Strategy and Diplomacy 1870-1945

...He has done a monumental amount of work, written a big book (679 pages), and has performed us a great service...

...As might be expected in a collection of essays written over the course of ten or so years, the author sometimes wanders from the point, making excursions into the study of arms races (which do not, as he and others have observed, cause wars) and Japanese imperial strategy...

...This would suggest that it is as much a requirement of statesmanship to recognize when Realpolitik is inadequate as it is to know when it is invaluable...

...Braley concludes that the New York Times, in the period under consideration, in fact subordinated a policy of objective reporting to an ideology or preconceived worldview...

...Army's official history of the Vietnam war...

...non-response to the building of the Berlin Wall, he was "chastised" by the speaker, Dean Rusk...

...Unlike theirs, our economy remains strong and creative...

...Kennedy's analysis is even more dubious if applied without reservation to the contemporary United States...

...Even at the height of imperial power precipient statesmen quivered inwardly at Kipling's 1897 poem, "Recessional," which foretold the day when "Far-called, our navies melt away;/On dune and headland sinks the fire:/Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre...

...It is worth noting that Kennedy was recently hired away from Great Britain to teach at Yale--the first time in several decades that a leading American university has hired a historian of strategic affairs...

...The Fascists are to be combatted and the mob p l a c a t e d . " Moreover, '' Times editors appear to see the Third World and black Americans in the same picture frame, to be placated, patted on the head, solicited, so they won't rise up in bloody revolt against privilege...

...Few would deny the relevance of such striking parallels as the tensions between maritime strategies and continental commitments, and between liberal values and imperial necessities...

...Since wealth provides the sinews of war, declining relative wealth means, ultimately, declining power...

...At one point in his absorbing reconstruction of the Tom Betheii is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...Braley wants us to know that the heavy guns of journalism--in particular those of the New York Times--could overpower less audible but sometimes more accurate disp a t c h e s - - f o r example those o f Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune...

...Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna summit, for example, he observes in a footnote that, having asked a sensible question at a press conference dealing with the U.S...

...This ideology in turn seeped into the reporting from the field...

...But in the longer-term perspective--on the fundamental issue of how to preserve a worldwide Empire for as long as possible once the economic and strategical tides had turned--was not this flexible, reasonable, compromise-seeking policy preferable to the assertive 'no surrender' one...

...Other universities are following suit...

...Braley's canvas is large--primarily U.S...

...In the home office and Washington bureau, John Oakes of the editorial page, columnists Reston, Wicker and the two Lewises, editors of the magazine, Book Review and later Times books, offered upcoming Times staffers the key to advancement...

...STRATEGY AND DIPLOMACY 1870-1945 Paul Kennedy/Allen and Unwin/$24.95 Eliot A. Cohen P a u l Kennedy is one of those infrequent modern scholars who is both prolific and deeply read in many subjects...

...And fear of a Jacquerie by the underprivileged...

...For the most part he makes this seem a matter of economics plain and simple: The British economy, though growing slowly, was being rapidly outstripped by the new and emerging powers of Europe and the world...

...Though many of its interwar campaigns are now forgotten (the suppression of the Iraqi revolt in the 1920s, for instance, or the campaigns in northern India in 1937), such actions enabled the British to control a huge and vulnerable empire...

...One reason for this trend is growing concern with the relative decline of American power...

...Appeasement was indeed one pillar for a policy of imperial decline, but so too was a strategy of strength...

...But at least we can be grateful to him for having raised them...

...Thus the appeal of his writings stems not merely from the attractiveness of competently written, broad-brush history, but from our uneasy sense that the phenomenon he describes has relevance for us today...

...Thus it seems to me that the Times's ideology can be more simply, characterized...

...This theme is obscured somewhat by the book's format...

...NH 03054 Please send me information about this program Name Address City State Zip Telephone politics...

...Even the public seems more interested in serious studies of military questions, as seen in the widespread attention given the first volume in the Eliot A. Cohen is assistant professor of government at Harvard University...

...A similar sense pervades Kennedy's work, except that his concern is the decline of British powerwhow it came about and how British statesmen controlled and managed it...

...At times Kennedy retreats from the simplicity of this argument...

...Everyone on the staff understood what was wanted after the promotions of Herbert Matthews and David Halborstam...

...For over twenty years he was foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News, mostly in Europe...

...But as we can see from the foregoing, the Times has in fact made a distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, because it consistently assaults the former and defends the latter...

...Gladstone, of the flaccid stance of Salisbury and the languid reactions of Balfour, of Asquith's refusal to face the facts and Baldwin's unwillingness to make hard but necessary decisions...

...Harvard, meanwhile, has established what appears to be the first endowed chair in Military and National Security Affairs at a premier academic institution...

...Had the British people been willing to acHis point is not without merit...

...Kennedy's realism--based as it is on a straightforward assessment of economic war potential--obscures the role of ideology in international politics...

