Tag Archive for: History

The sources of Russian conduct

This essay examines the sources of Russian power and conduct from an historical, cultural and geopolitical perspective. It aims to help assessment of Russia’s future behaviour.

My approach is based on the essay The Sources of Soviet Conduct written by the famous US State Department diplomat and leading Russian expert George Kennan (under the pseudonym ‘X’) in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947. Kennan was struggling to get Washington to understand the threat from the Soviet Union so soon after the end of World War II, when the USSR had been an ally of the United States.

Kennan concluded that Moscow’s communist expansion ideology was the central threat to the US and needed to be thwarted by ‘a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.’ Kennan’s objective was the bringing about peacefully either the breakup or ‘gradual mellowing’ of the Soviet Union.

This was at a time, however, when Russia had no nuclear capability. Later, Kennan foresaw that the USSR would become the US’s most serious military challenge in the new nuclear era. In 1986, when the number of nuclear weapons peaked at around 70,000, just under two-thirds belonged to the USSR. And, at that time, the Soviet Union’s conventional military power in Europe was widely seen as easily outmatching that of NATO. There was a general worry that, if NATO didn’t use nuclear weapons, Moscow could be at the English Channel in weeks, if not days.

Today’s Russia is a very much reduced military threat from the peak of its power at the height of the Cold War. Now, Moscow is struggling to progress beyond what looks like a three-year stalemate in the battle for military supremacy in Ukraine, which is a middle-sized non-nuclear country with less than 30 percent of Russia’s population.

Today’s strategists in the West are debating the underlying reasons for Putin’s war on Ukraine. And they shake their heads when Putin so frequently and irresponsibly rattles the nuclear threat. Russia’s small relative economic size these days (a GDP of US$2.24 billion, little more than Italy’s US$2.04 billion) makes it even harder to explain why Putin would embark on and persist with such a war. Moreover, Moscow no longer has the leverage of leading a world communist movement towards an ideological victory.

But Kennan believed Russia’s history, geography and the ‘permanent characteristics’ of the Russian national character were key determinants of Soviet conduct, in addition to its ideology. His conclusion was almost Freudian in its determinism: ‘Nations, like individuals, are largely the product of their environment.’

I begin by examining Russia’s historical experience, which is so different from our own, and the development of the distinctive Russian view of itself as a uniquely Slavic power that is neither European nor Asian. We move on to explore the relevance of Russia still being geographically the largest country in the world, even though it lost a huge part (more than 5 million km2, or double the area of Western Australia) of the former territory of the USSR when that country collapsed in 1991. The Soviet Union was then divided into 15 countries, eight of which still share a common border with today’s Russia.

I then move on to a consideration of Russian culture and how it illuminates Moscow’s view of the world today. And its unique concept of a bigger Russian World, or Russkii Mir, encompassing places with significant numbers of Russian speakers, such as the Baltic countries, Moldova, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Finally, we must consider the issue of the new Russian ideology, which—while it no longer seeks to rule a future communist world—persists with dangerous authoritarian and expansionist geopolitical ambitions, not least in what it terms ‘the near abroad’. We need to understand that Russian domestic politics is still burdened with heavy imperial baggage from the early 20th century. And its central geopolitical priority these days sees the West as a hostile concert of powers seeking to destroy Holy Mother Russia.

So, let’s start with Russia’s history. Many Western observers have consistently misread Russia and the way it is driven by its geography, history and ideological ambition. Successive Russian or Soviet regimes have been seen in the West as simultaneously dangerous and essentially fragile, and yet we are surprised when, once again, the Russian phoenix re-emerges from the ashes.

Indeed, when the former Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, the sudden reaction in the West, especially in the US, was to write Russia off. No longer regarded as a global superpower, it fell as low as being dismissed by then president Barack Obama as a ‘regional’ European power. This description was (and still is) bitterly resented in Moscow.

Russia on the eastern flank of Europe but extends to territory more than 8000km away in Siberia that is part of east Asia. Russia has the longest border in the world, with China. Its history goes back more than 1000 years and includes, according to Yale University professor George Vernadsky, being occupied in a period ‘of enormous significance in Russian history for almost 250 years (1223-1452) under Genghis Khan’s Mongols.

Unlike most Anglo-Saxon countries, Russia has no obvious or clear-cut geographical borders and for practical purposes is almost landlocked, with only a few significant ports on the Black, Baltic and Barents seas and the northwest Pacific. It was invaded by Sweden in the 18th century, by France in the early 19th century and by Germany twice in the 20th century.

The eminent Harvard University professor of Ukrainian history Serhii Plokhy has stated—correctly, in my view—that the questions of where Russia begins and ends and who constitutes the Russian people have preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries. Plokhy also says the current Russia–Ukrainian conflict is only the latest turn of Russian policy resulting from the Russian elite’s thinking about itself and its Slavic neighbours as part of an allegedly common historical and cultural space and ultimately as one nation.

Plokhy asserts that the current conflict reprises many of the themes that have been central to Russia’s political and cultural relations in the region for the previous five centuries. These include Russia’s great power status and influence beyond its borders; the continuing relevance of religion, especially Orthodox Christianity, as defined in Russian history; the assertive conduct of Russian policy abroad; and the importance of language and culture as tools of Russian state policy. The conflict in Ukraine reminds the world that the formation of the modern post-imperial Russian nation is still far from complete.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already become the worst international crisis since the end of the Cold War. Plokhy has worried that a new and terrible stage in the shaping of European borders and populations was emerging. He has said that it all depends on the ability and readiness of the Russian elites to accept the post-Soviet political realities and adjust Russia’s own identity to the demands of the post-colonial world. The alternative, he concluded, might be a new world war.

In my view, we now face the spectre of not only a new Cold War but the prospects of a wider war in Europe, and perhaps beyond Europe, if Russia persists with its post-imperial expansion objectives. This is occurring at the same time as an increasingly authoritarian China is collaborating with its strategic partner in Moscow to remake the international order. This deeply disturbing picture is made all the worse by Putin’s now frequent threats of the potential use of nuclear weapons.

