Getting Beyond Stalemate to Win a War

[PainRack]

The pre-WW2 case is even more interesting, We have a virtually powerless state (in 1920s terms) rising very rapidl. Now. according to Minimal Realism, we would expect other European nations to form a coalition against that country. They did not, quite the reverse. As German successes grow, we see other countries and movements bandwagoning with them. We see neo-fascist movements forming across Europe (ranging from Moseley's blackshirts in the UK to the Iron Band in Romania etc). We see the failure of the hegemon powers in Europe to deal decisively with this challenge causing yet further accelerations of German power growth and expansion - which was gaining it yet further support

We also saw a counter-coalition forming around the Soviet Union, UK, France,Poland in the 30s and a counter-coalition in the 40s around the Big 3.
The problem was that the counter-coalition failed in Czechoslovakia. The reasons were even more obscure than just appeasement, because documents now show that Chamberlain reasons for strengthening Germany was to form a counter against rising Soviet power...............

Indeed so; the dithering and ineffectual responses to challenge during the Clinton Era are a direct cause of the problems we face now. Look at teh situation; in 1991 we had brought down the Soviet Union and everybody knew it, they'd challenged us and we'd crushed them. When we whistled, over a hundred nations turned up to bandwagon with us - so much so, we ran ODS at a profit (contributions far exceeded expenses. After eight years of Clinton, when we whistled, the response was dramatically reduced.

What ineffectual responses would that be? Iraq? The decision to maintain a deleterious embargo that continually showed how weak the US was? Something that actually emerged from the Bush-Rumsfield adminstration?
Or are you referring to the ineffective attempt at regime change in Haiti?

Not true. The UN is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its being used to impede our freedom of manoeuver and limit our ability to respond to challenges. It's part of teh current challenge to our hegemon status, not part of the means of supporting it.

Primarily because the US has lost its diplomatic ability to use it, something which should be laid on the steps of ineffectual leadership.

[Elfdart]

There were already signs that other nations were beginning to bandwagon with Hussein so the need for decisive action was necessary - or so the powers that be decided.

Who? Aside from the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who were able to cash their welfare checks, I mean.

Now we have two additional cases. We have Syria that's doing its thing in the Lebanon and Iran that's doing ist things including sending nausea over the border into Iraq. Now, do either of those represent threats to the United States that challenge its hegemon status? That's the key question that has to be asked before an attack decision is made. In the case of Syria, the answer is almost certainly no, Syria's blunt and clumsy actions are actually counterproductive. The country is alienating prospective supporters, not attracting them. At the moment, I'd say Iran is falling into the same category although the omens and portents are less favorable.

The country that has really shot itself in the dick, as far as international opinion is concerned, is the U. S. of A, not Syria and certainly not Iran. It's only the sadism and barbarism of Al Queda that causes them to be held in somewhat lower regard than Uncle Sam, though in some countries (like Pakistan) Bin Laden is still flavor of the month. This column by Katha Pollitt, who had no qualms about cheering for the Vietcong, FMLN, FSLN and others who fought against the American Empire, spells it out pretty well when she responds to Alexander Cockburn's call for "solidarity" with the insurgents in Iraq:

With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be showing solidarity? Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? Shiites massacring their Sunni neighbors? Sunnis killing Shiites? Religious reactionaries who have murdered doctors, professors, working women, Christians, students, hand-holding couples? "Ignorance about the Iraqi resistance is somewhat forgivable," Alex concedes, given the lack of first-hand sympathetic reporting--not that he deigns to enlighten the reader.

So, okay, call me ignorant: The Iraqi resistance isn't dominated by theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs? Who haven't tortured and killed trade union leaders, feminists, aid workers, schoolteachers and such? We would like to live--Iraqis would like to live -- in the society they want to create?

The Sandinistas and the FMLN were far from perfect, but they were leftists. They stood for health care, education, land distribution, modernization--not burning down liquor stores and music shops, beating up unveiled women, suicide-bombing ordinary civilians, bringing back sharia law. They had support from all over the left end of the spectrum--labor,churches, feminists, socialists, human rights activists, peace activists--not just because they opposed US imperialism, but because they shared the goals of the American, and global, left.

