Frequently Asked Questions
1. Are these questions really frequently asked?
4. Your slant sounds kind of Marxist to me. What's with that?
6. If war is not the answer, what is?
10. Everybody's got a bias. What's yours?
2. Yes. There are always alternatives. To say that we have no choice in this situation is, in a real sense, the same as saying that the terrorists control us. They act. We react--in an automatic and wholly predictable fashion. In war, the enemy constantly tries to channel your response down paths that he desires. The case is no different here.
Lincoln once informed Congress, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
Our past has not been especially quiet during the past century, but the dogmas we learned during the twentieth century are inadequate to the twenty-first. We must disenthrall ourselves from old ways of thinking. That, in turn, means assessing all the alternatives. We must think anew. If we do, we shall quite likely find ourselves acting anew.
3. I equate patriotism neither with jingoism nor with the suspension of my critical faculties. On the contrary, in a republic the first obligation of a citizen is to be politically aware. In the present crisis, we cannot passively sit back and let the Bush administration do our thinking for us. We can support, constructively criticize, or flat out disagree. But republics are held together from below, by a citizenry capable of seeing not just beyond its own self-interest, but of seeing the big picture in the first place.
As for getting out of the ivory tower: the nature of my job gives me the time to read and think about these issues more than most. That, in turn, carries a responsibility to help my fellow citizens understand the issues--not to propagandize them (God knows there's enough of that), but to make it easier for them to arrive at their own conclusions.
4. Most Americans automatically reject anything that smacks of Marxist analysis because of its associations with Communism. But you can employ Marxist analysis without necessarily embracing Marxist prescriptions--and certainly without embracing Communism. And actually, I was never trained to think in Marxian terms. I've sort of just picked it up over the years because it helps me as a military historian. I imagine that a colleague thoroughly conversant with Marxist analysis would find my efforts lacking in polish.
5. Wars do not occur in a vacuum. There is always a political, social, cultural, and economic context. Further, this context varies from one conflict to another and--more importantly--from one era to another. For example, the basis for many early modern European conflicts was often religious in nature. After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), balance of power politics played a dominant role. The conventional view of the Cold War is that it represented an ideological struggle between the Communist regimes and great democracies for the control/protection of the world.
Scholars and policymakers seldom agree completely on the nature of any given context. Much depends on one's assumptions about how the world really works. For instance, it is fairly well established that the United States sometimes used the Communist menace as a smoke screen for policies actually pursued for other reasons. This modulates but does not necessarily overthrow the notion that the Soviet Union was indeed an "evil empire" which needed to be contained.
Globalization affords a useful framework in which to understand the post-Cold War world order. Here's how Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, explains it: From at least the mid-nineteenth century onward, a global economy emerged in which goods and people (i.e., labor) moved around the world in massive quantities. That first global economy disappeared in the ruins of the two world wars and the intervening Great Depression. The Cold War essentially segmented the world into two economies, one largely confined to Communist nations, the other to the rest of the world.
Now that the Cold War is over, a new global economy has burst forth with a vengeance. "What is new today is the degree and intensity with which the world is being tied together into a single globalized marketplace. What is also new is the sheer number of people and countries able to partake of this process and be affected by it. . . . This new era of globalization, compared to the one before World War I, is turbocharged." (Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Branch: Understanding Globalization [New York, 1999], xv)
A hallmark of today's globalization is falling telecommunication costs. Satellites, the Internet, and so on make it possible for corporations to place their operations in widely separated parts of the world but to manage them in a highly centralized fashion. The kicker is this: those corporations often place their labor-intensive operations in underdeveloped countries where labor is cheap. Since the entire point of making, say, Nike tennis shoes in Indonesia is to take advantage of the cheap labor, a corporation like Nike has little incentive to pay its workers more than a pittance. The Indonesian government and others like it are cajoled by both the corporations and, arguably, the United States government to accept this arrangement. Often a small elite in such developing countries reaps whatever benefit is to be had. The great majority do not benefit from the free market. They're nakedly exploited by it. And this breeds a resentment in which people become desperate enough to regard Osama bin Laden as a kind of twenty-first century William Tell.
6. War is never the answer. True, unless one is willing to reject outright the use of violence--and it is worth noting that some "peacenik" opponents of globalization employ violence themselves, albeit in trivial forms--it is sometimes necessary to meet force with force. But war solves immediate problems at the cost of creating new ones. In 1939, for example, Britain and France went to war to defend Polish sovereignty from Nazi aggression. Six years later Poland was indeed liberated from Nazi occupation, but at the cost of becoming a Soviet satellite, and so it remained for the next forty-four years. Meanwhile, Britain and France forever lost their great power status.
The point is, we have an obligation as citizens to understand the risks of war. We also have an obligation to ask ourselves why we have been attacked and what exactly we are defending.
As for a direct answer to your question, figure it out for yourself. My job is to equip you to think, not do it for you.
7. Name-calling is an easy way to avoid the discomfort of having to think. The original point of the First Amendment was largely to encourage free debate on matters of public importance. Dismissing a point of view rather than engaging with it is an abdication of one's responsibility as a citizen. And bear in mind: understanding a point of view is not the same as agreeing with it. Often we grasp our own perspective better once we fully engage with that of others.
8. You may be thinking of military history in the History Channel sense: guns and trumpets, guts and glory, great generals, and so on. I've done my share of strategic, operational, and even tactical history, but this instance requires a different emphasis.
10. Check out The Making of a Military Historian. My home page long promised that such a project was in the works, but I intended that as self-parody. It now seems to me that perhaps it would be of real utility to have such a page.
Return to Burdens of Empire, Then and Now.