I have deliberately begun these introductory words with reference to the deeply entrenched historical context of Russia’s relations with Ukraine, which extend over more than nine centuries. For much of that time, and particularly during the 74 years of Bolshevik power, Russia’s long history with Ukraine has been consistently reinvented. Russians like to say, ‘The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable.’

And for Putin, today’s past is being continually reinvented, along with his reasons for his so-called special military operation in Ukraine, which is now Europe’s biggest war since World War II. Fake news and facts are the key tools of his huge propaganda offensive to reinforce Russian popular support for his war in Ukraine. It is now claimed by Moscow’s Levada poll that more than 70 percent of Russians believe that the war is not just a war about Ukraine but is also about the West trying to destroy Russia itself.

This brings me to Russia’s geography and Putin’s attempts to mix his fantasies of history with Russia’s geographical vulnerabilities to reinforce his position as the acknowledged authoritarian leader. Countries with long, porous borders become endlessly obsessive about their geographical security. This is something that Australians, with such obvious natural borders, find hard to understand. For more than 400 years, between 1500 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire grew at an astonishing average rate of 47,000 km2 per year. From the nucleus of Muscovy, it expanded into the world’s largest contiguous empire.

Russia is now much smaller than it has been for the past three centuries. Even so, at 17 million km² it is almost double the size of China or the US, and more than double the size of Australia.

But the fact remains that much of the Russian Far East was taken from a weak China by the unequal treaties of Nerchinsk in 1639 and Aigun in 1858. The current Chinese leadership seems to have put this historical inequity to one side for the time being. But it lurks there as a possible geographic cause for a future Chinese conflict with Russia. The Russian Far East Federal District, which shares a long border with China, has scarcely 8 million people but accounts for 40 percent of Russia’s area.

This leaves us with the question of Putin’s further manipulation of Russian culture and his bid for a uniquely Russian ideology. Putin’s primary aim is to revive Russia as a great power and recover an acknowledged sphere of influence over its former Soviet territories in the near abroad. His view is that, without dominance over Ukraine, Russia cannot be a great power again, and that a Ukraine within NATO would be a direct national security threat to Russia. Or, as one of Moscow’s prominent political commentators, Sergei Karaganov, puts it, Ukraine’s membership of NATO would be ‘a spearhead aimed at the heart of Russia.’

So, Putin’s aim is to restore Russia’s reputation as a great power and end the post-Cold War era of its humiliation. By invading Ukraine, Putin intended to send a strong signal to NATO of Russia’s dissatisfaction with its refusal to treat Russia as a major power with a vital geographical interest in Ukraine. Putin’s problem is that he now faces a relatively unified NATO and European Union opposing him. He has not only failed, so far, to establish Russia as a key player in European security; he has also ensured NATO’s enmity for the foreseeable future.

There is one final geopolitical consideration about Russia that requires mention. In recent years, leading Russian figures, including Putin, have begun to stress the geopolitics of what they call ‘Eurasianism’. In this geopolitical ideology, Russia’s economic and political orientation is changing dramatically from being predominantly European in historical outlook to being a great power in what it calls Eurasia. Former foreign minister Igor Ivanov argues that Russia is no longer the eastern flank of a failed greater Europe but is becoming the western flank of the emerging greater Eurasia, albeit led by China.

Many of these musings about Eurasia reflect the sort of imperial revival mentality that can be found in many writings in Moscow these days. They desperately reflect Russia’s seeking a new ideology as a powerful driver for Moscow. Karaganov argues that Russians have ‘our Asian traits in our genes, and we are in part an Asian country because of this.’ And he sees Russia’s greatness as being increasingly focussed on the development of Siberia.

But I believe most Russians would disagree with him. For example, the former KGB rezident in Canberra, Lev Koshliakov, said to me a couple of years ago, ‘I am not Asian.’

All this, of course, begs the question of how Russia can reassert its great power status in the permanent shadow of a rising, if not dominant, China? The central geopolitical question here is how can the West detach—or, more realistically, distance—Russia from China? Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in 2016 that the most dangerous scenario facing the US would be an anti-hegemonic grand coalition of China and Russia united not by ideology but by complementary grievances against the West. A current concern is that such a coalition now exists and is reflected in official worries in Washington that for the first time the US could now face war on two fronts with two great nuclear powers.

Another issue we need to explore, however, is whether Russia is now going to cease to be a major power and what that would mean for global order. The worst-case scenario for Putin would be for Russia’s war in Ukraine to end in a comprehensive military defeat and Ukraine’s integration into the EU and NATO. This would mean that the course of Russian history would change, with the irrevocable and final fall of the empire of the Tsars and the Bolsheviks.

As some Russians recognise and fear, the consequences of that calamity would be far-reaching, plunging Russia into a chronic identity crisis with unpredictable political consequences. It would mean the utter destruction of three long-held Russian beliefs: that Russia is different and is neither European or Asian; that this difference is transcendently important to the continuing existence of the uniquely Russian World or Russkii Mir; and that this gives Russia a unique role in world history.

So, what we are witnessing in Ukraine today may be the prolonged death throes of the Russian Empire, which started three decades ago with the end of the Soviet Union. How much weaker and smaller may Russia become?

Long-term trends of Russia’s demography and economy will certainly further weaken Russia. Russia’s military power and sheer size have led most commentators, reasonably, to still describe it as a major power. But, in view of the dismal performance of Russia’s military power in Ukraine, we must now revisit that judgement. It is hard to see the weakened and still kleptocratic Russian economy quickly rebuilding Russian military strength whenever the war ends.

In this context, strategic failure for Russia will be enormously consequential for the West. Some Russian experts, such as Andrei Kolesnikov, talk about ‘the complete collapse of everything’ in Russia, because under Putin ‘Russia’s future has been amputated.’ In that view, an entirely isolated and weakened Russia faces not only long-term decline but the risk of further chunks of its already much reduced territory deciding to go it alone and to separate from the Russian Federation. A severely weakened, isolated and smaller but still heavily nuclear armed Russia might then become more, not less, dangerous for the world.