If the Central American revolutionaries had resisted American intervention in the name of the Spanish Inquisition and spent a lot of time ethnically cleansing their neighborhoods, American leftists probably wouldn't have been so eager to hold potluck suppers for them.

Why Alex thinks embracing the Iraqi resistance would strengthen the US antiwar movement is beyond me. On the contrary, the nature of the resistance is a major reason why the antiwar movement is so weak. No matter how intensely you oppose the war, it is hard to feel good about an Iraq in which the resistance calls the shots. That was not how anti-war Americans saw Central America, or even Vietnam. It's not just that the Iraqi insurgents are killing our soldiers--which, let's remember, was not an issue in Central America. It's that they're killing each other.

Thank goodness for small favors!

To some extent ignoring a challenger's actions can be more damaging to that challenger than responding to them. The worst thing that can be done is to respond ineffectually (like Clinton did when he blew up some empty tents with million-dollar cruise missiles). That was pathetic and risible. The options are to either respond effectively or don't respond at all.

Even worse is responding forcefully to a "challenger" who never challenged you in the first place. Others will take note of your predation on the weak and will try to do something to prevent their own countries from being raped. The US was heavyhanded in Latin America for many years and is now so despised that politicians nowadays get elected when running against the Yanquis, and crowds in Bolivia cheered when they heard about the WTC attacks. You can see the same thing in Greece and other countries where a "challenger" was slapped down or a smaller, weaker country was cornholed by the US government. Screwing with other countries for the sake of screwing with them is the worst option of all.

The article in the OP reminds me of stage versions of Peter Pan, where Tinkerbell is dying from poison and the cast begs the kids in the audience:

"If you clap your hands and say 'I believe in fairies' Tinkerbell will live!"

The difference is, rather than amusing children, this pile of bullshit is meant to confuse adults with infantile minds.

[Darth Wong]

I think one has to differentiate between rhetorical bandwagoning and military bandwagoning. If you detect that a powerful military coalition is forming against you, that is a military bandwagon, and you have no choice but to act in self-defense. But if a lot of people are just trash-talking you, then that is a rhetorical bandwagon, and you're talking about a war of public image. That is what Hussein was building: a rhetorical bandwagon. And in a war of public image, responding in a thug-like manner only makes you look worse. You could completely destroy the enemy in a military sense (as the United States did to Hussein) and still lose that kind of war.

In the past, this was not exactly true. The victor could write history as he pleased, so it was an entirely viable strategy to be a thug and simultaneously win the public image war. But in the modern age of rapid and relatively unrestricted global information flow, it is no longer possible to kill your critics and then create your own version of events, which the whole world's historians will cheerfully adopt for lack of competing information.

The way to win a war of public image is to demonstrate your superiority through example, rather than acting like a youth gang member and saying "You be dissin' me, I pop a cap in yo ass".

[Edi]

Stuart, one of the biggest reasons nobody came to your whistling after the Clinton era is the fucking moron currently sitting in the White House. Bush had set out from the start of his presidency on a course that was guaranteed to alienate all of his allies in the long run due to his political decisions and direct disdain for the rest of the world. Then 9/11 happened and virtually everyone expressed a lot of support and you had offers of help, you got the NATO article 5 declared in your favor and then the moron says that "You're with us or against us", which was essentially "You do as we tell you or you're one of the enemy".

Then Bush started his trumped up drumming-up for the Iraq war and when unsurprisingly it all turned out to be a pack of lies, it's a wonder anyone is friends with the US. Trade partners, military allies etc, yes, but friends? You have rather few of them left. Most nations wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire unless they were guaranteed to get some tangible benefit out of it.

The problem was not the actions of the Clinton era, but the actions of the Bush era and what Mike said about the public image war.

[Stuart]

The problem with Hegemon Theory (a much better name than "Realism")

I agree, the problem is that neither of us write the text books in question so we're stuck with the terminology that was probably introduced by some dozy academic who'd had too many glasses of sherry for lunch. If its any consolation, we reduced one of said academics to tears when we quoted her doctoral thesis as support for the concept of using nuclear weapons in Operation Desert Storm (six years after the event of course).

is that adopting it will inevitably commit the self-declared Hegemon into a never-ending series of campaigns against any and all perceived challenges to its authority, thus leading inevitably to over-extension of its capabilities, followed by loss of prestige.

