J. D. Crouch and Patrick J. Garrity: You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Professor Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Harold W. Rood was a plain-spoken man who “wanted, above all, to instruct his students in the hard logic of power, especially as that logic played out in international politics.” The notion of international relations struck him as touchy-feely, and he never hesitated to strike back. But he neither worshiped political power nor supposed it to operate like electricity, He considered it as an instrument of strategy, that is, of prudential reasoning—reasoning that itself both served purposes but needed steady reminders that purposes must be navigated through a complex landscape. Part of that landscape is political, but much of it really is landscape—that is, geography. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he could scarcely overlook the importance of terrain, physical resources, and logistics. He was a geopolitician, and proud of it.
The authors divide their book into three segments. The first three chapters present Rood’s understanding of nature: the nature of politics, the nature of international politics, and the nature of strategy. The final three chapters present the main strategic problem Rood considered in his career—the Russian problem—and the strategy Americans devised to address it; the last chapter shows that Rood did not think the Russian problem had disappeared with the disintegration of the Soviet empire; moreover, the Chinese problem had been added to it. The fourth, central chapter treats the “democratic strategic deficit,” that is, the limitations imposed upon democratic-republican regimes as such, apart from the territorial, demographic, and other material strengths and weaknesses a given democratic republic must work with and against. The strategic deficit such regimes characteristically suffer ensure that while they may embody ‘the end of history’ in Fukuyama’s sense of the best practicable regime under modern conditions, they will always have weaknesses other regimes can and will exploit, and therefore will never put a stop to historical conflict, never bring on an ‘end time’ of perpetual peace.
The chapter on the nature of politics is short. Rood did not elaborate on human nature in the direct manner of a political philosopher. One gets the sense he thought Aristotle had already done that, with Hobbes providing a useful supplement. Subtitled, “The Inherent Logic of Events,” this chapter shows Rood to have been anything but a Hegelian; the “logic” here amounts to a set of deductions from human nature, embodied in human individuals and groups living in physical places and ruled by “constitutional arrangements” or regimes “through which men seek to control and govern their environment,” that is, those physical places. The “inner logic of historical themes” derives from the nature of human beings, in their physical and political circumstances. Rood described themes, preferring not to attempt to track down causes, because “strategy involved an appreciation of human agency”; he was no fatalist, no historicist in the philosophic sense. In too many circumstances causation is too complex to account for. Attempts to do so usually lead to terrible simplifications wielded by terrifying simplifiers.
Rood saw what physicists came later to see: There is no such thing as chaos. “Organization and control are present even in what seem to be the most chaotic and violent of circumstances.” Spontaneous ‘uprisings’ and ‘riots’ are seldom spontaneous, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. But strife does concentrate minds on the fact that “power is intrinsic to politics, something that intellectuals often forget.” Power, including technological power, serves purposes. In the early years of the Internet, when I told college students that warfare had moved from land and sea to the air and now to cyberspace (without moving away from land, sea, and air) they thought me a fool. Didn’t I know that networks of personal computers would bring peoples closer together, facilitating peaceful commerce and friendship? That the new technology would make war far less likely? No, I didn’t. Neither did Rood. In his opinion, power, including technological power, remains instrumental for any number of human purposes, not all of them pleasant. Ten years later, students treated my observation as ordinary; cyber-warfare was on, now noticeably. As Rood once wrote, politics is “the organization and application of power to accomplish purpose,” whatever that purpose might be. Worthy purposes include peace, justice, and defense, purposes and indeed “obligations” that “exist irrespective of the nature of the regime and whether its constitution is written or unwritten.” Unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, “Rood drew a fundamental distinction between the position of the tyrant and that of the lawful prince” because tyrants effectively wage war against their own subjects, ruling by force alone and not by law. Tyrants invite faction and rebellion, and these make foreign intervention likely and also more likely to be effective. “When the weak, faction-ridden French government and people failed to defend France in 1940, there was no justice in France, save for that dictated by the occupying authorities.” Faction arises even in well-governed countries, and in large, diverse, democratic republics it poses a problem for foreign-policy strategists as well as for citizens and ordinary politicians. Rood never succumbed to the typical geopolitician’s prejudice: assuming that states are like billiard balls, caring only about the size, density, and velocity of each ball, ignoring its internal structure. He cared very much about size, density, and velocity in international politics, but those things did not add up to the whole of the matter.
