February 2005

Response to Readership

The Democratic Party—of which you are a member—currently relies on economic policies tied to an outdated form of collectivism. How do you see this party reforming to keep up with the free market liberalism of the Republican Party? What should the ideological basis be for a 21st-century Democratic Party that can serve as an intellectual and electoral match for the Republicans?

Hanson: The old Democratic idealism abroad has been taken over by the Republicans—and ditto Democratic ideas like meritocracy and exclusion of racial bias, faith in American exceptionalism, pride in local control, and other grassroots ideas. Just imagine: in the last campaign, Bush supporters were more likely to be volunteers and unpaid; Kerry’s on salary and mercenary and paid through the money of a George Soros and other millionaires. The old world is upset down.  What can it do? Look at Hillary’s extreme makeover: distance from gay marriage and abortion which can be left to the states; pride in our troops; budget discipline; no corporate welfare; and ostracism of Michael Moore and Howard Dean. It matters little that it is disingenuous; it is a formula to recapture the middle class, and with a weak Republican candidate, a recession or other catastrophe, a third-party Perot-like candidate, Hillaryism might work and give victory to a Democrat with 45% or so of the vote.

In a lecture, Clay S. Jenkinson presented his interpretation of Thomas Jefferson, and it was wonderful. At the conclusion I asked him, “Can the U.S. avoid empire in the modern world?” “No, it’s too late,” he said, and referred me to a book, The Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson, adding, “It will make you depressed for months after reading it.” I read the book and found it to be a superficial, progressive, liberal screed. It did not answer my question. Can we avoid empire?

I commend your good taste: the book is not serious. Yes, we can avoid empire. And what a funny sort of empire we are: pay for bases; leave when asked; put democracies in place of autocracies; run up trade deficits with developing countries like China and India; tear down trade barriers; endure slurs and slander from our allies; and spend historically low percentages of GDP on defense. I’ve learned one thing since 9-11: the “empire” industry of gloom and doom draws all sorts of hacks and the half-educated who toss around terms like “hegemony,” “imperialism,” and “pipeline,” dress it up with conspiracies, quote a few Europeans, and presto, expect to have their non-books praised in the liberal journals by grandees of the Ivy League, themselves well paid and insulated thanks to the largesse of market capitalism. Sorry, that is just the way it is. A Roman proconsul or Victorian High Commissioner would think an American ambassador or three-star general a strange sort of imperialist or the U.S. trade deficit a reflection of an odd sort of mercantile system.

You are a life-long Democrat, a classicist and an old-style farmer skeptical of big business, yet after September 11 you’re finding yourself on the same side of the fence as Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice. Do you see a major political realignment taking place in American politics?

Hanson: Yes, I do. Democrats are isolationists now.

In matters of the Middle East, a Mubarak or Saudi Royal family are the "other" and deserve the multi-cultural pass of not being judged, since they are just "different" rather than atrocious.

Those who worked in the trenches for George Bush were mostly volunteers and grass roots; those for Kerry paid, and often from monies from the likes of a George Soros.

When I see a Teresa Heinz Kerry or George Soros, or the Hollywood elite, or the pampered professoriate, I see out-of-touch utopians who lecture others to do what they never would. Sort of the Kerry SUV syndrome or the big mansions of a Barbra Streisand lecturing on conservation.

And in the media, by any fair historical measure, the blogs, call-in radio, and cable news, are far more the vox populi than Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and the CBS—the old reformers, who are now dull, timid, arrogant, huffing and puffing about "standards" and "being degreed" as they do some questionable things.

Look at Jason Blair, Rathergate, the Moyers PBS family octopus, the crazy CNN President's statements, and so on. The old reformers on four feet are the new entrenched on two inside the former farmer's house, to paraphrase Orwell who had seen the same thing in the socialist world of the 1930s.

If you wish to find a pompous, affluent, stuffy, condescending, bore then go to a university or big news room—and this was not always the case when Civil Rights, worries about pollution, and exploited labor needed support.