In conclusion, the purpose of this essay is to make readers aware of just how different Russia is from Australia and what drives Moscow’s actions. The worry, as Oxford University’s Robert Service reminds us, is that many of the older attitudes and practices under the tsars and the Communist Party have been reinforced with severity in the 21st century under Putin. He has emasculated democratic processes and curtailed freedom of expression. Opposition leaders have been killed, imprisoned or driven into exile. The rule of law has been dumped and the mass media neutered. The corrupt Russian state has seized back control of the commanding heights of the economy. And the West is being treated as a hostile concert of powers. Service concludes, ‘It is resoundingly clear that Russian politics are still freighted with heavy baggage from the early twentieth century.’ The oppressive conditions that held back Russia in the past ‘have yet to be consigned to the ash heap of history.’

In my view, however, the last act of Russia’s threat to the established international order is still to come. Therefore, we need to be vigilant and ensure the current checks and balances against Russian aggression remain firmly in place. Even more importantly, insufficient attention has been paid in the West to the evolution of Russian security thinking, and to understanding Russia’s emergent strengths and ongoing, perhaps fatal, weaknesses. Western policymakers’ grasp of the Russian leadership’s motivations and decision-making processes, especially in respect of military matters, has degraded since the end of the Cold War.

The fact is that the West has been caught napping, and we need to think afresh about planning for Russia and its new security policy, including the role of nuclear weapons. But in thinking afresh, we need to keep in mind that many of the historical forces at work in Russia will persist—including beyond Putin’s term in office.

The prime minister’s prerogative to send Australia to war

Australia’s prime minister has the power to launch a war. The almost unfettered right to take the nation into conflict is a stark and simple statement about our system and our history of wars.

The ‘almost’ bit of ‘almost unfettered’ is a small modifier.

A prime minister in command of his or her cabinet and with a majority in the House of Representatives faces no fetters.

The wars change, but the Australian way to war hasn’t changed in a century.

The prime minister declares the deployment or announces the conflict and the troops march and the ships sail. This is the leader’s most profound prerogative.

The PM confident of cabinet and party can act without any authorisation or resolution from the parliament.

Parliament is the stage for high drama, fine speeches, arguments of great political import, and eventually budget authorisation. But in that first, monumental choice, the prime minister and cabinet have ‘comprehensive discretion’ in defence of the Commonwealth. The comprehensive discretion line is from Robert Menzies, writing in 1918 as a Melbourne law student.

Menzies’s article is the starting point for one of the excellent papers by Australian researcher Peter Mulherin on war-power reform in Australia. Mulherin observes that ‘it remains the executive’s “melancholy duty to inform”, rather than consult, on when Australia will next be going to war’. ‘Melancholy duty’ is the famous phrase from Menzies’s broadcast to Australians in September 1939 informing them that Australia was at war.

Surveying the role of parliament in Australian foreign policy 40 years ago, a smart Liberal senator (John Knight) and a fine historian (W.J. Hudson) pointed out what an unhinged prime minister could do with the profound prerogative. The ‘marvellous freedom of executive government in external policy’ meant a deranged PM had the power to declare war simultaneously on the United States and the Soviet Union, thus bringing ruin and destruction on Australia and its people. By contrast, if the same leader wanted to add a cent in tax to the cost of cigarettes, he or she would face a long legislative trek through the parliament.

The agonies and failures in Vietnam and Iraq have caused much soul-searching about giving parliament greater oversight of war power. Draft bills to give parliament a role in sending the Australian Defence Force to serve overseas have been presented in the Senate intermittently since the 1980s. Each time, the parties of government, Labor and Liberal, combine to dismiss the idea.

See how this plays in the 2010 report of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee on a draft bill from the Greens. The report stressed ‘uncertainty and confusion around the use and application of terms such as war and non-warlike service’ and worried about ‘the nature of the resolution to be agreed to by both Houses of the Parliament’.

Worrying about agreement between the houses (getting the Senate to pass what the government wants) is the shared nightmare of Labor and Liberal prime ministers. Pushing a budget through the upper house is annual purgatory. Imagine trying to get the Senate to approve war.

The parties of government strut and rule in the House of Representatives. Rarely commanding a majority in the Senate, the same parties must go into bargain-and-beg mode. Many government dreams die in the upper house.

So any effort at a greater parliamentary role in deciding to go to war must centre on the House of Representatives. Even that more limited vision crashes against the Labor–Liberal unity ticket to maintain their prerogatives when in power.

One coming milestone of history, plus voting trends confronting the parties of government, will push against the prime minister’s prerogative.

The milestone will be the release under the 20-year rule of the cabinet archives showing how the Howard government decided to go to war in Iraq in 2003. The archive vault will be opened and what will be there? Almost zilch.

When the cabinet papers for 2003 are released by the National Archives of Australia on 1 January 2024 there’ll be an extraordinary absence. I’ve called this the Canberra silence on Iraq. John Howard didn’t ask the bureaucracy to produce a paper on the central issue of war. The cabinet submission arguing the pros and cons of war doesn’t exist.

The absence of those arguments for war and what the war would mean is one of those big topics that quickly entered Canberra’s lore. A prime minister driving Australia to an unpopular war didn’t want any official thinking that would trouble his cabinet, roil his party, and cause great public damage when it invariably leaked.

The revelation of that Canberra silence will generate headlines for a day and fascinate the historians.

The big trend with future impact is the slow change in the workings of Australia’s two-party system and the erosion of the primary vote for Labor and the Liberal–National Coalition.

In the 20th century, the roughest of rules proclaimed that Labor and the Coalition each got around 45% of the primary vote in the House of Reps. Then the distribution of preferences gave government to Labor or the Coalition.

This century, the 45% rule is broken. Instead, today’s rough guide is the 33% standard for the lower house primary vote—one-third for Labor, one-third for the Coalition and one-third for independents and the Greens.

The preference system no longer has that simple binary effect in delivering for the parties of government. The one-third guide slowly seeps into the system and eats at the simplicities of the Labor–Liberal binary. So far this century, Australia has had only one minority government. But the atomisation of the vote has set in.

The trend will make it harder for governments (the executive) to strut and rule in the House. And a parliament with more ability to check the prime minister’s power will come eventually to that profound prerogative in the Australian way of war.