Rood understood the nature of international politics in Hobbesian (but also Socratic-Platonic) fashion: “There is going to be a war.” International politics consists of conflict. “There are clashes of will between nations or communities of nations just as there are clashes of will within nations,” clashes “arising from profound differences in outlook and purpose,” some of them “irreconcilable short of war.” War isn’t pathological or anomalous; it “is the political means by which humans, to a first (if not final) order, determine who will organize things, and for what purpose they will be organized.” Accordingly, in international politics “there is either war, or the preparation for war,” and you had better be ready to fight if you don’t want to lose. Nuclear weapons, economic ‘globalization,’ non-governmental organizations, sensitivity to the need to protect human rights, the interdependence of peoples: none of these things has stopped warfare from continuing, although they have all altered the ways in statesmen fight wars. Therefore, “the bottom line of war—who rules in whose land—should never be ignored.” If you want to be ruled this way, not that way—by the way of (for example) British parliamentarism or the German tyrant—you won’t, or at least shouldn’t, ignore that bottom line. For all our technology, geography remains central to understanding international politics. Sitting at your computer, you may feel as if the screen links you to the whole world, and so it does. But to what is your computer linked, if not to an electric grid constructed on a particular topography, in this climate, on a territory of a certain size, featuring some resources but not everything you need to live as you sit in a safe space, tapping away on the keyboard?
“Geography conditions the distribution and configuration of the great powers, as well as their natural enemies and friends.” ‘Powers’ great and small being located somewhere, “international politics are characterized by certain persistent patterns of great power interactions despite apparent changes in political regimes.” The exact ‘whereness’ of those states will shift, given the continual struggle that animates international politics. In his long career, Rood considered five major topics, each illustrating this point. They were: the German problem; the problem of Asia; the Middle Eastern question; the Caribbean-Cuban salient; and, as mentioned, the Russian problem. The first and the fifth problems, taken together, might be said to form the European problem, which reflects the geographical fact that Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s phrase), and especially northern Europe, consists of a large, flat surface, well-suited for running armies through it.
Germany made itself a problem in Europe by the mid- to late 1800s, when Prussia overcame the divisions in which the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had left it. That settlement had been very much to the advantage of France, already united during the early modern period. Rood cited the Prussian General Staff’s history of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866: The war “must sooner or later have broken out,” the authors wrote. “The German nation could not forever exist in the political weakness into which it has sunk between the Latin West and the Slavonian East since the age of Germanic Emperors.” French statesmen saw that German unification spelled “disaster for France,” but Napoleon III made things worse by launching a premature war in 1870. His defeat cost him his throne, making the next war not only a war for territory but a regime war, a war setting republics against monarchies, with the French republic and the German monarchy at its center. Through 1945, in fact, “the logic of strategy dictated that it would be in united Germany’s interest to see that France was dismembered and removed from the ranks of European great powers. Otherwise, France would inevitably seek allies to encircle and redivide Germany.” This core conflict in turn troubled, and was troubled by, the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, European imperial rivalries outside Europe, European social revolutions, the stresses of industrialization, and even Japan’s defeat of China, on the other side of the now-interconnected international-politics world. The Great War occurred not because diplomats failed but because they had to: “the growth of German industrial, military, and naval power [was] nothing short of revolutionary, as German rulers could now hope to push hard against the western country, France, the eastern country, Russia, and, on the seas, the British navy which had effectively policed what Thomas Jefferson had called the great highway of the nations.
