Victor Davis Hanson, the expert on war in ancient Greece, has an article over at National Review Online that needs attention. His argument is that we are entering a very dangerous situation in world affairs that could result in war without judicious diplomacy. The reasoning goes this way:

• The United States altered its foreign policy towards retreat from command of the global commons (Posen 2003)
• This provided space for revisionist states to challenge the established global order
• Now that the United States is changing its foreign policy to a more aggressive assertion of hegemony, revisionist powers may miscalculate

His specific examples of revisionist states are:

1. North Korea’s missile launches and threats of nuclear war against the United States and allies
2. Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty and invasions of its near abroad
3. Iran’s harassment of ships in the Persian Gulf
4. China’s construction of artificial islands in the SCS
5. The rise of Islamic State

He provides the following pieces of advice:

1. Avoid making verbal threats that are not serious and backed up by force. After eight years of pseudo-red lines, step-over lines, deadlines, and “game changers,” American ultimatums without consequences have no currency and will only invite further aggression.

This is not quite good enough. According to his strategic logic, the United States no longer has credibility as an enforcer, therefore any statement by this logic not only must be backed by force, but actually it should be signaled with force.  Taking this logic, it invites escalation.

 

2. The unlikely is not impossible. Weaker powers can and do start wars. Japan in December 1941 attacked the world’s two largest navies based on the false impression that great powers which sought to avoid war did so because they are weak. That current American military power is overwhelming does not mean delusional nations will always agree that it is so—or that it will be used.

The problem described is age-old. Weaker powers will initiate war, when the stakes are higher for the weaker power than they are for the stronger.

Now, his analysis of World War II is incorrect. Japan expected to wipe out the US Pacific fleet. It just so happened that the American carriers weren’t in Pearl Harbor at the time the attack occurred. They attacked the British in Malaya, because the British would be in the position of fighting a two-front war and Japan calculated that they would sacrifice colonial presence in the Pacific as homeland security was a higher priority. By ejecting the British from the Malay Peninsula, the loss of the Singapore coaling station would end the hegemony of the British Navy in the Eastern Pacific. The Japanese were not delusional.

 

3. Big wars can start from small beginnings. No one thought an obscure Austrian archduke’s assassination in 1914 would lead to some 18 million dead by 1918. Consider any possible military engagement a precursor to far more. Have a backup plan—and another backup plan for the backup plan.

Prudent advice, but from a realist perspective completely misunderstands World War I. It was not the assassination, but the structure of the international system in Europe at the time. World War I was bound to happen after German unification, it was just that nobody could say when. It upset the balance of power and drove a network of unconditional security pacts to help balance the system that had been in place since the Vienna Settlement. Beyond The Guns of August, Hanson should read Mearsheimers, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

4. Do not confuse tactics with strategy. Successfully shooting down a rogue airplane, blowing up a speedboat, or taking an ISIS-held Syrian city is not the same as finding a way to win and end a war. Strategic victory is time-consuming and usually involves drawing on economic, political, and cultural superiority as well as military success to ensure that a defeated opponent stays defeated—and agrees that further aggression is counterproductive.

These conditions cannot be met in the post-World War II era. The presence of nuclear weapons means wars are necessarily limited when fought between great powers. The stakes are not high enough for a great power to wage a war of annihilation against a weak power. Wars since decolonization are principally wars of identity. They are ethnic conflicts which can only be terminated decisively with forced migration or genocide. Otherwise, they are merely frozen or managed, the more humane option.

The situation in the Middle East is a direct result of poor planning an poor execution of the campaign to change the regime in Bagdad in 2003. There was no real planning for the collapse of the regime and every decision by the provisional authority exacerbated the problems. The United States tried to do imperialism on the cheap and birthed a virulent insurgency. To attempt to turn Iraq quickly into a multi-ethnic/multi-confessional/multi-sectarian republic overnight was naive in the extreme. Humpty Dumpty was broken and nothing is going to put it back together again.

Were it not for the refugee flows destabilizing Europe, a better policy, but amoral and cruel, is a bloodletting. Let the parties grind each other up while balancing sides in turn to prolong the conflict and weaken all sides. The Obama administration except for the deployment to Iraq appeared to be attempting just that. At least that is the kind way of interpreting the half-measures taken, which Hanson rails against.

5. Human nature is unchanging—and not always admirable. like it or not, neutrals more often flock to crude strength than to elegant and humane weakness.

I am not sure what he is getting at here. Who’s flocking to whom? Is he channeling his inner Morgenthau? The fact of the matter is, in power politics, you can see either balancing or bandwagoning behavior. Furthermore, when you bring preferences into the mix, you get some very indeterminate behavior than would be expected by power politics alone. Christensen and Snyder (1990) for example, created a continuum index of power and risk aversion to explain various observed alliance behavior. At one end of the continuum are the lions, who are great powers with lots to lose and high risk aversion to upsetting the status quo. Next are the lambs, who are weaker powers with not much to lose but also risk averse. As you move up the scale, you come to jackals that are weaker states but willing to take some risk to upset the status quo. Finally you have the wolves that are states with power and willing to take great risks to increase it. Jackals bandwagon with wolves—think Italy with Germany in the Second World War. Russia these days behaves like a wolf. China and Iran behave like wolves in their respective neighborhoods.