Paul Kennedy wrote a book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000" (for those of you who haven't read this, I strongly urge you to do so; its a masterly thesis on the interaction between economic and military power) which pursues precisely that line of logic. He goes further to suggest that any Great Power which rises to the position of being hegemon will suffer from Imperial Overstretch and thus bring about its own destruction. This raises an interesting question; assuming a power is going to become a Hegemon (and few actually have much choice in the matter) how does it delay that inevitable end as long as possible?

Especially since part of the Hegemon's behaviour is to publicly subscribe to Hegemon Theory, thus making it appear as if has been defeated if it does not follow up by acting upon that theory.

I think its important to note the difference here between Maximal Realism which is a theory on the mechanisms that lie beneath the interaction of nations and policies that are derived from an assumption that Maximal Realism does represent an accurate picture of how nations interact. The US hasn't, by and large, been ruled by people who are Maximal Realists, the driving doctrine of the US for most of the 20th century has been a mix of Minimal Realists and Internationalists with the balance between the two swinging backwards and forwards as political party dogmans waxed and waned. The early part of the Reagan era was one period when Maximal Realism did hold sway but the US reverted to its normal mind-set when Ronaldus Magnus left power. The current administration is an uneasy mix between Maximal and Minimal Realism with the majority being the latter pretending to be the former.

It's also worth noting that Realism in all its forms isn't necessarily accepted worldwide. The old Soviet Union, for example, used (and based its decisions on) a quite different theory of international relations that didn't involve a struggle for power at all, or not in those terms at any rate. Europeans tend not to accept Realism either (which lead to one French academic at the Halifax conference proposing that 'realism has been discredited", a perfectly rational statement in context but one that sounds pretty out to lunch in any other.

So, picking up your point (at last ), one of the demands of a set of international policies based on the perception that the Maximal Realism is correct would be to hide the fact that the nation in question had, in fact, made that perception. A Maximal Realist country would actually pretend to be anything other than Maximal Realist in order to maintain the widest possible range of options in its foreign policy decisions. The up side of that is the division between international relations theory and the policies based on the acceptance of those theories means that people look at policy and declared policy, not at the perceptions that underly those policies.

[Stuart]

[quote="ElfdartThat's hilarious. When Noam Chomsky said that the reason Uncle Sam intruded into Indochina was to make an example out of them in order to deter any other colonies of allied states from getting uppity, he was attacked as a godless commie fag and conspiracy theorist. Now the War Lobby and its cheerleaders say the same thing. As usual, right-wingers are 40 years behind.[/quote]

Err, no. You're grotesquely oversimplifying things and Chomsky's talking a load of rancid dingoes kidneys as usual. I suggest you read Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict by Michael Lind. Lind makes a lot of mistakes (for example he attributes the acceptable length of duration of American involvement in a conflict to casualties when, in fact, the determining factor is time) and some of his judgements are off-beam but his analysis of why the U.S. got involved in Vietnam is essentially accurate. Put into a nutshell, the big mistake we made was ever getting interested in Vietnam in the first place (the Eisenhower approach was Viet-where? They didn't want to know, gave the place no importance and refused to get involved on anything more than the most superficial of levels. The US didn't give a damn whether colonies of allied states broke free or not (on quiet reflection we rather hoped they would but that was just us) it wasn't a matter of any great concern to us. Because it wasn't a matter of any great concern to us, it couldn't be used as a challenge against us (Thailand, on the other hand was a different matter). It was the Kennedys who made Vietnam a matter of significant interest to the United States and therefore opened us up to a challenge there to which we had to respond.

[Stuart]

We also saw a counter-coalition forming around the Soviet Union, UK, France,Poland in the 30s and a counter-coalition in the 40s around the Big 3.

Do you mean the Locarno Pact? It collapsed when Germany started to move (formally, Locarno became null and void when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936.

