Shield of Achilles, Intro

The eras during which the nation-state grew and thrived saw many different types of states and a continual reconditioning of the triad relationship between law, strategy, and history. There were many different revolutions in military affairs, for example: which one led to the modern financing system which required a state to support it? The state, in essence, has been continually restructured and organized.

How to law, strategy, and history combine to make the state? The state exists, mainly, because it was the most efficient way to accomplish a number of elements – as Bobbitt says, it exists by virtue of its purposes. These elements are:

a) drive for survival and freedom of action (strategy)

b) authority and legitimacy (law)

c) identity (history)

These three factors do not simply provide the basis of a pyramid for which the top is the state; they also flow into each other, making them intertwined to a detailed degree. A state must have legitimacy to have a monopoly on the use of force, but it is often force, fed by identity, that gives it that legitimacy.

The situation amongst states today is one of confusion. With the end of the Long War (1914-1990), and the victory of the democratic nation-state, the virtue of its purposes is being called into question. In essence, the state no longer has a clear calling. Is it to establish other democratic nation-states? If so, the inability to establish a clear policy one way or the other in the twenty years since the end of the Cold War has not only been counter intuitive, but incredibly harmful. Bobbitt again: “That calculus [What are our forces for] depends upon the axiomatic requirement of the State to survive by putting its security objectives first.” What, exactly, are the security objectives of the modern nation-state?

Bobbitt says the need to maintain order must factor in, but the need to maintain order does not catch minds, and is not a concept domestic orders can easily get behind. “The state, being highly future-oriented, can channel resources into the future and harness present energy for deferred gains. But this quality of futurism is also its vulnerability: the state is a clumsy instrument for persuading people to make sacrifices when objectives are in doubt, or to parry subtle long-term threats, because the interests of the people can easily be severed from those of the state when long-term objectives and goals are at issue.”

* * *

As is probably clear by now, Bobbitt’s overall point is the context which the nation-state reformed so continuously throughout the 18^th and 19^th century and put into practice in competing systems in the 20^th century died when the Long War ended. While the state is not dying, the nation-state is – the basis for the state is changing, and organizing the state along principles of nationalist sovereignty does not hold up to the leveling force of globalization. Corporations now dominate the world economy, in the sense that they are economies unto themselves, controlling larger amounts of wealth than most nations. Bobbitt says the market-state is the next logical step, which will maximize the opportunity of its people, as opposed to the nation-state maximizing the welfare of its people.

Globalization results in a short-term nationalistic tendency, as culture and economy go through upheaval, then settles down as culture and economy get plugged in with the rest of the world. Globalization, also, has no controlling force; the United States is the ‘source code’, in the words of Thomas P.M. Barnett, but in many ways the United States lost control of the virus it created. Nobody has control of it now, leading to a hybrid of political nationalism and economic dependency. American politicians demand American jobs, and the American consumer agrees, while also wanting the cheap goods China makes and provides.

The nation-state undergoes upheaval strategically as the element of its existence disappears, and as globalization helps transform warfare, assisted by nuclear weapons, instant communications, and the recognition that defeating the United States in a conventional war is unlikely. Warfare goes to the ground, so to speak, in avoiding American strengths and playing to a key weakness – prolonged engagement. The nation-state, which for so long was based around deterrence of conventional and nuclear war (especially among major powers), compellence of weaker states, and reassurance of allies via nuclear umbrella. With everyone deterred, weaker powers somewhat compelled, and reassurance not entirely needed, the state must rediscover its strategic basis for action and re-legitimize itself at home for a populous increasingly frustrated by the lack of control they, and the state, seem to have.

Link Set and Commentary

While I finish the first chapter of Shield of Achilles...

China leads in Solar Production - Want the US to move to clean energy? Give us some competition.

Marines Fight Taliban With Little Aid from Afghans - Just depressing. In Iraq, we could provide security with a 'surge' and then work to build a system from the bottom up (as opposed to the top town, which we tried and failed at: see Iraq, 2004-2006). We can provide the security but, more and more, it seems like little is following up.

The Ultimate Burden - Reinstate the draft? Expand the roll of the Peace Corps? Make federal programs to teach students languages from a young age?

How do we make Americans realize their role is not just within the country?

The End of 'The Wire' - The Brits and Baltimore

40 dead in Afghanistan - Hot off the press!

And, as always, today's Nightwatch

The Shield of Achilles – Prologue, and the nation-state as it exists today

Shield of Achilles is about the modern nation-state; past, present, and future. The focus is not on the state itself as much as it lies on the key relationships which make the state whole: the relationship between the history of the state and war, the relationship between constitutional (state) and international law, and the relationship between war and the international legal order.

The state today is different from the traditional model of sovereignty, so much different one would be foolish to consider that a state does have true sovereignty within its own territory. Yet that is the model the international legal order is based on, established in 1914, reinforced in 1945, and seen through to success in 1990. Bobbitt gives five main challenges to the sovereign state:

1) universal human rights

2) nuclear weapons and other WMD’s and the ability with such weapons to render the state defense of civil society impotent (much less state borders)

3) trans-border threats, such as environmental damage, migration, and disease

4) economic freedom, leaving states out of the management of economics

5) global communications network which bypasses traditional network paradigms for the transmittal of news

While the initial state was created because it was a better way to finance a larger army (extrapolate this notion from buying a few cannon to the timetabled armies of World War I to get the full effect of the idea of the state), today even armies are outsourced under point 4, or are out of limits of state control, #3, but remain protected by that state due to the notion of sovereignty. Coupled with #2, this causes a huge problem in the way modern nation-states act: deterrence works in a threat-based strategic environment, but not when the threat hides amongst the people.