North Korea is not a wolf. North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons is fully explained by the lessons they have learned living in a unipolar world. Aggression by the United States to defend United States interests from the outside looks reckless—like a crusader state. North Korea is a case of authoritarian personal rule. Kim Jong-Un is the state. Having a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it to the US mainland in his mind is the ultimate deterrent to a US engineered change of regime. No US President would risk a US city in exchange for removal of Kim’s regime. It is life insurance for Kim.

Kim inadequately appreciates how the drive toward this deterrent is in fact destabilizing and inviting attack. Nuclear weapons without a second strike capability is not much of a deterrent. It encourages a first strike to eliminate the arsenal. In the era of ballistic missile defense, the US just might risk regime change, before Kim has a chance to develop a second strike capability, such as mobile ICBMs that require little preparation to fire or nuclear armed submarines. Kim’s best strategy, and the one he is using, is the Soviet strategy from the end of World War II until 1964, when it was finally able to muster a viable second strike capability: threaten US allies with attack to dissuade US aggression.

6. Majestic pronouncements and utopian speechifying impress global elites and the international media, but they mean nothing to rogue nations. Such states instead count up fleets, divisions, and squadrons—and remember whether a power helps its friends and punishes its enemies. Standing by a flawed ally is always preferable to abandoning one because it can sometimes be bothersome.

No hegemon should be chainganged into war. (Libya is a case of this, and a major failing of the Obama administration.) If anything US allies often feel they are chainganged into war. As to the speechifying, US foreign policy has always been idealistic. Realpolitik is compatible with several strands of primordial foreign policy tradition. The policy prescriptions can be the same.

7. Public support for military action hinges mostly on perceived success. Tragically, people will support a dubious but successful intervention more than a noble but bogged-down one. The most fervent prewar supporters of war are often the most likely to bail during the first setback. Never calibrate the wisdom of retaliating or intervening based on initial loud public enthusiasm.

Liberal and some strains of classical realist theory assume that state preferences reflect popular, or at least elite popular desires, when the state has consensual legitimate government. Wars of choice, not defensive wars triggered by existential threat, necessarily will lack popular backing if they are not ended quickly on favorable terms. War is unpredictable. Don’t start one without an exit strategy short of victory.

8. War is a harsh distillery of talent. Good leaders and generals in peace are not necessarily skilled in conflict. They can perform as badly in war as good wartime generals do in peace. Assume that the commanders who start a war won’t be there to finish it.

Pure Clausewitz and sage advice to any President.

9. War is rarely started by accident and far more often by mistaken calibrations of relative power. Flawed prewar assessments of comparative weakness and strength are tragically corrected by war—the final ugly arbiter of who really was strong and who was weak. Visible expressions of military potential, serious steady leadership, national cohesion, and economic robustness remind rivals of the futility of war. Loud talk of disarmament and a preference for international policing can encourage foolish risk-takers to miscalculate that war is a good gamble.

While the advice on sources of power listed are important in the abstract, they don’t really figure into the calculus of the weak state fighting for higher stakes than the great power. What the weak state contemplating a change in the status quo wants to know is how much the status quo great power is willing to risk to maintain it. It is for that reason, loud talk of disarmament is important. It signals a change in preferences. Remote interests aren’t as important as they were.

Here is where the South China Sea situation got to where it is. In purely realist terms, geography in this case is destiny. China has approximately 9000 miles of coast line. It is dependent on international trade for energy, raw materials, and export markets for its manufactures, since it lacks a mass consumer society. Its access to the sea is constrained to narrow, easily blockaded straits formed by archipelagoes. Therefore, political and military control out to the first island chain is existential for China. Freedom of navigation and national self-determination of the archipelagic states in the region are not existential for the US. Taiwan is very serious but not existential because, just as MacArthur understood, Taiwan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine pen. China in possession of Taiwan gives it unfettered access to the Pacific for a submarine fleet that poses a threat to the US and radically alters the relative power of China and the United States. Japan is not at risk. Japan is a great power and a peer competitor of China.

The US is not going to risk war to prevent Chinese domination of the South China Sea and China knows it. China is not going to risk war either. It is why confrontations have always been with constabulary and naval militia forces.

10. Deterrence that prevents war is usually smeared as war-mongering. Appeasement, isolationism, and collaboration that avoid immediate crises but guarantee eventual conflict are usually praised as civilized outreach and humane engagement.

Welcome to the world of a consensual government. Kant’s republican peace theory predicts that states will be risk averse when they reflect popular will, since it is the demos that bears the cost of war.  It is ultimately a tragedy waiting to happen, since state preferences in the system vary and the only way to prevent war is to prepare for it–there are in fact wolves–and there is currently no such thing as a global security community.

Hanson needs to think more about the multipolar world prior to World War II. While “Munich” has passed into the lexicon as a synonym for pusillanimity, lest we forget, there are times when appeasement and collaboration are the wiser policy. It all depends on the preferences. Appeasement and collaboration were common tools of diplomacy between European status.