Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in
Statecraft
By Angelo Codevilla
(Basic Books, 336 pages, $27.50)
Machiavelli could not have written a better book to give advice
to “war presidents.” But this should not puzzle the reader. Angelo
Codevilla is a connoisseur of Machiavelli; indeed he translated and
edited The Prince (Yale University Press, 1997). What
Codevilla teaches in this book— he calls it a “remedial primer on
statecraft”—has a rich historic foundation that ranges from the
wisdom of Thucydides, to the sage writers of the Roman Empire, to
John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and many more.
The most interesting ideas in this book are its lively critique
of the misuse of language—the language used by our diplomats and
our statesmen to articulate America’s goals, and by intellectuals
who seek to explain what is good and evil in our time. Thus, they
wrote in the United Nations Charter that “we the peoples of the
United Nation determined to unite our strength to maintain
international peace and security…” Codevilla blows this verbal fog
away and reminds us that “the world’s peoples had not
conceived the UN, and the member governments had mutually
incompatible objectives in mind for it.” The misuse of language
also attached confusing labels to different nations. The
economically more backward nations were called the “underdeveloped“
nations, but that seemed too harsh and so they were renamed the
“developing” nations—as if the wealthy nations had stopped
developing.
But Codevilla’s criticism of the misuse of language moves beyond
these superficial decorations and gets to the heart of the matter:
the mistaken axioms that are the pillars of our distorting
intellectual edifice. For example, the axiom that all mankind wants
democracy. Codevilla recalls that Condoleezza Rice told the State
Department staff on taking office in 2005, that all other people
want democracy and decency as much as we do. Alas, because of this
mistaken axiom President George W. Bush attempted to transform
Georgia into a democracy, a blunder that merely aggravated our
deteriorating relations with Russia. Codevilla also mentions a
“corollary axiom”: All the world’s diverse cultures are compatible
and commensurable. This is the road to multiculturalism, which is a
downhill path for the functioning, genuine democracies into the
abyss of tribal chaos.
Even more damaging is the axiom that there is such a thing as
the “international community.” Such hypostatizing has been
criticized by the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who
called the excessive reliance on an abstraction “the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.” Codevilla doesn’t pull punches to explain
how damaging this fallacy about the international community is. “In
today’s struggle with the people who terrorize Americans,” he
writes, “the worst thing you can do is to define America as open to
any and all cultures and ideas. By so doing you demoralize our
people by telling them to risk their lives for the privilege of
believing in nothing, and convince anyone who lives by a lively
vision that Americans are empty shells.”
Codevilla makes useful points about Islamism, which he calls
“the problem du jour.” He explains that distinction
between moderates and extremists is an abstraction from reality.
“These American categories are artificial, unserious. Taking
seriously what actually moves people is a prerequisite for
successful manipulation.”
Yet, it is also essential to call a spade a spade. Senior
officials in the U.S. government began to worry that “moderate”
Muslims would become hostile if they were labeled “jihadists.” And
these timid officials also worried that by identifying specific
terrorists as Islamists they might bring the wrath of a billion
Muslims upon America. Hence, the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security urged the U.S. government to refer to actual or potential
Islamic terrorists as “extremists.” Even the Defense Department
agreed to this appeasement and explained in published documents
that the global campaign (or “global war”) against terrorism was
against extremists. Which extremists? The drug smugglers in Mexico,
supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, or the few Neo-Nazis who sometimes
paint graffiti with swastikas? One cannot defeat the enemy if one
is afraid to identify him.
THE POLITICAL ROLE OF RELIGION is a large and complex topic that
this book addresses only briefly. “For those who run American
foreign policy,” Codevilla writes, “to regard religion as a
negative factor in the world, to be overcome by ‘ moderation,’ i.e.
by watering belief down to a point pleasing to unbelievers, is to
place America in the role of the enemy to all the world’s sincere
believers in God.” Not so fast! Not all religions are equal. Those
who run American foreign policy should regard certain religions as
a negative factor. For example, the Taliban who kill girls because
they tried to go to school, who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan,
who decapitate Pakistani policemen in a public square for young
boys to see, and who will undoubtedly assert that they are “sincere
believers in God.” The irreconcilable disagreements between
different religions often lead to violent wars that are fought—it
is sad to say—with godless cruelty. Hence, America has to be the
enemy of some “sincere believers in God.”
It would be most unusual if a book with such a wealth of
intrepid ideas did not have some minor flaws.
For instance, there is the Harvard professor, Joseph Nye, who
wrote the book on “soft power,” a clever two-word term that became
a frequently used label for influencing nations without the use of
military power, but with the ability to purchase a desired policy
by offering aid (and bribes), or the ability successfully to use
propaganda. This soft power is almost a platitude—although it has
been skillfully branded as a two-word epiphany. Yet, Codevilla
builds a farflung indictment of Nye’s “soft power” by citing the
many foolish ways of attempting to exert influence with propaganda
and bribes. To be sure, the United States programs for influencing
Muslims and Arab nations with sermons about democracy, broadcasts,
and films have been embarrassingly inept. But even more painful has
been the frequent ineptness in wartime, when a wrong strategy was
used and the tactics were botched.
Codevilla’s “remedial primer on statecraft” incorporates the
wisdom of what war presidents and their staff must keep in mind.
The essence of his book can be expressed in a wise maxim from the
time of the Roman Empire: Whatever you do, do with caution and look
to the end. Quidquid agis prudenter agas et respice
finem.