There is more, and probably will be more, but the basic notion is thus: the nation-state as we know it is undergoing a transformation. Most often, throughout history, this turbulence in the international legal order resulted in war to establish a new order; with the growing interdependency between nation-states, the legal order can be reset with growing political cooperation.

There is more in the prologue, but it deals with visions of the future as well as the structure of the book; overall the key point taken from the prologue is the changing conception of the nation-state. It’s difficult to think of the nation-state in terms of absolute sovereignty, yet that is what we define it as. For the past…at least 19 years, and maybe longer, the various states of the world have agreed on an international forum (at the least) and some semblance of international legal order without any mechanism of enforcement. Given the notion of the sovereign state, there does not need to be any mechanism, but given the idea of ‘state-sponsored terrorists organizations’ what does a nation-state do when the threat remains hidden in another state which is incapable or unwilling to deal with it?

The Nation-State

In an effort to continue my education on a subject I've always been keenly interested: The triad relationship between modern war, the modern state, and globalization.

There are, I'm sure, hundreds of books about this topic or one of the three relationships. I've read some of them, but I want to delve deeper into the topic.

The start of this will be twofold: Phillip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Machiavelli's The Prince - Machiavelli being one of the first to lay out the building blocks of the paradigm that would be the state. I've read The Prince a few times now, but not with this critical eye.

Only just finished an interesting forward in SoA by Michael Howard, giving a very brief background on the history of the state as Bobbitt sees it, beginning with the breakdown of the feudal order and the creation of the dynastic order; its fall and the creation of the nation-state; and the current period of upheaval within nation-states themselves.

Thoughts so far:

1. The climax of the state was World War I, of the nation-state, World War II, with a long period of waiting out the Soviet Union. If Kant and Bentham guide one path of statehood (the western tradition) and Hagel guided a second, Marx and Lenin were relative latecomers to the game, but did establish a third path. However, after World War II the world begins to see operating forces not controlled by a state, so while the end of the Cold War may have proven the legitimacy of the western-style nation state, the climax was much earlier.

2. States earn their legitimacy by how well they keep the peace, but they keep the peace only as well as they defeat those elements seeking to undermine it. This doesn't always mean war, but in many cases it does.

Afghan Elections

Afghanistan's Tyranny of the Minority - Selig S. Harrison, NYT

Probably not going to happen today. The best scenario for the immediate future is a true run-off, with security improving over the next month and a better political battle. Even that is unlikely to happen.

World War I and II

One of the reasons for the lack of posts the past week are two books I’ve been fascinated by.

The first is Edwin P. Hoyt’s The Glory of the Solomons. The Solomon Island campaign of 1942-1943 is a fascinating topic, primarily because both the Japanese and the Allies (Australia and New Zealand both played large roles) were evenly matched. This was not true in all areas – the Japanese were superior when fighting at night, and their torpedoes were far better than the American types, while the Americans had the advantage of the increasing abilities of radar and much better interservice co-operation – but the year and a half of battle saw the tides shift towards each side many times.

The book moves its way from Guadalcanal up through the Russell Islands, New Georgia, the bypassing of Kolombangara by invading Vella Lavella, and Bouganville, which was invaded in late 1943. Even as late as then, had the Japanese committed more troops to the island, the Allied force would have found itself in serious jeopardy.

The Solomons campaign is as full of drama and luck as any other period of military history, making a study of it riveting. Not only was the issue in doubt many times, but the sheer difficulty of fighting on islands of sheer jungle make each invasion unique. 500 yards a day was exceptional – this is, by no means, Operation Cobra. The other aspect making the campaign fascinating is the learning curve on each side. After the invasion of Guadalcanal, the lessons learned in the Solomons campaign shaped the rest of the Pacific War, ranging from fighter interception and carrier radar detection to landing craft and sites to jungle warfare and how to blast the Japanese out of their defenses.

One other point of note, which translates well: exaggeration. Both the Allies and Japanese were prone to exaggeration after attacks (in terms of planes shot down, ships suck, etc). The Japanese, however, were far guiltier of this offense, having sunk the Allied fleet many times over by the end of the campaign.

The other book I am reading is John Keegan’s The First World War. I don’t know how I’ve got so far in life without reading it, because it is excellent and the First World War remains the subject around which all of the 20^th Century can be explained. It remains, also, one of the more tragic events in history – the poetry alone is tear-jerking, much less other works. Entire generations of men were wiped out because mass, supposedly, ruled the day.

There are times, looking at war, when I wonder how we possibly got here from there. A vociferous anti-war movement, a strategy in Afghanistan which has to be reduced to sound bytes and therefore makes no sense, militaries built to fight rivals as increasing trade makes it unlikely (but not impossible – see Germany, 1914), weapons which destroy entire cities. On some level, we’ve moved past nation-state war, with nuclear weapons and the globalization bug which America no longer controls – it reproduces and spreads on its own – but that means we have to learn to fight all over again. I don’t mean the military by any means, but the public. Symbols of military power and foreign success are not what they used to be at all.

China and Australia

With a little understanding - Economist.com

In the western Pacific, China lays at one end and Australia the other; therefore the relationship between the two is important. What is interesting about this description is the surface dichotomy between the political and economic ties between the two countries. Reading this, and one gets the impression Australia is welcoming Chinese dissidents, and China is acting like a child in the knee-jerk response.

Yet economic connectivity still goes on, and the head of the Australian Treasury is optimistic about this.

The further question will be how China and Australia balance the Chinese need for resources vs. Australian economic sovereignty. When Chinese companies are state-owned and want to control huge amounts of Australia's resources, one can see the hesitation.