In response, these out of touch boutique liberals thought Michael Moore's scruffy looks meant he was a populist, even though he, not George Bush, would have been booed at a NASCAR rally.  As far as Wolfowitz, go back and look who favored freeing the Shiia after the 1991 halt on Baghdad or who pressured Marcos to leave. And when I saw Rice stand up to Boxer and insist that her crazy tirade "It was the WMD, period"  in reference to the 23 cases for war passed by her own Senate, I thought something is radically wrong.

Boxer was the entrenched bore who raced to her website to raise money from her embarrassing invective, Rice the calm and far better prepared newcomer. So yes, the Left has to go back and start over again, and quit thinking that just because you apply affirmative action to some redneck from your tenured perch or just because you would never be a friend of a Church of God worshipper that somehow makes you, in the words of Tom Sowell, "annoited." Such smug arrogance the elite left now shows. The Democratic Party reminds me of the Republicans circa 1965 or so—impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen. I would listen to Lieberman, bring back Gebhardt, ignore Dean and Boxer, ostracize Sharpton and Moore, retire Ted Kennedy, and yes, let Bill behind the scenes triangulate Hillary to the middle-if they wish to win and resonate with Americans.

After having read many accounts of the Civil War, I still don’t understand why South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumter, galvanizing the North into war.  What do you think might have happened had the South continued to let these coastal forts be manned by the Union for a longer time?

Hanson: I think conflict was inevitable, because the South had little appreciation of Northern industrial power nor of the competence of a number of formerly nondescript Union officers. The best officers of the Mexican War had joined the Confederacy and there was an erroneous general impression that all superior commanders had left the Union, and with vaunted Southern courage, a big victory or two would teach the Yankees that going into the Confederacy was simply not worth the trouble, especially for the increasingly controversial idea of emancipation. Lincoln’s dilemma in 1861 was trying to teach the secessionists that their extremism would lead to ruin, but he lacked credible military deterrence—the Army of the Potomac in 1860 was not that of 1864. So the South miscalculated and thought it could succeed with relative impunity—the rewards of secession seemingly greater than the dangers of war. One of the ironies of the war was that a Sherman, Grant, and, yes, Lincoln himself, had far greater strategic sense and tactical competence than either a Jefferson Davis or perhaps even a Robert E. Lee.

What exactly do you mean by "American beneficence"?  Would this include the CIA-backed coup in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, and installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah? Or would it include the billions of dollars in weapons (including chemical) supplied to Saddam Hussein during the 1980's? Maybe you're referring to the current Iraq war.

Hanson: No, I was referring to the defeat of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan, the subsequent rebuilding of Europe, and then the 50-year effort to stop the onslaught of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China (100 million of their own butchered by communist cadres). No one has been more critical of Cold War realpolitik that determined rightist thugs were our own only bulwarks against Communist killers, and that socialist nationalists like a Mossadegh or Allende were de facto enemies or naïve and precursors to appeasers. But consider: is Cuba or Chile a better place today, a South Korea or North Korea, a Taiwan or China?

American pressures for reform led to evolution even in the worse-case scenario, while so-called national socialists never left power, but continue to oppress their own without audit or censure. Blaming the United States for the world’s problems leads nowhere; determining to what degree it has been a more powerful force for good than evil in comparison with other superpowers like a Soviet Russia, Communist China, or liberal EU is the more critical question. Letting 250,000 die before your eyes in the Balkans while you lecture about morality doesn’t seem to me very moral.

Have you compared the War of 1812 and the Mexican War to the current state of affair—specifically the debates in Congress and the lack of support to the federal government by the states? Of course by the time of the Mexican War, slavery and it's survival was constantly in the minds of those who argued their positions on Capital Hill.