“The defeat of Imperial Germany in 1918 did not reset the German strategic agenda. This was as true of the Weimar regime as it would be for the Nazis, although the Nazis proved considerably more dangerous. It was the moderate president of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, who took care to tell the Brits, in the form of a 1920 letter to The Times of London, that “another war between Germany and the Anglo-Saxons [that is, the British and the Americans] is inevitable,” especially given the injuries sustained by the French during the war, making France a dubious shield for the Atlantic powers. At that time, Germans had already begun rearming, and Reich Chancellor Hitler described the next, complementary step: “We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms!” The relatively modest re-dismemberment of Germany (into merely two, rather than some 300, independent states) was only reversed near the end of the Cold War because Americans saw Germany as an ally against the Soviets and, Rood argued, because the Russians considered it “necessary to weaken and eventually eliminate the U.S. presence from Europe”—a trend already visible by the beginning of the next millennium.
The problem of Asia consists of the rise of Japan in the twentieth century, Russian/Soviet expansion, and “the breakdown and recovery of a unified Chinese empire.” At the core of the Asian problem Rood saw “a China Problem—whether China is to be divided or unified,” who will rule the mainland, what the mainland’s boundaries and “strategic perimeter” will be, and what allies it will have. Rood pointed to The Problem of Asia and Its Effect on Modern Politics, published in 1910 by the great British geopolitician of naval power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the lesser-known 1936 book by Gregory Bienstock, The Struggle for the Pacific, as perennially useful guides to Asian geopolitics.
Rood identified the source of the “the modern manifestation” of Sino-Japanese conflict as the 1868 regime change in Japan, when a centralized modern state was established with the emperor as its head, replacing the feudal-warlord regime of the Shogunate. China at that time still suffered from the absence of a modern state, with oligarch/warlords vying for control. Just as French statesmen long intended to keep Germany divided, so Japanese statesmen intended to keep China divided; they also wanted it isolated from foreign powers that might use it “as a means of weakening Japan.” Accordingly, Japan fought wars against China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s, acquiring Korea and with it the means to take control of Manchuria when offered it by its fellow-allies at the end of the Great War. In the settlement they also acquired German island colonies which “made ideal bases from which Japan could sever communications between the United States and the Philippines and isolate America from China.” The Japanese also “used commercial enterprises to penetrate those places they would target later in wartime,” as strategy that the China of the twenty-first century may well be emulating. By the late 1930s, Japan had conquered China, establishing a vast empire. As for Russia, the Soviets were happy to sign a non-aggression treaty in 1941 because Japanese conquests in Asia would rid the area of the Western empires and “expose those territories to the rise of nationalist movements that the Soviets were prepared to abet through indigenous communist parties,” as indeed they did throughout the postwar period. American anti-colonialism aided Soviet purposes in that regard, too. “Newly independent nations were susceptible to Soviet influence in a manner not possible when imperial control was being effectively exerted,” whether by the Japanese or the Europeans.
The breakup of the Soviet empire left China with a freer hand in Asia, where its sole remaining ‘superpower’ rival is the United States. “Since 1949, Rood noted, the Chinese government has suppressed internal dissent, sought the unification of Chinese territory, and promoted loyalty to the regime in Beijing”; this in turn has enabled modernization, including industrialization and militarization, with a network of highways and railways to the borders and, after Rood’s death, beyond those borders. “Han Chinese, accompanied by Communist Party cadres, have been transferred to the outlying regions to ‘dilute’ the local population, despite resistance from the indigenous peoples.” They have re-taken the key commercial and financial hub, Hong Kong, and intend to recover Taiwan, as well. Recent Chinese political-economic inroads into the Philippines (to take but one example) would come as no surprise to Rood. Nor have they relinquished hopes of unifying Korea “under a friendly regime.” As Rood summarized it, China remains “a one-party, totalitarian regime where international politics is seen to be an arena of unending struggle for a world order in which Chinese interests are respected and deferred to by other powers,” and this will require the United States to respond, if it intends to line up with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the Middle East, peace has prevailed only when enforced by “ruthless application” of authority by an imperial power—a pattern Rood might easily have traced back to Biblical times. Even such well-removed powers as Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and China have involved themselves in the Middle East for one reason or another, ranging from the need to defend against Muslim encroachment, maritime trade and naval routes, the desire to secure routes for navies and maritime commerce, or the hunger for oil. From a military standpoint, Mesopotamia is central to the region; accordingly, the British founded modern Iraq, hoping to “render Iraq an independent nation, one that was self-governing and equipped to maintain internal stability and defend its borders.” Half a century later, the Americans were still attempting to do the same thing. Meanwhile, the Russians, once under the Soviet regime, now under Putin, continue to follow their own geopolitical imperative to establish warm-water access points; their thus-far successful intervention in the Syrian civil war follows from Rood’s analysis of a strategy pursued since the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. The regimes have changed on all sides, but the geography hasn’t. The Soviets may have been atheists in principle, following Marx, but their policy “aimed to array Islam against the West, just as the Kaiser and Hitler had once done,” and the well-trained geopolitician Vladimir Putin is no different. Thus Rood supported the 2003 United States war in Iraq not because he cared about changing its regime or worried about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but because the United States could use a military anchor in the region, just as it had one in Germany, against Russia.