There's no doubt that Chamberlain did see Germany as a counter to the Soviet Union - that's been accepted for many, many years (from before WW2 in fact). However, the key point here is the growth of bandwagonning with Germany as challenger to the UK/French European hegemony. When Germany was weak, people bandwagonned with the UK/France; as Germany picked up strength, more and more countries shifted sides - an early example being Italy (compare Mussolini's comments and statements regarding Germany in the early/mid 1930s with those a few years later. Of course, the great example was the decision by the Soviet Union to ally with Germany (the reasons why they did that are many and varied, for the purpose of this discussion though, the important fact is that they did.) We have the spread of Nazi-like beliefs all over Europe and beyond (close to where I live there is a German-American club called the Arion Singing Society which, in the 1930s was the Aryan Singing Society - and guess which Singing Society was closely investigated by the FBI for treasonous conduct during WW2. Hint - it was linked to the only known act of industrial sabotage carried out by Nazis in the US during WW2).

What ineffectual responses would that be? Iraq? The decision to maintain a deleterious embargo that continually showed how weak the US was? Something that actually emerged from the Bush-Rumsfield adminstration? Or are you referring to the ineffective attempt at regime change in Haiti?

Neither actually, the ones in mind were the shooting of cruise missiles at groups of tents in Afghanistan (having made sure occupants of those tents were well aware of what was coming - making this the most expensive dead camel in history) and the bombing of a poor defenseless aspirin factory. There are others as well, the Clinton era wasn't one of our finest hours internationally speaking.

Primarily because the US has lost its diplomatic ability to use it, something which should be laid on the steps of ineffectual leadership.

I'd put it differently; I would say that the UN has evolved into an organization whose bureaucracy is now primarily concerned with self-perpetuation. Out of the military sphere for a moment, the performance of the UN during the Great Tsunami was deplorable to put it mildly. The organization is essentially more concerned with not doing anything wrong than doing anything right and even more concerned with not rocking the boat in case its overpaid, underworked bureaucrats lose their jobs.

Nobody can get the UN to do anything now; the UN is only of use in stopping people doing things.

[Stuart]

I think one has to differentiate between rhetorical bandwagoning and military bandwagoning. If you detect that a powerful military coalition is forming against you, that is a military bandwagon, and you have no choice but to act in self-defense. But if a lot of people are just trash-talking you, then that is a rhetorical bandwagon, and you're talking about a war of public image.

Exactly. This is precisely why 'challenges' have to be evaluated and treated on their merits, there is no one-size-fits-all response (or shouldn't be). Trash-talking can (and should) be ignored. Here again, we run into the difference between the theory of how nations interact and the policies that result from that theory.

That is what Hussein was building: a rhetorical bandwagon. And in a war of public image, responding in a thug-like manner only makes you look worse. You could completely destroy the enemy in a military sense (as the United States did to Hussein) and still lose that kind of war.

This is a little less clear; certainly Saddam Hussein's challenge and attempts to build an anti-US bandwagon were largely rhetorical and that is now very apparent. However, his military capability was over-estimated in the late 1990s/early 2000s and grossly over-estimated in the early 1990s. I can still remember getting briefings (from people who should have known better) that the US could expect up to 100,000 in ODS. I think at least part of the overestimation of the military component of Saddam Hussein's challenge was a legacy of those original exaggerations. The line of argument went "we made these terrible predictions, they didn't come true, therefore the forces that could have made them come true weren't involved, therefore they weren't destroyed, therefore they still exist, we can't find them so they must be well-hidden." The fact that they never existed was anathema to them because that would have implied their original assessments were up the spout.

All that meant that the military component to Saddam Hussein's attempted bandwagon was greatly overstated. In fairness to us, that wasn't just us, indeed some of the worst overstatement came from intelligence outside the USA.

In the past, this was not exactly true. The victor could write history as he pleased, so it was an entirely viable strategy to be a thug and simultaneously win the public image war. But in the modern age of rapid and relatively unrestricted global information flow, it is no longer possible to kill your critics and then create your own version of events, which the whole world's historians will cheerfully adopt for lack of competing information.

