In These Pages

Welcome to the fall issue of Orbis, celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the journal. We believe it is a strong issue indeed. We kick off the issue with Kori Schake’s splendid essay on the causes of war, in which she surveys commentators from Thucydides and Clausewitz to Geoffrey Blainey, Barbara Tuchman, and Azar Gat. The fact is that human beings can find many things over which to go to war.

Since this is our 60^th anniversary issue, we thought it would be useful to reprint several prescient articles from past issues of Orbis, including memorable essays by two of my predecessors as editor. Accordingly, our first article cluster features: an appreciation of Orbis‘s founding editor, Robert Strausz-Hupé by Morton A. Kaplan from spring 1970; Walter McDougall’s reflection on the ability of the United States to “do” grand strategy from spring 2010; and James Kurth’s spring 2002 essay arguing—correctly it turns out— that the way the United States would conduct the wars after 9/11 would be greatly shaped by the nature of Western civilization and the nature of Islam.

Next, we are pleased to publish a very important essay on U.S. civil-military relations by Jeffrey W. Donnithorne, who provides a more nuanced understanding of the civil-military “bargain” than the one that treats the military as a monolith. He argues that the four services tend to act as “principled agents,” which view ambiguities in both the advising and executing phases of policy through the lens of their own service cultures.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was a creature of the Cold War purporting to represent developing states that wished to avoid alignments or alliances with either the Soviet Union or the United States. By virtue of its size, population, and location, India played a prominent role in the NAM. Harsh V. Pant contends that although some parts of the Indian establishment still favor non-alignment, the better course for New Delhi is to pursue a strategic autonomy that differs from non-alignment, which would allow India to benefit from leveraging partnerships rather than shunning them.

Our second article cluster offers appraisals of two American presidents’ statecraft. First, Colin Dueck assesses the statesmanship and foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt, who combined diplomacy, energetic executive action, and credible naval capabilities to support this forward role, while avoiding strategic overextension. Dueck contends that Roosevelt’s presidency represents a good example of American foreign policy realism in action.

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding argues that although at age 70 the Truman Doctrine might be considered an artifact of history, the fundamental insights of this grand strategy—the employment of all instruments of national power; the creation and maintenance of alliances; and fostering an American-led liberal order—should still inform U.S. foreign policy.

Leonard Hochberg and Geoff Sloan offer a defense of classical geopolitics, as articulated by Halford Mackinder. Despite attempts to bury geopolitics as a way of looking at the world, the geopolitical perspective provides useful insights about the interaction of power and geographic space. This is especially the case as the United States considers possible responses to the occupation and domination of Mackinder’s Eurasian heartland by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

In our book review section, Frank Hoffman considers three books, written or edited by Graham Allison, James Lacey, and Xu Qiyu, that examine the risks of war as a rising power confronts the international status quo. Lukas Milevski reviews J.P. Clark’s Preparing For War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917, and I have convinced the editor to let me review Paul Miller’s defense of an American role in sustaining a liberal order.

Finally, I hope to see many of you at FPRI’s Annual Dinner on November 14^th, which features former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter as the keynote speaker.

Impromptus and Asides: In Defense of the West

Donald Trump recently delivered one of the better speeches of his young presidency in Warsaw, where he called on the West “to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization.” Surprisingly, the speech was roundly criticized by some as offensive. One commentator called it “an alt-right manifesto.” Another claimed that by referring to “the West” and to “our civilization” Trump was pandering to “white nationalism” because “the West is a racial and religious term.”

Of course, what Trump said differs not at all from what previous presidents, Democrat or Republican, have said. In 1952, Harry Truman praised the United States for saving “Western civilization from enslavement by a godless creed.” In West Germany in 1963, John F. Kennedy spoke of “preserving Western culture, and Western religion, and Western civilization” and defending “our common heritage from those who would divide and destroy it.” In 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson, warned of “ideologies. .. that threaten the very roots of our common Western civilization.”