Closer to home, Rood considered the Caribbean-Cuban salient indispensable to American security. (He was not alone; Thomas Jefferson called any country that controlled New Orleans the enemy of the United States). America must always defend the two main avenues of approach to its heartland: the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence; and the salient, whose gateway from the Atlantic is Cuba, commanding the sea routes into the Gulf of Mexico. The British proved that in the 1760s, when its capture of Havana “crippled Spanish power in the West Indies and cut the communications between Old and New Spain.” “Whenever Cuba has been in the hands of a weak regime or one hostile to the United States, American interests have been threatened,” whether from piracy in the 1820s, Confederate raiding ships that found friendly ports there in the 1860s, or potentially from any hostile European power. (Although Rood may not have suspected this, it seems likely that Theodore Roosevelt took a strong disliking to the young Winston Churchill because Churchill wrote articles for publication in 1896, suggesting that the British seize the island from Spain. Whether or not this is so, Teddy did beat them to the punch, a couple of years later.) Rood did recall the 263 U.S. merchant ships sunk by German submarines in the Gulf and the Caribbean during World War II, and the Soviet-sponsored communist coup in 1959 gave the Russians what he called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier, 90 miles from the United States”—a platform “for expansion into the Western Hemisphere.”
Throughout this chapter, Crouch and Garrity take pains to show that although the conflict of regimes is indeed a major consideration in international politics, geography—combined with existing, if temporary, circumstances—may override such differences. For example, although “Russia and Japan were mortal enemies in East Asia over the future disposition of China” they “shared a common interest in expelling the Western colonial powers from the region,” just as Russia and Middle-East jihadists shared an interest in ridding the Middle East of Americans and Europeans. In the 1940s, Soviet Russian gyrations—a peace treaty with Germany, then alliance with the ‘Anglo-Americans’—were products of shifting military circumstances; either way, Stalin wanted control of Eastern Europe.
From the nature of politics and the nature of international politics, the authors shift to Rood’s understanding of the nature of strategy, encapsulating in his mot, “You run the show or the show runs you.” As the authors remark, this is no time-bound, ‘historically relative’ principle but one that’s “been in operation since before Thucydides.” More formally stated, “the ultimate goal in strategy is to confront an enemy with such a preponderance of forces, and such superiority of strategic position from which to deploy those forces, that the enemy, however much he may resist, can only conform to one’s will.” General Lee, meet General Grant. Geography enters in because this goal usually requires occupying physical chokepoints such as the city of New Orleans, controlling the mouth of the Mississippi River; Gibraltar, controlling the western entrance to the Mediterranean; the Straits of Malacca, connecting the Pacific with the Indian Ocean. Even in the era when the British ‘bourgeoisie’ enjoyed unmatched ascendancy in the world, no less a personage than Queen Victoria understood that maintaining military power is “the true economy.” (Adam Smith would not have disagreed.) Pace George Kennan, but “diplomacy cannot substitute for military power or make up for its deficiencies.” Sooner or later, someone else will cut through your verbiage.
