Patrick Porter

WHY BRITAIN DOESN'T DO GRAND STRATEGY

Abstract The SDSRs proverbial elephant in the room is Britains failure to craft strategy that reflects not just its aspirations, but its actual interests and capabilities. With no obvious major enemy to focus the mind, British strategy has been shaped by Washingtons agenda, and become overly concerned with ‘narrative’. As the National Security Strategy is reviewed over the coming months, Britain must ask basic existential questions about its role in the world, and encourage its scholars and policy-makers to embrace the study and conception of strategy.

Long wars and long telegrams: containing Al‐Qaeda

Can history help the ‘war on terror’? It is a cliche that 9/11 changed the world. But the idea that the war is exceptional lacks historical perspective. Assuming a radically new threat, the Bush administration proclaimed a theology rather than a coherent strategy. It articulated the ‘war on terror’ as a utopian and unbounded quest for absolute security. It did not effectively measure costs against risks or orchestrate ends, ways and means. This led the United States into exhausting wars of attrition. A more careful dialogue with the past can address this. Containment, Americas core idea during the Cold War, supplies a logic that can inform a prudent strategy. Like Soviet communism with its fatal self-contradictions, Al-Qaeda and its terror network is ultimately self-destructive without major military operations. America and its allies can contain it with more limited measures in the long term as it destroys itself. The US should show restraint, doing nothing to hinder the growing Islamic revolt against Al-Qaeda. In other words, fight small and wait.

A Matter of Choice: Strategy and Discretion in the Shadow of World War II

Abstract American policy-makers are predisposed towards the idea of a necessary war of survival, fought with little room for choice. This reflects a dominant memory of World War II that teaches Americans that they live in a dangerously small world that imposes conflict. Critics argue that the ‘choice versus necessity’ schema is ahistorical and mischievous. This article offers supporting fire to those critiques. Americas war against the Axis (1941–45) is a crucial case through which to test the ‘small world’ view. Arguments for war in 1941 pose overblown scenarios of the rise of a Eurasian super-threat. In 1941 conflict was discretionary and not strictly necessary in the interests of national security. The argument for intervention is a closer call that often assumed. This has implications for Americas choices today.

Goodbye to all that: On small wars and big choices

This article reflects on a decade of British counterinsurgency operations. Questioning the idea that lessons have been learnt, the paper challenges the assumptions that are being used to frame future strategic choice. Suggesting that defence engagement is primarily focused on optimising overseas interventions while avoiding a deeper strategic reassessment about whether the UK should be undertaking these sorts of activities, the article calls for a proper debate on Britains national security interests.

Beyond the American Century: Walter Lippmann and American Grand Strategy, 1943–1950

As the United States became a world Power, journalist and intellectual Walter Lippmann feared that it would become its own worst enemy. During and after the Second World War, he tried to steer the country towards coherent statecraft, to define the national interest and the limits of power, and give geopolitical expression to the role of the United States as the core of an Atlantic strategic system. But in response to world war, the Truman Doctrine, and the Korean War, he became pessimistic about the countrys ability to conduct strategy effectively. In the prophetic tradition, he believed that a fatal symbiosis between Americas growing strength and domestic politics led it towards crisis. Though at times ahistorical, Lippmanns concept of strategy deserves attention for its dialogue between power and identity, for its questioning of “ends” as well as means, and for its focus on the danger of self-defeating behaviour.

Why distance matters: putting the ‘Geo’ back into politics

A common assumption in the West is that distance and space are no longer key considerations in strategy and politics. ‘Over there’, the argument goes, can quickly and dangerously become ‘over here’. Yet, as Patrick Porter contends, this is a dangerous fallacy that distorts Western strategy. A proper consideration of the role of distance should not lead to disengagement or isolation, but rather to a more selective and considered – and thus more flexible – foreign and security policy.