That is an extremely interesting and incisive insight. What you are actually saying is that the prevalence of modern, uncontrollable communications have made all the existing theories of international relations obsolete and fundamentally changed the ground rules on how nations interact. Indeed, one could take it a step further and suggest that modern uncontrollable communications have made the nation-state itself obsolete. That gives rise to all sorts of interesting questions.

For example,

How do nations interact in an uncontrolled communications era?
If the nation state is becoming obsolete, what replaces it?
What basic mechanisms will be in place to determine how nations operate?
What policies will be put in place to take advantage of these new structures?


The way to win a war of public image is to demonstrate your superiority through example, rather than acting like a youth gang member and saying "You be dissin' me, I pop a cap in yo ass".[/quote]

[Stuart]

The way to win a war of public image is to demonstrate your superiority through example, rather than acting like a youth gang member and saying "You be dissin' me, I pop a cap in yo ass".

The problem is that, while that sounds good in theory, its exploitation is rather harder. Its fine to say leadership by example is an objective, the problem is that all international problems are a mass of different considerations and influences, most of which are contradictory. What is a "good example" to one set of opinions is a very bad example to another. Each nation has its own set of objectives, requirements, policy rationales etc and those dominate its strategic thinking. Each nation has its own vital interests which it cannot give up without compromising its own existance.

So, exerting superiority by setting an example (implicitly setting a good example) runs into this problem. Who's good example? And what happens when one side's definition of a "good example" is horrendously wrong. Taking an extreme example; let's just suppose that we have a situation where genocide is a good thing according to a dominant international group. Do we set a good example by joining in said genocide? Because if we condemn and oppose it, we are,a ccording to that group, setting a bad example and should be punished for it.

The other option is that the United States decides what its priorities, national interests and definitions of right and wrong are and acts on those. Now, this could be defined as "setting an example" but to those for whom the ideals and interests in question are anathema, this is (insert all national insults as deemed appropriate).

In the final analysis, that's the problem. If we do act in our own interests and according to our own ideals, shaping the world accordingly, we're a hegemon and the only question left is how do we stay that way. If we allow policy to be determined by others, we'll be another inconsequential nation-state and somebody else will be hegemon - and their beliefs and/or ideals will hold sway. They may not be as gentle as us.

[K. A. Pital]

If we allow policy to be determined by others, we'll be another inconsequential nation-state and somebody else will be hegemon

A hegemon can be nonexistent, can it not?

[Darth Wong]

Stuart, I agree with you that warfare in the modern information age is an extraordinarily difficult thing to manage, particularly for a Hegemon, and while my preferred course of action is easy to say, it is also extremely difficult to implement cleanly. But if the true nature of the situation is at least recognized by those in power, it is much more likely that they will take actions consistent with that goal, which is less likely to create the kind of expensive and thoroughly unconstructive public-relations fiascoes that the United States all too often gets itself into.

Al-Quaeda, for all of its apparent military impotence, appears to have a fairly well-developed understanding of the nature of information war. The United States needs to catch up in that regard.

[Stuart]

A hegemon can be nonexistent, can it not?

Depends on the theories of international relations one believes in. back in the days of the USSR, the dominant theory of international relations in the Soviet Camp was one of continuous change (I forget what its actual name is).

Basically, this proposed that in any interaction between two national entities, each takes on some of the characteristics of the other. The two states collide, interact, and go away in a form that represents a synthesis of the two systems. The degree to which they exchange characteristics is dependent upon the extent and violence of the collision. Two entities that engage in depth over a wide range of issues will influence eachother greatly, two that have only minor and inconsequential encounters will hardly change each other. Likewise, a large and powerful entity that collides with a small, weak one will influence the weak entity much more than it will be influenced by it (although, note, the large powerful entity will still be influenced, just not very much).

In other words, two opposed national entities collide and from their collision arises two new national entities that represent a mix of the characteristics of both.

According to this theory, international relations are not a continuous struggle for a hegemonic position but a sort of brownian motion, an environment in which nations move essentially at random and collide with eachother on largely a random basis. As a result of the process above, slowly, the nations adopt more and more of eachother's characteristics and become harder and harder to distinguise from eachother.