...It "appears to derive from two nightmares," he writes...

...The "HalberstamHiggins War" took place in Vietnam in 1963, but one suspects something very analogous may be going on in El Salvador today...

...For that matter, it is far from clear that Wilhelmian Germany was an "appeasable" state, unlike either the United States or France at that time...

...The same statesmen who favored appeasement in North America--Burke preeminent among them--favored stubborn, unreasonable, and prolonged struggle with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, for they understood the difference between national revolutions with limited aims, and those with unlimited aims...

...Appeasement of the Munich variety was advocated in the name of "realism," of a sophisticated and unsentimental assessment of world PLENUM PUBLISHING CORPORATION 233 f~pr,nq %tr~,el New York N Y 1001.3 THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...

...Certainly the American Victorians were bound to be disappointed if they felt that museums could cure the pathologies of the urban masses...

...The reassertion of British naval power in the late nineteenth century (which Kennedy discusses briefly in an interesting essay, "Fisher and Tirpitz Compared"), the threatened use of force (at Fashoda in 1898, for example, or earlier in the Far Eastern Crises), and the real use of force bolstered British power as well...

...One only wishes that so learned and eloquent a historian as Paul Kennedy had addressed these issues in depth...

...His analysis leads him to conclude that the British prolonged the Empire's existence beyond its natural term, and cushioned its inevitable collapse, through the adroit use of appeasement...

...It is at this earlier stage, the time of first the Elder and then the Younger Pitt, that one sees a sounder view of world politics...

...BAD NEWS: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Russ Braley/Regnery Gateway/S22.50 Tom Bethell I f journalism is the first rough draft of history, then Russ Braley has composed a second and considerably amended version...

...He argues that museums once did try to function as institutions for inculcating the values of our culture, but failed...

...One may simply posit that the Times is consistently pro-socialist, always trying to get a little bit more of it at home, and...

...Kennedy is not a crude economic determinist, to be sure, but he often seems willing to accept the judgment of temperamentally anxious and fearful Treasury officials, who always were ready to explain why one more military measure would bankrupt the nation...

...Reagan and Mr...

...In certain respects, of course, the imperialists and the anti-appeasers were correct: on specific issues, British governments made wrong decisions, indulged in wishful thinking, failed to take full advantage of a given situation...

...On the book's penultimate page he writes: The final irony, then, is this--and perhaps Mr...

...Our empire is an even looser one than theirs, and far less hampered by the need for direct administration of our dependencies...

...Unfortunately Bad News is not likely to receive the attention it deserves, because the authors of the first draft not only are very much still with us, but today occupy the most influential editorial posts, and they are not likely to be enthusiastic about this revision of their youthful dispatches from the field...

...I do not mean to suggest that he has an axe to grind...

...This is the kind of book that journalists almost never write in their retirement, and I suspect that it was his personal involvement in some of these events that gave Braley the energy needed to pursue the daunting task of revising history and opposing fashion...

...Writes Braley: Some of the Times correspondents rank with the world's best, but they cannot run the newspaper from the field, and they don't always fit into management positions...

...of reality...

...At the same time, they never 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 ceased complaining of the weak, compromising, appeasing policies of Mr...

...The English were ever a parochial race, and many took little interest in imperial affairs...

...A state with unlimited goals, which aims for world hegemony, cannot be accommodated, and it is foolish to think otherwise...

...He refers to other elements of the problem--e.g., the changing balance of sea and land power (in an essay on "Mahan versus Mackinder: Two Interpretations of British Sea Power"), or the growth of African and Asian nationalism, and changing patterns of relations among the Empire s Great Power enemies-but he returns again and again to the problem of economics and power...

...The Boer War--in which appeasement followed vict o r y - b o r e witness to the lengths the British were willing to go to keep their grip...

...One need not postulate guilt-ridden editors throwing worried glances back at the South Bronx and Harlem as they flee to Scarsdale...

...at its peak it covered nearly a quarter of the globe's land surface...

...understand the very real limits on its power, and the relative decline of that power in the world, we must also bear in mind the differences between our position and that of the British during the first half of this century...

...In the late nineteenth century the British accommodated American national interests whenever they could...

...As he writes, "The art museum was founded soon after the Civil War as part of a long struggle by the Protestant elite, which ran the large cities, to moralize their populations by eliminating vice and inculcating civic v i r t u e s . . . With the rapid growth of the cities, the futility of these efforts became apparent...

...foreign policy in the years 1945-75--and his main purpose is to correct some of the more conspicuous errors and misinterpretations of the first drafters...

...Such an impossibly crude conception of what art can do was bound to be refuted...

...As a result, the Times became "the champion of any and all revolutions," and went out of its way to "deny any distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian r e g i m e s . . , all authoritarians must be deposed, to quell Fascism and placate the revolution," while leaders to be preserved "have included CastrO, Mugabe, Ho Chi Minh, the Alexander Dubcek group, Janos Kadar, Wladyslaw Gomulka and Erich Honecker...