Paper Bullets: American Psywar in the Pacific, 1944-1945

This article examines the ideas that underpinned American psychological war (psywar) in the Pacific. While we cannot precisely measure its effects, we can trace its intellectual history with more confidence. US psywar was a combination of scientific method and myth-making. Assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army tended to be careful, discriminating, and increasingly sophisticated, if not uniformly accurate. At the level of the battle front, practitioners of the ‘mind war’ strove to overcome stereotypes and refine and complexify their view of the enemy.The further they moved from the battlefield towards assessments of Japanese military leadership, society, and high politics, the more they became myth-makers, projecting onto Japan a powerful set of preconceived ideas. These included notions of the superstitious and malleable Japanese mind, the suicidal military elite, and the innocent symbol emperor. In their analysis two models of culture evolved. Their approach to the IJA mostly presented culture as dynamic, layered, and conflicted, whereas their view of Japanese society was monolithic, bounded, and timeless. This contradictory pattern can be explained by different levels of exposure to the subject, the practice of filling ‘knowledge gaps’ with preconceptions, and by American policymaking interests.

War and the Religious Will to Sacrifice

The Great War, with its mechanized slaughters, did not kill the language of sacrifice. Most religious students who fought did not undergo a unilinear experience of disillusionment. Instead, ambiguity and adaptation dominated their responses. In explaining why, four interlocking attitudes and influences emerge. First, most did not enter the war in a state of illusion about the pre-war world in the first place. Second, their rhetoric of sacrifice did not disguise the war’s conditions and heavy losses, but made a virtue of them, representing high casualties and suffering as the necessary precondition of national moral and spiritual rebirth. Third, by interpreting the war as a personal test of faith, they internalized the sacred meaning of the war as a struggle within the combatant’s soul, so that the more passive stance of endurance and willingness to sacrifice was sacred in itself, even when deprived of immediate offensive breakthrough. Finally, the cumulative impact of the loss of comrades turned soldiers into an armed community of the bereaved who were reluctant to disown and cheapen the sacrifices of the dead. Even for those who questioned the language, it was rarely in terms of nihilistic irony that saw deaths as meaningless. Far from a meaningless cataclysm, the war and its horrors remained the product of intelligent design, an apocalypse with an even bleaker set of meanings, as the judgment of God.

Book Review: The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers

The spiritual history of the First World War is still being written. Richard Schweitzer’s The Cross and the Trenches, an analysis of the religious journeys of British and American Soldiers, is a painstaking and insightful contribution. Schweitzer delves widely and deeply into archives, memoirs, diaries and tracts. Rejecting the archetype of the war as the Great Flood washing away religious faith, Schweitzer unearths a whole plethora of religious responses. From the metaphysical hopes penned by Field Marshal Haig on the eve of the Somme, to the cultic power of the soldiers’ encounter with the crucifix, to the pre-battle prayers of the pious, Schweitzer shows the richness of this increasingly popular historical field. Schweitzer skilfully interweaves the history of religion at the front line with the history of the war as a whole. The morale of combat soldiers, for example, was often bound up with mythology and piety, ritual and sacrament, which for many rendered intelligible the experience of danger, wounds, suffering and death. The Western Front, the site of an immobile and lethal system of trench warfare, was also the site of wayside crosses and churches converted into makeshift hospitals, of reported saints and miracles. An especially illuminating chapter shows the way the home front and the front line experiences were intertwined. The homeland=front-line relationship was not one of simple hostility and mutual incomprehension, as embittered novelists sometimes portrayed it. Soldiers entreated their families or intimates to pray for them, and sent their prayers in return the state of morale was mutually reinforcing. Godly literature and missions of religious revival connected the two fronts, as the churches continued their peacetime welfare activity to combat a godless modernity. Schweitzer shows the intersection between soldiers’ and civilians’ emotional needs, a common experience of anguish and mutual support. A fascinating, though tantalizingly brief, highlight is the reception of Woodrow Wilson in near-Messianic terms. His famous ‘14 points’ programme, aiming at reordering world security and replacing secret diplomacy with open arbitration, endowed Wilson for many faithful as the bringer of a better world, the rainmaker of peace. This is one example of the way Schweitzer illustrates the discursive power Book Reviews 459