Now, we move from theory to policy. If we wish to influence the final mixture to our own national advantage, we have to maximize our effect on the nation states with whom we collide and minimize their effects on us. Therefore we have to make sure that we are larger and more powerful (we make a bigger impact) than the states with whom we collide and that we maximize the extent to which we act on them. Equally, we must minimize the changes made to us and we do that by minimizing the impact of the collision and by reducing the level of contact to a minimum.

In this environment, there isn't a hegemon per se, but if the above policies are carried out properly, the whole international system slowly and steadily looks more like "us" (whoever us may be).

[Stuart]

Stuart, I agree with you that warfare in the modern information age is an extraordinarily difficult thing to manage, particularly for a Hegemon, and while my preferred course of action is easy to say, it is also extremely difficult to implement cleanly.

I think we are in complete agreement on that point.

But if the true nature of the situation is at least recognized by those in power, it is much more likely that they will take actions consistent with that goal, which is less likely to create the kind of expensive and thoroughly unconstructive public-relations fiascoes that the United States all too often gets itself into.

I think the problem is recognized by the authorities (they spend enough money on it) but the problem lies deeper. Americans have an inbred assumption that everybody else in the world secretly wants to be American. I suspect that comes from the fact that we are a nation of immigrants and everybody who is here originated from people who wanted to be here (or perhaps found everywhere else too unpleasant). Therefore there is a presumption that other people are like our ancestors and want to be here and be us. The idea that they might not just doesn't occur to people.

Unfortunately, a lot of what makes America tick doesn't make good publicity all the time (the aggressive competition for example, which is what makes the US economy what it is, doesn't fare too well when translated to an international political scene. What we need are people who can actually understand what makes the rest of the world tick. They're hard to find/

Al-Quaeda, for all of its apparent military impotence, appears to have a fairly well-developed understanding of the nature of information war. The United States needs to catch up in that regard.

I agree we have a lot of catching up to do. However, al-Quaeda has much the same problems as the US does (in fact, they are stunningly like the US in a lot of ways; they assume that everybody secretly wants to be like them and will become them if they only understood what it all means). For example, down in the Yemen, one of their screeds carefully explains why beating women is a good thing. That may go down well in certain parts of their home constituency and on some porn sites but as a political concept it has all the flying characteristics of a lead brick. al-Quaeda has its moments but they're propaganda is pretty amateurish and in most cases counter-productive. Where they do excel is using the Internet as an internal information and C4I resource - in effect we supply them with their C4I system.

The real danger is what will happen fo we come across an enemy who is REALLY good at playing the info-war game. For example, an old friend of mine is a senior (star rank) officer in a foreign army. We were talking about what would happen if her army had to take on the United States one day. After the usual crack about dying gloriously, she said that they'd be the nicest, politest, most chivalrous enemy the US has ever fought. Why? "because it is much easier to make Americans feel guilty than to make them feel frightened". By playing the good guy very obviously and very blatantly, they'd undercut American home front support and hopefully bring the war to a half before they lost.

[K. A. Pital]

If we wish to influence the final mixture to our own national advantage, we have to maximize our effect on the nation states with whom we collide and minimize their effects on us.

Does this really fly? Trying to minimize the effects of others on your nation whilst maximizing your influence on them can cause international alienation - which is the backside of the hegemony quest medal. Essentially it's good old imperialism, only in a new cover - "we'll influence your politics, but god forbid you do anything to ours". No wonder it fails again and again.

The question is not the methods, but the goals. Is it the goal of every powerful nation to become a hegemon and remake everyone in it's own image? Why? The costs of such behaviour might outweigh anything positive it grants, as the British Empire and USSR found out; and so did the US.

I'd say it's not a given there should be hegemons, or quests to become such; if you say that it's an irreversible trait of the existing international relations and the economic system in the world, maybe it's time to think about international relations and economy once again... and think how much progress we've made anyway? Maybe changes are in order - to the US, to economic relations, to international politics?