From the bookshelf: ‘The economic weapon: the rise of sanctions as a tool of modern war’

The war in Ukraine has put economic sanctions in the global spotlight. The West’s sanctions on Russia are perhaps the most comprehensive ever imposed, limiting trade and investment, restricting energy imports from Russia, closing Western airspace to Russian flights, and freezing more than US$300 billion of central bank reserves and the assets of Russian oligarchs. Companies and investors have withdrawn from Russia in droves.

Russia has responded in kind, weaponising its energy exports, closing its airspace to flights from countries imposing sanctions, and blocking shipping in the Black Sea.

The economic repercussions have been felt around the world. The sanctions and countersanctions have caused oil and gas prices to soar, stoking inflation and presaging an energy crisis later in the year when the northern hemisphere turns up the heating. In the European Union, inflation is already over 9%, with many countries planning to restrict energy use.

Russia’s blockade in the Black Sea has restricted Ukraine’s grain exports, pushing up global prices. The implications for grain-importing economies in Africa and Asia are particularly dire. Tentative steps have been taken to ease the blockade, but a global food crisis looks imminent.

The experience thus far raises questions about the effectiveness of sanctions. In Russia, the general population has taken a significant hit, while the impact on elites is less clear. Some outcomes were unexpected—for example, Russia’s reaping of the rewards of high energy prices which have left poor countries reeling.

Will the sanctions force Moscow to back down? The West claims that they are having the desired effect, limiting Russia’s ability to wage an extended war. Russia claims that the West is committing economic suicide.

In The economic weapon, Nicholas Mulder, an assistant professor of European history at Cornell University, reviews the history of economic sanctions. Mulder traces the first use of sanctions back to the Peloponnesian War, when Athens in 432 BC imposed a commercial ban on merchants from Greece. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of blockades, embargos and sieges as tools of war gradually expanded.

However, it was only in the globalising world of the 20th century that sanctions moved to centre stage. According to Mulder, during World War I, blockades caused more deaths than other anti-civilian weapons combined, although due to their indirect nature they were ‘difficult to render visible or condemn’.

For centuries, sanctions were used mainly as a tool of war, but after World War I they were also viewed as a tool for peace. At the Paris peace talks in 1919, US President Woodrow Wilson rather optimistically dubbed sanctions ‘something more tremendous than war’ that would ultimately render war unnecessary.

The League of Nations, although generally considered ineffective, provided a mechanism for imposing sanctions to prevent war. Mulder describes several instances in the interwar period when the risk of sanctions dissuaded countries from using force.

Ultimately, however, the threat of sanctions was ineffective against major powers and insufficient to prevent another world war. When Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, three-quarters of the world’s states severed most of their commerce with Italy. However, Italy had prepared to withstand shortages, and the sanctions were ineffective.

Mulder reminds us that the risk of sanctions can encourage nationalist powers to build up their self-reliance. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany implemented a nationwide plan to achieve ‘blockade-resilience’, reducing its reliance on raw materials and minimising its foreign exchange exposure, while Japan saw territorial expansion as a means towards autarky. There are clear parallels with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which built up its foreign reserves and firmed up its position as an essential supplier of natural gas prior to attacking Ukraine.

Mulder’s focus on the first half of the last century is well justified. It would nonetheless have been useful to include a chapter on more recent sanctions, including those on the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Iran.

Ironically, as the use of sanctions has surged, their chances of success have plummeted. In the 20th century, only one instance in three of using sanctions was considered ‘at least partially successful’. More recently the success rate has dropped to 20%.

The threat of sanctions, Mulder notes, is more potent as a deterrent than the imposition of sanctions once war has broken out. Not surprisingly, sanctions are more effective against small states than against large ones. These conclusions don’t bode well for the measures taken against Russia.

Mulder concludes with an important chapter on the role of positive sanctions in keeping the peace. During World War II, the American Lend-Lease program provided financial aid as an incentive to oppose the Axis powers.

Mulder’s timely book contains important lessons for decision-makers, not least those dealing with sanctions related to geopolitical hotspots.

Nuclear deterrence and the risk of miscalculation

The Latin adage Si vis pacem, para bellum warns: ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ Given the heightened risk of war between China and the United States, we might take heed of this ancient wisdom. It is better to deter wars than wage them.

Part of the tragedy of the two world wars was that the principal aggressors who initiated or escalated them did so against objectively more powerful enemies. So, in theory, such aggression should have been easy to deter.

In 1914, Germany launched an unprovoked assault on neutral Belgium, bringing Belgium’s ally Great Britain into the war. Thus, after the opening gambits of World War I, the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary found itself at war against an objectively more powerful alliance of Russia, France and Great Britain.

In 1939, Poland had security guarantees from Britain and France, an alliance more powerful than Nazi Germany alone, but Hitler attacked Poland anyway. In 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, a much bigger and more populous country than Germany. Later that year, Japan attacked the world’s greatest industrial power, the US, by bombing Pearl Harbor. Thus, the alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan was at war against a much more powerful alliance of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States.

The overconfidence and misjudgement displayed by Germany and Japan in the two world wars were in large measure attributable to a perception of a lack of resolve on the part of their foes.

In 1914, it wasn’t clear that Britain would fight on the side of Russia and France, and the British had made woefully inadequate preparations to do so.

In 1939, Hitler had been appeased for years, which made the British and French security guarantees to Poland seem hollow. The Soviet Union had fought poorly in the 1939–40 Winter War with Finland, and Hitler perceived that one kick would knock the whole rotten structure down. Japan thought that, with the US fleet destroyed, an indulgent and lazy America would seek a peace treaty rather than fight it out.

Since 1945, there’s been a ‘long peace’. There have been no big international wars and overt military conflict between nations has grown increasingly rare.

Nuclear weapons have changed the risk–benefit calculus for aggressors. It is difficult to misjudge a nation’s military capability if it has nuclear weapons, and such a misjudgement risks a mutually destructive Armageddon. Thus, the two superpowers and their alliances never directly fought each other during the Cold War.

Both China and the US have nuclear weapons today, so is there any reason to doubt that deterrence will continue to prevail?

A hot war between China and the US is mostly likely to break out over the issue of Taiwan. Nuclear weapons alone are unlikely to deter such a conflict.

