Political Theory

The Developing Situation with Iran – The Craziness Continues

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I don’t necessarily want to make a habit of talking contemporary issues on a regular basis but the events in, around, and about Iran over the past few weeks have really got me thinking.  There are a couple of points I would like to bring up. The US administration and European leaders don’t seem to really have a clue what they are doing.  They keep making statements about what they will not tolerate, and hen tolerate it anyway.  This has been going on for years and on the US side started with the Clinton administration as far as I can see.  A clear line has not been drawn and stuck to, that is probably the root of Iran’s boldness, … More after the Jump…

Book Review: A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman

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I have reviewed several of Mr Kratman’s books so far and this is another one. I have read all of his books before and find myself going back and rereading them while I wait for the next to come out. Kratman is one of those authors that makes me wish people could write as fast I can read so I would not have to wait so long in between books. Since they cannot, I settle for rereading what they have already published, Kratman’s work is well worth reading and A Desert Called Peace is no exception. The book is a thinly veiled recitation of what could happen to the earth. … More after the Jump…

Book Review: Makers of Ancient Strategy – Edited by Victor David Hanson

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This book was conceived as being a sort of prequel to the modern classic, Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret and first published in the 70’s and updated in the 90’s. As Dr Hanson states in his foreword the scholars who wrote the various essays presented in the book did so with an eye to drawing lessons from antiquity that are relevant to the challenges faced by modern states and statesmen. They have succeeded admirably. It is not as hard to do as you might think despite the fact that modern war is fought with the benefit of tanks, night vision, aircraft, and satellite communications. Modern commanders Face … More after the Jump…

Book Review: Race & Economics: How Much Can be Blamed on Discrimination? by Walter E. Williams

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I was first motivated to buy this book by the blizzard of negative articles and news pieces about it when it was first published. I also realize that I am opening myself to charges that I am not competent to comment or even post a review of this book because I am white, as the picture on the About Me page clearly shows. I am going to review it anyway because I think the book was worth reading and worth talking about even if someone disagrees with its conclusions. Williams makes several highly controversial points in this book about policies that have kept black people and other minorities from achieving … More after the Jump…

Europe and Modern War

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Saw an interesting piece awhile ago on the South African Business Day website called: GIDEON RACHMAN: Threat of war seems unreal in an age of peace. The essential point is that although war seems to have been eradicated in Europe, don’t count it out if the Euro crisis gets as bad as it possibly can. I think it is naive in the extreme to think that because there has not been a major war in Europe for the past 65+ years that one cannot happen.   We should keep in mind that it was 49 years between the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars and the Prusso-Danish war of … More after the Jump…

The Decline and Fall of the United States?

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There has been much talk and discussion both in editorials and on various internet forums about the pending decline of the supposed US “empire” or the USA itself. I was thinking about this on the way back from dropping my wife off at work this morning and the more I think about it, the more I think it could only possibly happen if America lets it happen. The USA is not comparable to the UK prior to their fall from Great Power status post WWII. The disparity between the size of the two nations both physical and in population is too great for their to really be a valid comparison. … More after the Jump…

Book Review: The Age of Total War: 1860-1945 by Jeremy Black

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The notion that a book is “thought-provoking” is often thrown out there for works of non-fiction, and of those that are described as such that I have read most very seldom are.   This book is different, Dr. Black has written not so much a history as a treatise challenging historians, particularly military historians, to reexamine the history of conflict in the examined period with the idea of total war uppermost in their minds.   It seems a counter-intuitive thing to do at first, but he provides plenty of examples of why the wars under consideration were not total or were only partially total at best.   This includes World … More after the Jump…

The Fall of Qaddafi and the future of the “Arab Spring”

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I wrote about the war/action/conflict/kinetic what have you in Libya when it kicked off in March, April, and again in June. With the rebels now storming Tripoli itself and being on the verge of success under the cover of NATO, the question now becomes what will the successor regime look like. I will guess here and say that it will be a notional democracy wit an oligarchy of strongmen in power. They will also make all the right noises to placate the soft-heads in the west and make them feel good about their policy of R2P. It will probably not be long before the new regime starts hunting down Qaddafis … More after the Jump…

Sun-Tzu & Clausewitz: A Comparison

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Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz have something to offer for the serious student of warfare.   The biggest distinction between the two seems to be their different approaches to the art of war.   Sun-Tzu advocates a more subtle and indirect approach to the art of war while Clausewitz advocates a more direct approach. The essence of Sun-Tzu’s philosophy seems to be winning through superior generalship.   He almost seems to advocate a type of warfare by superior maneuver similar to that practiced in Renaissance Italy.   He preaches the avoidance of pitched battles unless the attacker is assured of winning.   This view is summed up in chapter III verse … More after the Jump…

The Opening Months of World War I in the West

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This will be a series of posts laying out the general history of the major Fronts in World War I. The First World War was unnecessary in that if the diplomats of Europe had truly wanted to stop the war there was ample opportunity in the five weeks between the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of the fighting.[1] The outbreak of war in 1939 can be directly traced to the terms of the Peace dictated at Versailles in 1919, and World War II was incomparably more destructive than World War I both in terms of lives lost and property destroyed. It was fashionable in the aftermath … More after the Jump…

Combatant Military Strategic Thought in 1914

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All classical military theorists point out that military strategy and national policy are intermingled.   Clausewitz devotes a lengthy portion of his treatise to the ways in which military action should serve the needs of the state; indeed, his most famous quote concerns politics and war.   Most of the combatants in World War I seem to have forgotten that policy drives strategy. When the Elder Moltke was Chief of the German General Staff, German war-plans and policy neatly interlinked however, during Schleiffen’s tenure as Chief of the General Staff that link between policy and strategy was lost.   The Great Memorandum of 1905 ignored political reality in favor of … More after the Jump…

The Political Acumen of Otto von Bismarck

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Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was probably the most accomplished politician that Germany has ever produced.   He was almost single-handedly responsible for the emergence of the nation of Germany during the nineteenth century.   He was appointed Prime Minister of Germany in 1862 by the Prussian King Wilhelm I (1797-1888) in the middle of a constitutional crisis in Prussia in which the Reichstag refused to authorize a state budget.   Bismarck handled this crisis with ease by using the machinery of state to collect taxes without the Reichstag thus making them irrelevant.   He continued to collect taxes and finance the state for four years until finally the Reichstag was … More after the Jump…

The Death of Bin Laden, a Good Start

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With Bin Laden dead, what next? It is a virtual certainty that terrorism will not stop because someone (even bin laden) who has been in hiding for the past 9 1/2 years was killed. Terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism, is bigger than any one man. It is the result of an ideology that holds everything the Christian, liberal, West stands for in contempt. Bin laden is dead great, what happens next? I don’t think that the mythical moderate Muslim majority is going to suddenly come out of hiding as the Christian Science Monitor apparently believes. Where have they all been for the past ten years? Or were they hiding from bin … More after the Jump…

Samual Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”

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Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22-49 This article set off a debate in academia that continues to this day. What Huntington argues in the paper is that after the fall of communism in 1989, the world is no longer looking at a standoff between ideologies but that the world will revert to clashes between civilizations. The basic thesis is that the ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism covered over or subsumed the natural differences between civilizations. He argues that prior to the end of the Cold War the conflicts that shaped history were primarily Western and have gone through three phases since … More after the Jump…

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