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How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle

2010, Gideon Rose

3.2/5

How wars end. They end in peace. It's not clear from Rose's title or from anything I read about this book beforehand, but this is a history of American grand strategy in the 20th century. Grand strategy is the direction steered in to enable you to win the stable peace you desire when the fighting ends. So this is a history of how America has achieved its brand of peace during the last century. It tells how political and military leaders have handled the endgame of war in making force serve politics as each war ended. Generally our leaders at each war's end have learned the most from the previous wars and base their reactions on it, and that's why Rose says we always fight the last battle.The author's perspective on some of these issues is fresh to me. So I read with interest his explanation of how Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points were designed to prevent a harsh punishment of Germany and Austria to forestall the bitterness that could lead to another war. But his naivete and good-heartedness ran against the grain of British and French desire for retribution. We know what happened. I read how the decision to use the A-bombs on Japan was more of a decision dictated by the fact that we'd developed the weapon and not to use it would've been political suicide because every American death after its availability would have been blamed on the decision. The peace talks to end the Korean War were stalled until Eisenhower, the new president, threatened to expand the war with atomic weapons. Nixon, his vice-president, learned how toughness could produce results and tried the same tactics in Vietnam, without results. What Rose writes about Vietnam fits my own understanding. For this reason I thought his analysis of how Nixon and Kissinger got us out of the war the most comprehensive and clearly explained I've ever read. Rose explains how we screwed up the endgame in both wars in Iraq. Both in the Gulf War and in 2003 we failed by not having a clear policy and organization to meet the political realities once the military was finished. Both times we created a mess, adversely affecting American prestige and long-term strategic interests.The conclusions Rose comes to about the endgames of these wars and the results achieved amounts to a kind of wisdom. Obviously he comes to his conclusions through hindsight. It's true what they say about hindsight, that it's 20/20. But hindsight is also true.Rose tells a history based on pragmatism, a realpolitik though it's seasoned liberally with morality. In a section headed "The Strong Do What They Can" he explains that only the strongest nations can be geopolitically proactive, a conviction first expressed by the Greek historian Thucydides in the 4th century BC and still believed to be applicable today. Weak nations can only react to immediate developments. Those nations who're global leaders can project policy aimed at the future and potential problems. This is how he sees Iraq at the time of 9/11. Following the attack on New York and Washington, the U. S. had several options on how to use its power, wealth, and influence, including developing alternatives to fossil fuels which would free the west from dependence on the Middle East, or work toward the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Regime change in Iraq to produce a more stabilized Middle East was seen as one of the options and was the one chosen. It's emphasized that a team other than Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld would have chosen differently. Or the same team, given different circumstances, could have chosen differently. The strong do what they can, Rose insists. They're able to project, and Iraq was going to have to be dealt with sooner or later. Rose sees 9/11 as having the same importance and influence as the 1950 Communist invasion of South Korea, that is as a catalyst bringing about a new phase of international politics, this one characterized by American unilateral activity.Many people would object to Rose's conclusions. He's forgiving of American policies. He sees all of America's actions in the light of grand strategy--how do you win the peace and ensure the greatest economic and military security for the nation? One way is to use conflict to create and maintain stability. For this reason Rose doesn't look at the horrors of the nightly news. He looks at American foreign policy as that which projects American security. It's hard to find fault with the rationale for that security. Without being cynical, without seeing instances of flagrant imperialism, he sees America using its great strength to secure peace for Americans and to ensure stability in those areas of strategic importance. He describes American grand strategy as trying to pacify the world piece by piece. Few people, especially our leaders, articulate it in such grandiose fashion precisely because it sounds grandiose. If you look away from the hypnotic pull of television news and newspapers with their gloomy sense of western decline and economic doom, Rose sees promise. Sometimes we're clumsy, sometimes we stumble, but we're getting it right.
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