If the risk of nuclear annihilation could deter all acts of aggression, then nobody would ever attack a nuclear-armed foe. But nuclear-armed US military forces have previously been attacked by North Korea, China, North Vietnam, Iraq and the Taliban. Egypt and Syria attacked nuclear-armed Israel in 1973.

Would a country invade an island it claims as its own that is allied to a nuclear-armed nation on the other side of the world? It’s happened before, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a colonial territory of nuclear-armed Britain, in 1982.

Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in anger since 1945 and a taboo has long since developed over initiating their use. Nuclear weapons are only likely to ever be used if a nuclear-armed nation is facing an existential threat. The reality is that, in all the above examples, no existential threat existed for the nuclear-armed power.

Is the loss of Taiwan an existential threat to the US? If Washington is unwilling to initiate the use of nuclear weapons to prevent Taiwan’s loss, how will China be deterred?

Even if the US still retains the conventional capabilities to defeat China, the history of the 20th century suggests that what is truly important is the aggressor’s perception of the other side’s willingness to fight. This is where the recent debacle in Afghanistan is so dangerous.

After capitulating to the Taliban, who in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party thinks Joe Biden would be willing to risk the lives of thousands of Americans to defend Taiwan? They might be calculating that, if Taiwan can only ever be brought back into the fold of the mainland by force, doing so before Biden leaves office will be the most opportune time.

Of course, the loss in Afghanistan might have the same impact on Biden that the loss of Czechoslovakia had on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1939—a determination not to be embarrassed again.

The danger in the capitulation to the Taliban may not be that it has made America weak, but that it has made America appear weak. The issue may not be that Taiwan could be lost, but that China will misjudge American resolve, in which case the long peace will be at an end.

On the screen: Cold warriors

The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, is a film of the Cold War with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as backdrop. The central characters, British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), are centre stage, but the real dynamic is the challenge issued by the Soviet Union and its empire to the United States and its Western allies. Infamously, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that the USSR would bury the West and this claim features in the opening of the movie. A nuclear war between the two superpowers of the time emerges as possible as the Soviet presence in Cuba is revealed to be more threatening than originally thought.

Khrushchev destabilised the West with his recurring assertions of Soviet military strength. Nuclear missiles, he maintained, were being churned out like sausages at Soviet factories. This was not true. American, indeed Western, military strength at the time of John F. Kennedy’s presidency was actually overwhelming. Nonetheless, Khrushchev was a figure to be feared and not only by Western audiences.

A highly decorated war hero, Penkovsky is badly shaken by Khrushchev’s threats. He knows that the USSR would be wiped out in a nuclear exchange with the West and he decides that, notwithstanding the treacherous nature of his actions, he will do his best to prevent that happening.

Penkovsky’s cover role in the Soviet trade ministry in Moscow causes him to meet a minor British businessman who becomes his courier between London and Moscow for Soviet nuclear secrets.

Georgian actor Ninidze is superb as Penkovsky, whose fearful unease about what he is doing appears in his gestures and upon his face, as well as in the dialogue. Penkovsky is careful to keep his family totally unaware of his betrayal. So too does Wynne, a reluctant allied spy who was recruited by Anglo-American intelligence agencies MI6 and the CIA to tap into the goldmine of Penkovsky’s secret knowledge.

Cumberbatch is invariably convincing in whatever role he is asked to master. In Wynne, he projects a dull suburbanism that is of scant interest to anyone beyond his immediate interlocutors. His handlers believe that this will cause the KGB to be dismissive of Wynne as anything other than a minor British salesman. Wynne’s wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), however, sees the changes in him as he travels to and from Moscow. She suspects an affair.

The Cold War has faded in memory as the global balance has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. As we confront a second cold war, there are some telling lessons in The Courier.

The most powerful performance in the movie is real. It is Kennedy’s televised declaration to the world that the Soviet presence in Cuba is unacceptable and that any missile fired from the island to a target in the Western hemisphere will be met by a comprehensive American response, meaning a nuclear one, directed at the Soviet Union. This was thinly veiled code for Armageddon. Soviet over-reach brings serious consequences.

Cooke as director has previously registered with On Chesil Beach and he does well in conveying the tensions between the Soviets and the West, even in effectively contrasting the drab greyness of Moscow with the dazzling lights of London’s Piccadilly Circus. But the movie maintains that the US and the UK work seamlessly together in running Wynne as an agent. CIA officer Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) is unfailingly optimistic and opportunistic in pushing Wynne. Her British counterpart, Dickie Franks (Angus Wright), is inevitably aloof and austere.

The performances of both actors are convincing but, at the time, suspicions between the US and UK intelligence services, occasioned by the defections of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to Moscow, and then Kim Philby, caused the CIA to doubt British reliability. Just remember CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton’s witch hunts. This context is hinted at in the movie by the presence of an unidentified British traitor, but the suspicions in the Atlantic relationship were very great at the time and this reality could have made for a subtler canvas as background.

Ultimately, this movie is a tale of friendship, between two very different people who trust each other with their lives. Ideology is absent. Families are both so much more important as Wynne and Penkovsky become acquainted with each other’s partners and children, making the relationship between the two men ultimately critical in the outcome of the film.

Penkovsky is worth remembering, for his courage. So too is Wynne, who may have been a reluctant starter but finished with great credit as far more than a mere courier.

Brent Scowcroft remembered

Brent Scowcroft, who died on 6 August, aged 95, was the model of a modern lieutenant general. A graduate of West Point whose career as a fighter pilot was cut short by a broken back suffered in a P-51 Mustang crash in 1949, Scowcroft went on to serve three presidents and advise others. He was the national security adviser to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and, to this day, when scholars and practitioners discuss the best way to organise the National Security Council, they invariably refer to the ‘Scowcroft model’.

Scowcroft was famously fair-minded and believed that his job was not to lobby for a particular policy, but to make sure that the president was aware of all opinions in his government, and that all key advisers felt that their voices had been heard. Beyond his concern for establishing an orderly process, Scowcroft was devoted to public service. The concept of duty he learned as a cadet at West Point was reinforced by his Mormon faith.

While loyal to his presidents, Scowcroft understood that his oath to uphold the Constitution implied a higher duty. A quiet and self-effacing man, he eschewed publicity while in office and focused on efficacy. He had a reputation for integrity that extended well beyond his office.