...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...

...The military services themselves have again begun paying attention to the historical study of strategic problems, witness the fine series emerging from the Fort Leavenworth Combat Studies Institute...

...it made no sense to appease Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy...

...But his primary focus is on the British Empire in its last phase, when commitments accumulated and capabilities seemed inadequate, when the requirements of power grew beyond the resources available to meet them...

...Andropov, now presiding over their own declining empires, may take note...

...he admits that historians may have gone too far in positing an ineluctable decline of a century or more...

...A failure to have noticed the distinction would have produced an inconsistent pattern of support...

...The decline of British power in this century is a topic at once fascinating and perplexing...

...On the other hand, the Empire strikes one in retrospect as extraordinarily fragile--indeed, so it seemed to far-sighted contemporaries...

...Nonetheless, Kennedy's argument is historically inadequate and deeply misleading...

...For this reason one wishes Kennedy had made an effort to compare the strategy of Great Britain's rise with that of its fall...

...In an unsettling essay "Why Did the British Empire Last So Long...

...Here and there we find hints that he may include himself among the misinterpreters...

...On the one hand, the Empire summoned forth titanic efforts in two world wars...

...The British Empire, even in its declining years, was adroit in the arts of limited war and imperial policing...

...The market for younger students of strategy (particularly political scientists) is improving steadily, as are scholarly outlets for publication...

...The story of postwar appeasement (before the term acquired its current evil connotation) is well known...

...In addition, the Realpolitik justification for appeasement reflected as much a short-sighted unwillingness to bear heavy burdens as it did an acceptance cept conscription before the First World War they might have shortened that cataclysm considerably, by putting first-class armies on the continent a year or two before they actually did...

...Even so, I hasten to add, there is much to be learned from the late British imperial period...

...To the average viewer, a museum provides a vision of what we are sometimes capable of...

...PeterV Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack...

...The author of three major works in the past decade or so--The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, The Realities Behind Diplomacy, and The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism 1860-1914--he possesses a rare taste for the big questions of military power and foreign policy...

...He has pursued those interests in this latest book--a collection of eight separate essays-with lucidity and occasionally with insight...

...This last is particularly important...

...That we have come to doubt whether such an experience makes for more competent citizens suggests not so much the uselessness of museums, but the degradation that has befallen our idea of what a citizen is...

...B r a l e y ' s analysis of this ideology is interesting...

...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Or...

...moreover, after 1933 and until at least the Rhineland crisis even Churchill favored appeasement, albeit only from a position of strength...

...The correspondents became hostage to the Times" slide into ideology...

...While it is necessary that the U.S...

...A century ago, alarmed by what they sensed as new threats to their country's world position, a significant segment of British opinion called--and thereafter never ceased calling--for hardnosed policies to check foreign rivals, to protect British industry and markets, to turn their Empire into a self-contained armed camp...

...But surely, one can argue, it made sense to reincorporate pre-Hitler Germany into European politics...

...they concluded an entente with their French rivals, and even made an effort to come to terms with the Russians, who posed a considerable threat to India...

...British appeasement before World War I, therefore, enabled the formation of the great alliance which eventually won the war...

...It might well have been terribly expensive to create a first-class air force and an effective mechanized army during the 1930s, yet such instruments of power might have enabled the British to forestall much greater expenditures (and horrific bloodshed) in the 1940s, might, indeed, have enabled the Empire to survive the war more or less intact...

...But it hardly follows--as Banfield seems to think it does--that museums have entirely lost their public character and turned into playthings for the rich and obsessive art collectors...

...our primary opponents, in contrast to theirs, are shackled by economic systems that create wealth slowly if at all...

...its proconsuls and soldiers projected an image of unshakable self-confidence, unshakable because it seemed so well grounded in fact...

...For whatever criticisms one might make about the funding or acquisitions policies of museums, the fact is that the public is very little affected by them...

...Sometimes the big guns, like Sherlock Holmes's dog, were silent...

...Fear of a Fascist takeover in Washington...

...James Reston in essence knew that Kennedy had capitulated to Khrushchev in 1961, but maintained a discreet silence on the topic in his column...

...The frailest of politico-military webs held the provinces together-scarcely 50,000 white soldiers in India and few administrators (that masterpiece of administration, the Indian Civil Service, numbered barely 1,000 men...

...Kennedy's basic view in Strategy and Diplomacy 1870-1945 is that decline came no sooner than necessary...

...It made some sense to appease Weimar Germany...

...In any event, Braley was involved in the initial reporting of some of the events that he describes, and he is understandably eager to set the record straight...

...He observes that relative to other powers, particularly Germany, Russia, and the United States, Great Britain was in decline from about the last third of the nineteenth cen~.ury on...