Hanson: Somewhat. You can find some discussion of this subject in John Lewis Gaddis’s recent post-9/11 essays. The current strife reminds me of the early 19th century in the following sense. We are becoming polarized into two different cultures, divided not so much by region, race, or religion, as by ideology. 60% of us wish to consolidate our evolutionary gains, look back to see whether we have lost anything, and work to strength individualism, freedom, the family, religion, and personal responsibility to ensure our children can maintain our level of freedom and affluence. The others believe that the American Revolution is a constant extension of equality and the power of government must not rest until by fiat if need be almost all Americans are de facto the same. In this quest, the family, the church, rural and parochial culture, and the military must be ignored or changed since they are obstacles to utopia, while the mainstream media, the campuses, Hollywood, and government are to be enlisted to convince an otherwise simpleton middle class of their selfishness and superstition.  Either the latter will recede and enjoy their necessary roles in their proper perspective or we will have an unstable society where a Michael Moore or George Soros gets publicity and acclaim and exercises influence even while they are mostly ridiculed by the majority of Americans. I am confident this tension can be worked out, but it requires some realism: civil unions fine, gay marriage no; equal opportunity of course, racial quotes not all; dissent welcomed, calling the President Hitlerian or worse, pathological; one-time amnesty for Mexicans who have lived here for years—but only in exchange for controlled and legal immigration with closed borders.

In your opinion, if the Germans had in fact taken Leningrad and Moscow in 1941, and Stalin and his ministers had retreated further east, would Germany have won a victory over the Soviets or would the U.S.S.R. have been able to rally and go on to defeat the Germans in any event? The second question is: assuming a scenario in which the United States never entered the Second World War, in your opinion would the remaining allies, and the Soviet Union in particular, have been able to go on and win the war in the absence of direct American participation?

Hanson: Put it this way, had the US not bombed Germany, 10,000 Nazi artillery pieces and thousands of aircraft would have been unleashed against the Russians, who would have had not U.S.-supplied trucks, shells, and planes, but for sure a German war economy untouched by American bombers and probably not all that damaged by the U.K.’s planes alone.  And the US/Anglo invasion of 1944 drew off another 80-100 German divisions from the Russian front. Worse, without the US in the war, at some time at least 100 Japanese divisions would have returned to the Soviet East and drawn off troops from the West. And without a submarine campaign against American merchant ships, hundreds of U-boats would have cut Russia off from the world. In addition, over a million Germans were cumulatively posted in places like North Africa and Italy to stop American invasions. So there was no way the Soviets would have survived had they face an additional 100-200 Axis divisions who had no worries about American bombers, supplies, or ships. Would the US have won without the Red Army that killed 2 out of every 3 Nazi soldiers? Probably, but at the cost of at least an additional 1 million casualties and the probable use of the bomb.

Lt Col David Hackworth writes about "out guerillaing the guerillas."  Now Macubin Thomas Owens offers that we might adopt a model of the Phoenix Program used in Vietnam. Your thoughts and comments about these strategies?

They all point to the key to successful counter-insurgency: isolating the terrorists or guerillas, killing them, and demonstrating their weakness and vulnerability without collateral damage to the general population. Unfortunately, our media is not interested in this story, so we rely only on anecdotal evidence that in fact the insurgents have taken frightful losses from Marine snipers, Special Forces, and GPS bombing, which explains their relative impotence on election day. But the real key, belated to be sure, is that Americans are not on television nor is a Paul Bremmer, replete with charts, explaining the agony of restoring power. It is now an “Iraqi thing” and Iraqis can blame or praise themselves for their own fortunes. Sealed borders, counter-insurgency, indigenous autonomy, and economic growth are the keys for victory in such difficult situations.

Do you agree with von Moltke's alleged statement that the American Civil War amounted to little more than, ""two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned"?  Was this a case of European military snobbery that overlooked the contributions of new technologies and commanders such Lee, Grant and Sherman to the art of war? Or did these technologies and commanders have little impact, in practice, on how the war was waged, rendering it (as some historians hold) a haphazardly fought last gasp of the Napoleonic era?

Hanson: He was wrong, as Germany learned in 1918 when the American Expeditionary Forces replicated what was learned in the Civil War. By 1865 there was no army in the world of the caliber of Sherman’s Army of the West, acknowledged by foreign attachés who watched them march in D.C. in April 1865. Sherman’s strategic vision was unmatched by any European’s. Whether one examines mortars, repeating rifles, iron-clads, or the use of railroads and telegraphs, the American armies in 1865 were either as good or better than anything in Europe. The problem we have with all German military theorists is that in peacetime they seemed brilliant, but in war their doctrines either proved wanting or led to inevitable overreach. German strategists of the 20th century were comparable to contemporary Chinese thinkers who somehow have found themselves surrounded by nuclear Russia, nuclear Pakistan, nuclear India, nuclear American bases, nuclear North Korea, and soon perhaps if they are not careful nuclear Japan, nuclear Taiwan, and nuclear South Korea.