For example, in the early 1980s, when Scowcroft was out of office, Americans were deeply divided over foreign policy along partisan lines. When I was talking to foundations about supporting the creation of the Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan group that would try to bridge the gap, they said it would work only if we found Republican and Democratic co-chairs whose personal integrity was so obvious to members of both parties that we could overcome the partisan schism.

Scowcroft was the gold standard for personal and policy integrity, so we chose him as the Republican (and William Perry as the Democrat). The group has succeeded and exists to this day.

Although he was self-effacing, Scowcroft had strong policy views that were informed by his realistic morality and his prudence. When I surveyed the 14 American presidencies since 1945 in my recent book Do morals matter?, I found that the George H.W. Bush administration ranked in the top tier of moral and effective foreign policies.

Bush and Scowcroft were concerned about avoiding disaster in a world that was changing dramatically. Ending the Cold War and keeping a reunited Germany in NATO without a shot being fired was an extraordinary accomplishment.

In their co-authored 1998 memoir, Bush and Scowcroft noted modestly that, ‘What Harry Truman’s containment policy and succeeding administrations had cultivated, we were able to bring to final fruition.’ They avoided hubris and triumphalism and steered clear of what might have been a disastrous storm. As they put it, ‘The long-run framework of Bush foreign policy was very deliberate: encouraging, guiding, and managing change without provoking backlash and crackdown. In the short run, the practical effort included as well a certain amount of seat-of-the-pants planning and diplomacy. We eluded the shadow of another Versailles.’

While Scowcroft was personally close to the Bush family, he did not hesitate to criticise President George W. Bush when he felt that he had strayed from prudential values. While Scowcroft had strongly supported the elder Bush’s use of force (with the support of the United Nations Security Council) to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he believed that the invasion of Iraq being planned by the younger Bush in 2002 was a mistake that would turn the region into a cauldron.

In August 2002, Scowcroft published an article in the Wall Street Journal expressing his opposition. He did not pretend to invoke senior Bush, and it was an awkward moment for him, but he felt he had to speak out. Years later, during a hike in the mountains near Aspen in Colorado, I asked him about the relationship between Bush father and son. His reply was that the only way to understand it was to read Shakespeare. That was not your usual military or bureaucratic answer.

At a time when the current president has run through four national security advisers in four years, one of whom, John Bolton, has described his experience as serving a man who could not distinguish the national interest from his personal interest, the Scowcroft legacy is more relevant than ever. He remains the model for a modern public servant.

Keeping Australians and their civil liberties safe: The origins of the Hope model

The Covid-19 pandemic has given new and sharper emphasis to questions that were already being raised in the public debate. Why are Australians losing trust in public institutions? Are our security organisations striking the right balance between ‘keeping Australians safe’ and respecting our civil liberties? Have recent changes to national security legislation served to protect us or to threaten our rights? Are authoritarian or democratic countries better at handling crises? Should we look to the United States or China, or neither, for leadership in economic, social and political matters?

Already we have had insights from historians of previous pandemics and earlier economic crises. We can also learn something from the history of rises and falls in public confidence in our intelligence and security agencies.

In the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had early success in the Petrov affair, but then became partisan, confusing legitimate left-wing dissent with pro-communist subversion, and deficient in its primary role of counterespionage. Some alleged that it had become a political police force. The last federal conference of the Labor Party before it won the 1972 election came within one vote of adopting the abolition of ASIO as official policy.

Instead, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Justice Robert Marsden Hope to conduct the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security. Although often described as an inquiry into ASIO, it was a complete reconstruction of the entire intelligence system. Hope set out legislation, administrative structures and operational doctrines designed to ensure that the agencies were effective in defending national security, while being fully accountable for their impact on civil liberties.

Shortly after Hope submitted the last of his reports, the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to commission him to conduct a review of the Commonwealth’s protective security arrangements. Hope didn’t investigate the crime itself, but made important recommendations on the relations between the Commonwealth and state governments, between intelligence agencies and state and federal police forces, and between civilian and military authorities when the defence force was called out to support civilian agencies. The report of the review, which can best be seen as a supplement to the royal commission, remains an important foundational document for Australian counterterrorism.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, politicians, the media and the public debated the merits of Hope’s recommendations and whether governments were acting fast enough, or too fast, to implement them. Some civil libertarians were disappointed that the major political parties welcomed Hope’s recommendation that ASIO be reformed rather than abolished.

Less publicly, but more powerfully, officials in agencies and departments obstructed the challenges Hope’s recommendations posed to their bureaucratic assets and interests. Investigative journalists thrived on frequent leaks of classified documents.

When the Labor Party returned to office in 1983, another series of leaked documents prompted Prime Minister Bob Hawke to appoint Hope to conduct a second inquiry, the Royal Commission on Australia’s Security and Intelligence Agencies. Hope’s original brief was to assess the extent to which the agencies, and their associated departments, were acting in accordance with the recommendations from his first royal commission. In the public mind, however, this task was overtaken by the unexpected inclusion of the so-called Combe–Ivanov affair, which at one point threatened the survival of the Hawke government.

When Hope returned to the original purpose of the second inquiry, he made many recommendations designed to reaffirm and reinforce the directions recommended by the first. From the mid-1980s, as governments implemented the recommendations of all three reviews, the volatile debate around the agencies settled. Implementation was often extremely slow—some recommendations from 1977 came to fruition in 2018—but generally the direction of reform was consistent with Hope’s recommendations.

During the decades in which governments of all persuasions implemented what might be called ‘the Hope model’, public confidence steadily grew. In the early 2000s, when terrorism at home and abroad became a dominant concern, ASIO and the other agencies enjoyed a degree of trust and authority that was unimaginable before Hope’s first inquiry. In recent years, however, the Hope model has been severely challenged, and public trust has, to a degree, been shaken.

This four-part series will discuss Robert Marsden Hope and the qualities and attitudes he brought to the three inquiries; the principles underlying the structures, legislation and operational doctrines that he prescribed; the challenges posed recently to the Hope model; and the bases for reforms to the intelligence agencies when the current crisis has passed.