Different regimes incline toward different kinds of strategies. Although Carl von Clausewitz famously called war a continuation of politics by other means, Rood thought that modern tyrannies, “following Lenin,” consider politics “a continuation of war by other means.” So, for example, while “the United States thought it could seek a political solution in Vietnam as though it were an alternative to a military resolution of the war,” the Vietnamese communists “pursued a straightforward military victory, at the conference table as well as on the battlefield.” Throughout the ‘Peace Talks’ held in Paris, the communists sought a settlement whereby they would “preserve their armed forces and… retain strategic positions in South Vietnam,” thus “set[ting] the stage for its eventual victory in the war, as American patience with the war waned.” In the words of an even more conspicuous tyrant, Adolf Hitler, after military victory has been achieved “the wise victor will, if possible, always impose his claim on the defeated people stage by stage, dealing with the people that has grown defeated, and this in every people which has voluntarily submitted to force. He may then rely on the fact that not one of these further acts of oppression will seem sufficient reason to take up arms again.”
In preparation for such a consummation, the tyrant may often rely on his enemy’s wishful thinking, “the tendency for the inferior, unprepared power” to, in Rood’s words, “rethink the enemy’s strategy until one comes up with one that is not threatening.” Between the world wars and after the second one, many influential citizens in the commercial republics did exactly that, readying themselves in some cases for a nasty military surprise. Israel was nearly obliterated in 1973 for that reason, and of course the conduct of French and British parliamentarians in the 1930s remains the best-remembered example of the syndrome. Such psychological defeat can be hastened by deception and subversion. It was no wonder (to those who notice such things) when some of the most persistent apologists for Soviet conduct suddenly fell silent when the Soviet Union went out of business, although they might easily have told us that they had been right all along in claiming the regime was incapable of harming the commercial republics.
If you want to run the show instead of letting it run you, and you also intend to avoid war unless necessary, the best strategy will rest on deterrence. “But, like peace, it can never be achieved directly.” You will deter your enemy only if he knows you can and will act in such a way as to do him insufferable harm. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover kept the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii beyond its usual annual stay, but this failed to deter Japan from moving against China because Hoover “had already made it clear that he would not fight for Asia.” Worse, in 1940 President Roosevelt supposed that the mere presence of the U.S. naval forces in Hawaii would restrain Japan, without ensuring that they were ready for war if it came. The Japanese military leaders figured that out, and moved accordingly. Shows of force only work if the enemy believes the force is real; bluffing a steadfast and well-informed enemy risks a lot.
The authors turn to the regime-specific “democratic strategy deficit” in their central chapter. In view of the catastrophic failures of tyrants in the twentieth century, twenty-first-century tyrants “may become more subtle without becoming more just.” The constitutional-democratic, commercial-republican way of life and the ethos it generates and reinforces commendably seek to protect the weak, but that principle does not “ordinarily operate within the international community.” Tyrannies, however, “constantly at war with their own citizens,” apply that mindset and the policies it generates to “free peoples outside of their borders,” although such warfare may not entail “a shooting war” at all times, any more than it entails the use of truncheons against all their own subjects at all times.
As a result of the regime ethos of the republics, foreign policy ‘realists’ in them often display little realism. For a man like George F. Kennan, for example, “war, not totalitarianism, was the enemy to be resisted.” The purely diplomatic means proposed by him when he wrote on ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union could not work because Kennan largely eschewed military action and even adequate military preparedness to back up his diplomacy. Kennan’s ‘political’ geopolitics was therefore in fact apolitical, assuming that no “fundamental conflict between totalitarianism and democracy” existed. Kennan’s ‘realism’ treated the state instead of the regime as fundamental to politics, but, like all organizations, states have regimes, and therefore characters, inclinations, sentiments that effect their actions, even if they do not simply determine those actions. Democratic-republican ‘idealists’ do see the differences in regimes, but, precisely because they are idealists, often fail to see the serious real-world difficulties in establishing congenial commercial republics in foreign countries, many of which have “never known” political liberty and don’t know what to do with it when they get it. And so in Iraq, United States policy should have been less ambitious—aiming at a regime that fostered “a stable and comfortable place for ordinary citizens to live and prosper,” which might well be a decent rule of ‘the one’ and/or ‘the few.’