What is the relationship between capitalism, war, and empire building? Not in terms of military effectiveness (your chapter on Lepanto in Carnage & Culture was great), but the underlying causes. Is there a relationship as Marxists insist?

Hanson: No, I don’t think so. The Persians, Chinese, Moguls and Ottomans were anti-capitalists or at least pre-capitalists. I don’t the Soviet empire was market-driven. And the Islamicist dream of a caliphate reborn is surely not Western. The point is that empire and war are innate to human kind. But the efficacy involved in such megalomania is another matter entirely. Few non-Western powers ever developed the transoceanic reach that would allow them to project force across the globe. Even the Ottomans couldn’t do much in the Western Mediterranean or Arabian Sea, despite copying the Arsenal at Venice and Italian galley craft.

If we were to speak of an American empire today, it is the idea of globalization, and U.S. arms keeping the peace and the sea-lanes open to trade. So far even China is not eager to destroy a system in which they profit so well. They are almost like the 19th-century Americans who had no desire to fight the Victorians as they prospered from expanding trade and relative world security offered by the UK. If there is a story of empire, there is surely a parallel narrative of states that focus on trade and commerce under the aegis of such stability, and who in the end do as well, if not better. Look at the EU who ankle-bites us, but never says “Withdraw the 6th fleet from the Mediterranean, get out of the China Sea, pull all troops out of Europe, don’t patrol the Persian Gulf.” It is wise to let someone else pay for protection, feign opposition to such “militarism” and “empire,” and then in extremis quietly send signals of thanks.

Is there something in the Russian way that, while seemingly heedless of the value of human life, nevertheless persevered to the gates of Berlin?

Hanson: That is almost the theme of Max Hasting’s Armageddon. Late-19th century Czarism, followed by Stalinism, meant a different evolution than in the West, no doubt. But the Russians grasped that Hitler had foolishly chosen their type of war: more or less confined to the ground involving tanks and artillery, predicated on manpower reserves, fought mostly in the Russian motherland, and to be waged without humanitarian restraint. The one thing that the Soviet state could do well was to pour millions into battle, gear up heavy industrial production, and tell a brutalized public that they were free to retaliate again the German monster. Had Hitler the resources to conduct a sea-blockade, wage a stand-off carpet bombing as part of a strategic aerial campaign, close the borders of the Soviet Union, and conduct counter-insurgency by mobilizing Soviet dissidents and brutalized ethnic groups, in 3 or 4 years he might well have won. But a head-on invasion of a former ally, mass murdering of civilians, and no clear strategic plan, all at a time when the Western front with the UK and the role of the United States were both unclear was suicidal and proved as much.

What do you think of Clausewitz? What do you think of Keegan's trashing of Clausewitz in his history of war?

I am a great admirer of John Keegan, especially his beautiful prose that almost single-handedly brought contemporary military history into the realm of literature. But I admire Clausewitz because his non-anthropological explanations for war that I think more or less reflect reality; he was an empiricist rather than an abstract theorist, and understood that states, like people, make war for particular purposes that can be categorized and understood.

In essence, he believes, like Thucydides, that human nature is a constant that trumps culture. It can be ascertained even in the most foreign-seeming cult, tribe, or organization. Going to war for what seems irrational or culturally driven motives does not mean that the party does not think it is logical and thought out. Clausewitz would have described bin Laden’s motives well—the latter’s belief that an appeasing West would tolerate his attacks and insidiously grant concessions, and eventually win a political advantage—withdrawal of all Western troops in the Gulf or a free pass to establish an Arab Wahhabi state along the lines of Iran with himself as a sort of Wahhabi Khomeini. Bin Laden made only two mistakes—September 11 was over the top and he didn’t appreciate that George Bush was president. Had he only hit the top of one tower and had Al Gore been in charge, we’d be back to cruise missiles sent into the Hindu Kush for a week.