Australian War Memorial’s $498 million funding boost would be better spent on veterans

The director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, wants to extend the memorial at a cost of $498 million. The case he outlined in a recent ‘Strategist Six’ is as full of holes as a second-hand camouflage net.

Nelson assumes that the War Memorial must continue to expand as Australia continues to go to war. Prime Minister Scott Morrison agrees with him, remarking at the project launch in November that ‘sadly there will be future generations of service as well … The funding will allow the Memorial to implement these [expansion] plans and not be limited in its ambition.’

Open-ended expansion would make the memorial better off for space than most cultural institutions worldwide, very few of which can show more than a small proportion of their holdings at any one time. As former War Memorial historian Peter Stanley said recently, ‘Dr Nelson seems not to understand that if he wants to display more stuff he should do what other cultural institutions do—decide what can and cannot be displayed within the budgets provided.’

Nelson also claims that the extensions would allow the memorial to preserve the link between its museum part and its commemorative part (the Eternal Flame, the Roll of Honour, the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier). But, if co-location were essential, the memorial would never have built its large-objects storage and display facility at Mitchell in the Canberra suburbs more than two decades ago, and it would never run travelling exhibitions. It did and it does.

Nelson claims that there are funding constraints on the memorial. Yet, analysis of how the memorial has fared under the government’s efficiency dividend reveals it has done better than other cultural institutions. It was not caught, for example, in efficiency dividend rounds in 2012–13 and 2015–16. It has also topped up government funding by chasing the corporate dollar. Its annual reports show that its benefactors include the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra, but also Dr Chau Chak Wing, a person of interest to ASIO, and six of the world’s top 10 arms manufacturers.

The memorial is very good at using its money to tell stories of how well Australians fight and how nobly they die, but it is weak on the impact of our wars on those who fight them, their families and the nation. Historian of the RAAF, Alan Stephens, says, ‘[B]y telling [visitors] only half the story, the Memorial is failing in its responsibility.’ When the memorial’s refurbished World War I galleries were about to be opened, Nelson said they would say something about what Australia was like before the war and, by implication, how the war changed us. As it turned out, the galleries have barely a paragraph on that aspect.

The memorial has even diverged from the terms of its own legislation, which requires it to research and publicise ‘Australian military history’, defined in part as ‘the history of wars and warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service’. The history of wars, properly done, would require some consideration of the role of, and impact on, other countries in those wars. Successive corporate plans at the memorial, however, have narrowed its ‘mission’ so that the 2018–19 plan reads, ‘Leading remembrance and understanding of Australia’s wartime experience’ (emphasis added), which is a rather narrower brief.

How are these stories to be told? Nelson’s comments in The Strategist show his penchant for emotive vignettes, in this case about the mother of Private Scott Palmer and the daughter of Lance Corporal Luke Gavin. The fact that he uses these vignettes again and again in speeches and interviews does not make them any stronger as arguments for public expenditure, or even as interpretations of history or the focus of commemoration.

Nelson’s public statements are always heavier on emotion than on the important questions of ‘why?’ and ‘was it worth it?’ As for his reference to veterans of recent wars needing a ‘therapeutic milieu’ at the memorial, Margaret Beavis of the Medical Association for Prevention of War says this is ‘an astonishing trivialisation’ of the complexity of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression and the long-term treatment these illnesses require.

The $498 million intended for the War Memorial would be much better spent on treating veterans suffering PTSD or homelessness, helping veterans’ families, and other programs of direct benefit. Other national cultural institutions also need more funds. These views emerged strongly from comments on a recent petition against the memorial project. There were nine times as many signatures on the petition as there were individual responses to the memorial’s own consultation last year. Nelson’s pet project lacks public support.

Hamel: the orchestrated battle, 4 July 1918

At 3.10 on the morning of 4 July 1918, three brigades of Australian infantry carried out a successful attack on the German positions outside the village of Le Hamel on the southern banks of the Somme River in northern France. U

Under the direction of Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, the newly appointed commander of the Australian Corps, all assaulting units involved took their objectives in just 93 minutes.

With infantry, armour, artillery and air assets at his disposal, Monash had the good fortune of commanding a recognisably modern integrated weapons system that characterised much of the fighting during the final allied campaigns on the Western Front. In his postwar account, Monash likened this all-arms battle to a symphony for which he had been conductor:

A perfected modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for an orchestral composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments, and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phrases. Every individual unit must make its entry precisely at the proper moment, and play its phrase in the general harmony.

Monash had commanded the Australian Corps for little more than a month before the battle of Hamel, which was the first major offensive action by the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) since Cambrai in November 1917. The newly formed Australian Corps had been spared the weight of German attacks that devastated British formations on the Somme and at Arras in April and May and were holding a section of the front line that sat astride the Somme River near the town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Australian raids and patrols gave every indication that German morale was low and their defences poor. The German failure to achieve a decisive victory against the British and French before vast numbers of newly arrived Americans were combat-ready put the allies in a better position than ever to deliver their own counteroffensive. The German defences opposite the Australian Corps at Le Hamel proved a good place to start.

Knowing the British tank corps was eager to test the new Mark V tank in combat, the officer commanding the British Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, invited Monash and the commander of the tank brigade assigned to the formation to devise an operation with the purpose of straightening a bend in the line on the Australian front.

These proposals stressed the element of surprise by silently registering guns in accordance with new artillery methods and air support, and both plans suggested an attack with limited objectives involving infantry and armour. Attacking along a six-kilometre front, the infantry at Le Hamel would be supported by every technological and tactical advantage possible. Monash included two companies of inexperienced Americans (about 1,000 men) to add weight to the 10 battle-depleted Australian battalions tasked with the assault.

As at Messines, Monash planned the Hamel battle fastidiously—every detail was rehearsed at conferences with commanders and staff of all the services involved. No fewer than 250 officers were present at the final meeting on 30 June; the agenda included 133 items and the meeting lasted four and a half hours. Monash told Rawlinson:

The underlying principle of the conference was that everyone that mattered was present, and had to explain his plans and proposals; and that, where there was any conflict, or doubt or difference of opinion, the final unalterable decision was given there and then, and no subsequent fiddling with the plan was permitted.