During his 1982 Westminster address, Ronald Reagan praised Poland as a country “at the center of European civilization” and warned that our shared Western civilization is threatened by “totalitarian forces in the world who seek. .. to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit.” He called on the West to defend “the great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God,” and criticized “the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals.”

And in 1994, Bill Clinton declared that “Western civilization was the greatest of all, and America was the best expression of Western civilization because of its commitment to. .. the belief that the future could be better than the present and that we have an obligation to make it so.”

So the question arises, what is “the West” and why do some see defending Western Civilization as a manifestation of racism? Donald Kagan, the great classical scholar, provides perhaps the best answer to the first question:

No fair-minded person can deny that, whatever its other characteristics, the West has created institutions of government and law that provide unprecedented freedom for its people and a body of natural scientific knowledge and technological achievement that together make possible a level of health and material prosperity undreamed of in earlier times and unknown outside the West and the areas it has influenced. I think V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad of Indian parents, is right to speak of the modern world as “our universal civilization” shaped chiefly by the West. Most people around the world who know of them want to benefit from the achievements of Western science and technology. Increasingly, they also want to participate in its political freedom. The evidence suggests, moreover, that a society cannot achieve the full benefits of Western science and technology without a commitment to reason and objectivity as essential to knowledge and to the political freedom that sustains it and helps it move forward. The primacy of reason and the pursuit of objectivity, therefore, both characteristic of the Western experience, seem to be essential for the achievement of the desired goals anywhere in the world.

The civilization of the West, however, was not the result of some inevitable process through which other cultures will automatically pass. It emerged from a unique history in which chance and accident often played a vital part. The institutions and ideas, therefore, that provide for freedom and improvement in the material conditions of life cannot take root and flourish without an understanding of how they came about and what challenges they have had to surmount. Non-Western people who wish to share in the things that characterize modernity will need to study the ideas and history of Western civilization to achieve what they want, and Westerners who wish to preserve them must do the same.

Thus, contrary to the claim of those who argue that the West is based on race, Western civilization is founded on ideas that transcend race and religion. Kagan continues: “Americans do not share a common ancestry and a common blood. What they have in common is a system of laws and beliefs that shaped the establishment of the country, a system developed within the context of Western civilization.”

Today, the greatest threat to Western civilization comes from within, especially from “multiculturalists,” and other cultural Marxists, who portray Western history as an endless saga of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and oppression. The cultural Marxist assault on the West began in the 1960s (“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!”). The victory of Western principles at the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy and capitalism, and the worldwide impact of American popular culture did not change things.

But the cultural Marxists are wrong. Kagan argues that it was “the philosophical, scientific, agricultural and industrial revolutions in the West” that allowed human beings “to produce and multiply the things needed for life so as to make survival and prosperity possible for ever-increasing numbers” and gave birth to “the theory and practice of the separation of church from state, protecting each from the other, and creating a free and safe place for the individual conscience.”

But the emergence of the West was not preordained; it was not a seamless progression from “Plato to NATO.” It did not have to happen that way. Instead, it was in many respects a happy accident of history, the result of chance and contingency; including a creative tension between Jerusalem and Athens, between faith—“the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord”—and reason when Socrates asked, “what is the best way for man to live?,” largely mediated by the Roman concept of law; and between the medieval Church, and the freedom-loving Germanic tribes that eventually came to rule Europe. This premodern synthesis helped to create the institutions we now regard as quintessentially Western—property rights and constitutional government, for example, which grew out of the centuries-long collision between empire-building rulers like Charlemagne and Charles V, and the equally self-interested princes and churchmen who resisted their designs.

The fact that the emergence of the West and its virtues—liberty, reason, the rule of law, property, and prosperity—was not preordained makes it all the more critical that those who wish to defend those virtues must understand their real foundations. The West has lost much of its vigor because it has forgotten its religious and cultural roots. It is time to recover that understanding.