantly in America's Secret War, and glimmer here and there in the Next 100 Years, but beyond the midway point the book sadly devolves into the absurd.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

Get 44% OFF

Click here for more information about The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

Read More...