The popular view that Monash ‘invented’ the tactics used in the battle of Hamel overlooks the importance of the idea-sharing that occurred among experts involved in the planning. Like all commanders within the BEF at that time, Monash deliberately tapped the rich vein of tactical learning and development that had been built up throughout the previous four years of fighting. Monash benefited from the latest attack doctrine, ideas and technologies based on the successes and failures of previous engagements.

None of the tactical elements used at Le Hamel were being done for the first time. It has been claimed that this battle was the first time ammunition had been dropped to front-line troops (in fact, this was done by the German air service in May 1918), the first time aircraft had been used to mask the sound of tanks forming up (carried out by the Royal Flying Corps at Poelcapelle in August 1917), and the first time smoke and gas had been mixed in habituating barrages to try to trick the Germans into wearing their gas masks during the attack (used by the British as early the battle of the Somme in 1916).

Counter-bombardments, creeping barrages and predicted fire were perfected throughout the myriad battles of 1916–17, while machine-gun barrages were said to be the touchstone of British expertise by mid-1917. The Australian experience of the Third Battle of Ypres demonstrated the effective use of firepower to support attacks with limited objectives, most notably the ‘bite and hold’ battles at Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde throughout September and October 1917.

Employing these methods, the battle of Hamel was a resounding success. The Germans were caught by surprise and all assaulting units were on their objectives within 93 minutes. The Australian Corps and the British and American units involved suffered 1,400 casualties, while German losses were estimated to be around 2,000 (which included 1,600 prisoners).

Although small in scale, Hamel was a practical demonstration of an attack with limited objectives using combined arms tactics. It was these kinds of attacks that succeeded in winning battles in 1918, success Monash attributed to ‘the perfection of teamwork’.

From the bookshelf: ‘On grand strategy’

This is a superb book.

John Lewis Gaddis is a distinguished academic at Yale University, occupying the Robert A. Lovett Professorship of History. He’s a strategic thinker of the first order, having won the Pulitzer Prize for a penetrating biography of George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who defined the theory of containment as bedrock US policy in dealing with the Soviet Union.

Gaddis’s new book, On grand strategy, is sweeping in its dimensions and ambitions. He succeeds in forensically examining episodes in human history from the Hellespont to Hue, underlining where strategic imperatives are either achieved courtesy of the matching of ends and means, or destroyed by lack of judgement.

He begins by citing the Greek poet Archilochus, who impressed the brilliant Oxford don Isaiah Berlin with the competing notions of leadership as reflecting the characteristics either of a fox or a hedgehog. Berlin maintained, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

The contrast, as Berlin described in his book The hedgehog and the fox, was the difference between a single central vision and the pursuit of many ends that may be unrelated and even contradictory.

Gaddis applies this insightful assessment to the Persian Emperor Xerxes crossing the Hellespont in his invasion of Greece in around 480 BC. Xerxes didn’t heed the restraining advice of his counsellor, his uncle Artabanus, who saw the dangers ahead. Xerxes pressed on with his massive army to ultimate defeat and humiliation.

Delayed by the Spartans at Thermopylae, his fleet destroyed by the Athenians at Salamis and finally on land at Plataea, the Persian host began to disintegrate. Gaddis writes:

But Xerxes failed, as is the habit of hedgehogs, to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. Because ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite: a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view. Means, though, are stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground, ships in the sea, and the bodies required to fill them. Ends and means have to connect if anything is to happen. They’re never, however, interchangeable.

The recurring theme of the fox and the hedgehog is a useful device that allows Gaddis to unify his narrative. Across a range of military philosophers, major authors and more recent strategic thinkers, Gaddis weaves creativity and imagination into the decision-making which is under examination. From Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, and from Herodotus to Leo Tolstoy (with honourable mentions given to the likes of Machiavelli and St Augustine), Gaddis draws both insight and inspiration from thinkers of consequence.

And repeatedly he asks questions. Perhaps the single most important question is: Why did the Athenians see the need to send the best of their army to fight a war in Sicily?

On Sicily, Syracuse went to war against Segesta, a city allied to Athens. The Segestans sought Athenian intervention, which was duly considered by the Athenian assembly. Gaddis writes eloquently of the Athenian deliberations:

The Athenian assembly had always responded more to emotions than to abstractions, while relying on leaders to cool it off. Now, though, few were left. It dismissed protests from Nicias, the city’s most experienced general, against being dragged into a war ‘with which we have nothing to do.’ It welcomed seduction by Alcibiades, better known for his dazzling looks and Olympics prowess than for his prudence. Sicily’s defenders, this peacock claimed, were a rabble easily bribed. Their defeat would win Athens a western Mediterranean empire. Nor should anyone try to say where its expansion should stop, for ‘if we cease to rule others, we shall be in danger of being ruled ourselves.’

The Sicilian War was a disaster for Athens. The Corinthians intervened, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, and both the Athenian army and their fleet were smashed.

Gaddis draws an intriguing parallel with the US and Vietnam, quoting from a speech by John F. Kennedy on the morning of his death in Dallas on 22 November 1963 to the effect that the US was ‘the keystone in the arch of freedom’ and therefore must defend South Vietnam.

Gaddis consistently demonstrates critical scholarship, persuasive analysis and compelling conclusions. His strategic vision moves across the Roman Empire from the murder of Julius Caesar and the emergence of Octavian as Augustus Caesar, through to the sclerotic rigidity of the Spanish Empire under Charles V, battling to deal simultaneously with challenges from the Ottomans in the East, the Protestants in the Netherlands, and the English under the agile Elizabeth I everywhere from the Channel to the Caribbean.

Napoleon’s catastrophic failure after Borodino is also subjected to rigorous evaluation. Despite battlefield success, Marshall Kutuzov continues to retreat. Moscow is abandoned and then burned. Wonderfully, Gaddis describes Bonaparte as ‘like a dog which has caught the car it has been chasing’.

The critics would argue that On grand strategy reads like a selection of Gaddis’s lectures at Yale. Perhaps—but if so it would have been a privilege to sit through such a rich outline of strategic dilemmas from the ancient world to the 20th century. For anyone working in the field of strategic theory and practice, this book has intrinsic value, and is an essential foundation in arriving at imaginative yet real conclusions.