Significantly, in searching for an instance of sound military planning in a modern republic Rood found it within a sort of a non-democratic, non-republican organization within that republic: the policy set down by the U.S. military between the world wars. Given that “war is an instrument of national policy,” and that “wars are won by attacking, disorganizing, and destroying the armed forces of the enemy,” the American military should be “capable of carrying war to an enemy.” An “isolationist” policy would have amounted to coastal defense, reinforcing a naval fleet restricted to home waters—the naval equivalent of France’s Maginot Line. No other agencies in the federal government were “prepared to accept war as a legitimate act of policy and not imply as an expedient for the defense of the physical borders of the country.” Interwar U. S. foreign policy was ideological, “not territorial, and devoted to goals that had the haziest definitions,” such as “peace, disarmament, world order, sanctity of treaties, and international law.” “It was not until the middle of 1941 that the services received a firm directive from the president concerning the kind of war for which they should plan.” Fortunately, the military officers already knew what they needed to do, having learned from the experience of the Great War and rejecting “the reliance on static or trench warfare” seen in that war. As early as 1919, an article in the Infantry Journal argued that “war is motion,” that “only the unlimited offensive brings decisive results.” This doctrine quickly got into the curricula at West Point and Annapolis. Indeed, future naval officers had been studying Mahan in the years before the Great War, and drew from him the determination to prevent attacks on the American coasts, not merely to respond to them. To his credit, Franklin Roosevelt, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the war, imbibed this doctrine, too, although he didn’t understand the need for an army expeditionary force until much later. Although Crouch and Garrity don’t mention it, the idea of ‘advance defense,’ of carrying the war to the enemy, animated American military policy throughout the nineteenth century during the Indian Wars and the Civil War. When American military planners decided that “the implacable logic of military doctrine” required preparedness to fight the country’s “nearest and most dangerous enemy,” they followed the practice of their predecessors.
For the United States and its allies after the Second World War, the nearest and most dangerous enemy was Soviet Russia. Crouch and Garrity turn to Rood’s analysis of “the Russian Problem” in the first chapter of the book’s third triptych. Since Peter the Great established the first modern state in Russia, the country’s grand strategy has consisted of “the persistent drive to open waters” on all sides of its huge territory. “If successfully accomplished, this strategy would have left Russia the dominant Eurasian power, given Russia’s long-standing ability to control or influence events in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia”—vast, mostly flat expanses that lend themselves to the movements of mass armies culled from a massive population. “The political-religious notion that [Russia] was destined to be the ‘Third Rome'” has reinforced this policy; the Marxist-Leninist ambition to serve as the cutting edge of ‘World History’ yielded the same policy, albeit on an atheist foundation. “Rood took seriously the statement of… Soviet officials that the end of their policy was to be the establishment of socialism and communism throughout the world.” Under their ideology, the world needed to be reorganized, wrested from the capitalists. “So long as the nations of the West continued to claim the right to rule themselves under the principles to which they adhered, Rood concluded that there was a high probability of war.”
Rood understood Soviet grand strategy to consist of five characteristics: in contrast to the Nazis, postwar Soviet rulers showed patience, relying on the security provided by their Eastern and Central European empire and the absence of any Asian power capable of launching a major invasion; Soviet rulers “played both sides against the middle,” often backing both sides in a conflict, thereby positioning themselves for influence over whichever side won; the Soviets always linked politics, economics, and military strategy ( beginning in the 1950s, in Afghanistan, they built roads and airports as an apparent means of improving commerce, then used that infrastructure to launch their 1979 military invasion); they established alliances with two or more countries that could serve one purpose, as when they allied with both Egypt and Libya in the late 1960s, reasoning that if one of those countries ‘turned’ on them or lost a major war, the other would still provide them with a foothold in the Mediterranean; and finally, the Soviets “sought to force the United States to defend areas away from the principal theater of war,” as for example in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, theatres far from the crucial European Plain. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia not only served to firm up the Soviet empire, it also “effectively served as a dress rehearsal for an invasion of Western Europe, without unduly alarming the United States and its NATO allies.” After the re-conquest, the Soviets took care to leave two tank divisions and three motorized rifle divisions behind, strengthening their in-place military capabilities near the border with the West Europeans, and doing so without provoking “any commensurate military response” from NATO. Meanwhile, in southern Europe, by the 1970s Yugoslavia “had become an advanced base for Soviet military power in the eastern Mediterranean,” serving as a point of transit for Soviet military supplies to Egypt during the 1973 Middle East War. By then, NATO would have been hard pressed to defend Greece or Turkey in a war with Warsaw Pact forces. The beauty of all this, from the Soviet perspective, was that “nowhere had the Soviet Union needed to wage war to change the strategic circumstances in its favors, although wars in the area had frequently opened opportunities for new strategic gains.” They employed a similar strategy in Asia, aiming at isolating the United States from such allies as Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.
But what about deterrence based on U.S. nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles? The Soviets devoted substantial resources to civil defense, evidently not concurring with Western claims that such efforts must be useless against such weapons. “Rood thought that if the West acted upon the belief that the Soviets were not really serious about going to war, that they were only interested in security, the West would fall victim to the self-deception that characterized the democratic strategy deficit.” But if the nuclear standoff really was a standoff, if nuclear weapons were truly ‘unusable’ because a first strike by one side would provoke an obliterating counterattack by the other, why would a well-prepared ‘conventional’ war in Europe not make sense? What would the Americans do about it? “Americans had not toughed it out in Vietnam—why should it be any different in Western Europe, when the costs would be so much higher?”
In Rood’s judgment, the end of the Cold War left American more, not less vulnerable to Russian machinations, in the long run. “He wondered if objective conditions now rendered an alliance between Moscow and Beijing, based on their common anti-Western perspective, much more viable than it had been.” Nothing that has occurred since his death in 2011 has undermined that suspicion.
How would America’s rivals address their “America Problem”? “If there is to be a war, Americans will want to fight it abroad.” To avoid fighting on American soil, and to avoid fighting a large and costly war far from that soil, Americans will need to prepare “to fight a lot of little” wars; this requires a network of “bases and allies abroad, from which to conduct military operations.” Considered as targets, North and South America “are little more than continent-sized islands off the west coast of Europe and off the east coast of Asia”; taken together with Africa, they constitute what geopolitical strategist Halford Mackinder called “The World Island.” This ‘Old World’ is much bigger than the New World, making “the balance of power in Eurasia…of intense interest to Americans,” inasmuch as a country or coalition of countries that dominated the World Island would confront the United States with “an overwhelming material threat to its existence.”
American interests overseas are more than military and political. As a commercial republic, America has “far-flung commercial interests and the desire for open markets.” Both the Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars—the “first congressionally authorized uses of force” under the 1787 Constitution—aimed at protecting U.S. commerce.
The sheer size of the United States, along with the extent of its commercial and military interests, makes it both powerful and vulnerable in international politics. More, the very proliferation of factions that benefits American regime (as shown by Publius in the tenth Federalist) can prove a handicap in international politics because it provides foreign powers opportunities to play divide-and-rule, as Americans also saw early on, when French agent Edmond Genêt fomented dissent against the Adams Administration. Rood understood the American Civil War geopolitically, as a struggle by the United States to prevent disunion, which would have caused the North to deal “with endless coalitions between the confederacy and any European powers with territorial ambitions in North America,” a likelihood illustrated during the war itself, when France attempted to install an Austrian prince as the monarch of Mexico. It was not until a couple of years after the U.S. victory in the war that Great Britain finally accepted “the viability of the United States,” as signaled by the British North America Act of 1867.
A good thing, too, for both countries, as the twentieth century saw. “The imperatives of strategy would eventually overcome the American notion of political and military isolation from Europe,” as “Germany’s war aims in 1914 clearly included domination of the European continent, which meant controlling the maritime approaches to Europe and dictating the terms of peacetime commerce with powers like the United States.” Further, as Rood put it, “one of the invariable indications that the United States is in for trouble with a foreign power is when that power begins open or clandestine operations in the Western Hemisphere,” as Germany did in the run-up to both world wars. In both cases, the main political challenge came from the reluctance of democratically-elected political representatives to contradict the intense desire of their constituents to stay out of the war; the average citizen doesn’t think geopolitically, and usually doesn’t want to.
Competing European empires had buffered the United States for decades because none was able to dominate Europe, much less the World Island. The collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, and French empires left only one empire standing there. Soviet ambitions compelled the United States “to man the distant ramparts itself.” As Rood acknowledged, Nicholas Spykman had anticipated this circumstance during the war, calling the attention of readers of his 1942 book, America’s Strategy in World Politics, to the need to prevent hostile powers from controlling the “Rimland,” that is, the borders of Eurasia—areas containing most the world’s population and natural resources. The strategy of ‘containment’ followed from Spykman’s insights; Rood recommended U.S. efforts “to defeat probes or aggression by the communist bloc in the Rimland; to threaten to escalate the conflict locally if circumstances warranted; and to roll back marginal communist gains in the Rimland whenever the opportunity presented itself.” Hence his support for the American military intervention on the side of the non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong guerrillas operating in the south. “If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Rood thought that the Philippines would be forced to reconsider its attitude toward China,” which is exactly what has happened. Rood also judged that withdrawal would risk “a later war with China when it had developed a full-sized nuclear arsenal, backed by the capacity to command the sea areas around the island shield of Asia”; the first has now happened, the second is in the works.
Since the Cold War never quite ended, as Russia regrouped and reprised many of its longstanding policies, Rood observed that “geography has not changed”: “Even a diminished Russia is still only a few hundred miles from the German border, while the United States will always be thousands of miles away.” Russia’s regime changed, but not into a commercial republic, ready to give up its extraterritorial ambitions and happily restrict its relations with the world to diplomacy, commerce, and cultural exchange. “Like Germany after 1918,” Russia “had not been occupied”; “in the mind of its leaders and people, it had not truly been defeated” but rather had been “cheated out of its rightful place in the sun by traitors and scheming foreign enemies.” Russia’s 2001 agreement to a “strategic partnership” with China underscored this point, a point underwritten not only by China’s growing military power but by the much-overlooked fact that “Russia remains the strongest military power in Europe,” as China does in Asia.
Rood’s welcome defense of the American 2003 intervention in Iraq reflects these concerns. Iraq was an ally of Russia; Russia wants the U.S. out of the Middle East. In defeating the Saddam Hussein regime, America had “accrued strategic advantages” by “remov[ing] a protégé of Russia” and a “disruptive force in the Middle East.” But although America “had neutralized Iraq,” it hadn’t “dealt with other hostile nations claiming leadership of the Arab world,” nor “resolved the terrible weakness of the Saudi regime in the face of Arab-Islamic terrorism.” The war in Syria illustrates this, although Rood did not live to see it.
Crouch and Garrity conclude their study of Rood’s strategic thought with a call for moral and political responsibility. “What if” America’s “apparent loss of direction is not merely the result of uncontrollable historical forces, and the limits of our power and human foresight, but at least in part is due to the strategic purposes and actions of others? What if these purposes are long-standing, going back not only to 1991 but well before that? What if others are patiently accumulating the sort of strategic advantages that will put us at grave disadvantage in a war, or at least in a major political crisis, while attempting to conceal those preparations. Are objective conditions bringing about an alignment of hostile powers?” Good questions, all. Who today is answering them?
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