There's only one argument which could justify the existence and actions according to the "hegemon theory", and that is that hegemony quest of nationstates is undividable from human nature. But that would be too hard to rationalize in a coherent manner, too many unknowns. So the "hegemon theory" and it's practical realization are not goals in and of themselves, they are not the "natural" order of things any more than any other technically implementable model of national relations. They are the existing order, but claiming this does not shed any light on whether this existing order is preferrable or desirable at all - maybe it isn't, and national relations should pursue other models for their own good.

[Stuart]

Does this really fly? Trying to minimize the effects of others on your nation whilst maximizing your influence on them can cause international alienation - which is the backside of the hegemony quest medal. Essentially it's good old imperialism, only in a new cover - "we'll influence your politics, but god forbid you do anything to ours". No wonder it fails again and again.

It certainly didn't for the USSR who originated it. They sort of lost.

The question is not the methods, but the goals. Is it the goal of every powerful nation to become a hegemon and remake everyone in it's own image? Why? The costs of such behaviour might outweigh anything positive it grants, as the British Empire and USSR found out; and so did the US.

That depends on the theories of international relations one happens to like. There are others (we've had them mentioned already) that postulate the formation of international systems that take the place of hegemonic powers. These theories are being debated all the time (in disputes that remind me of how many angels can stand on the head of a pin) with each side doing excatly what I've been doing, taking historical circumstances and showing how they can be explained by a given theory (the trouble is they can all be explained by all the theories but that's another matter).

I'd say it's not a given there should be hegemons, or quests to become such; if you say that it's an irreversible trait of the existing international relations and the economic system in the world, maybe it's time to think about international relations and economy once again... and think how much progress we've made anyway? Maybe changes are in order - to the US, to economic relations, to international politics?

The problem is that all these theories are attempts to explain what is happening around us, they're attempts to find explanations and mechanisms, not create systems. It's an absolute that if we look at history, nations have been interacting with varying effects. The question is, how did those effects get to be? Its demonstratable that nations have always sought to maximize their power and influence, again the question is why and how?

So can we do without a hegemon? The evidence from the past says we can't, that somebody always will rise to fill that role. I suspect that changing that will mean changing the kind of animal species that we are.

[K. A. Pital]

It certainly didn't for the USSR who originated it

The USSR didn't originate it, but at start played the old game, attempting "new rules". It is possible that it was indeed thought as a new game: this time, it was thought that popular revolutions would change all other nations into voluntary allies, thus eliminating the quest for hegemony once and for all. When it failed, the old idea of using military dominance to ensure hegemony over certain territories resurfaced.

So can we do without a hegemon? The evidence from the past says we can't, that somebody always will rise to fill that role.

That's ridiculous. A person who hasn't witnessed the demise of slavery, or the demise of "old-style" imperialism could say the same of those phenomena and then conjure a theory about the "need for hegemony" which is postulated as a "goal" and therefore a good thing.

The problem with this is that hegemony is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you admit that there needs to be a hegemon, and that being a hegemon is best for you - it only takes the last step of complete egoism to make to start actively pursuing hegemony, from local to global.

So "hegemon theory" is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's not alone here - many social interaction theories are self-fulfilling.

[Stuart]

That's ridiculous. A person who hasn't witnessed the demise of slavery, or the demise of "old-style" imperialism could say the same of those phenomena and then conjure a theory about the "need for hegemony" which is postulated as a "goal" and therefore a good thing.

But both slavery and imperialism are still around and doing quite well, Their forms and outer appearance shift to match with changing times, just as they have always done, but the form and content are still there.

The problem with this is that hegemony is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you admit that there needs to be a hegemon, and that being a hegemon is best for you - it only takes the last step of complete egoism to make to start actively pursuing hegemony, from local to global. So "hegemon theory" is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's not alone here - many social interaction theories are self-fulfilling.

For sure. The problem is that the factors that lead to the rise of a Hegemon are present throughout human society. As I said, there are theories of international relations which don't call for a hegemon but none of them feature very strongly in the US body politic so they're not really relevent here. Pretty much all the political theory that's acually meaningful in the US rotates around a hegemon and the pursuit/creation of hegemon status by varying means. The question is more how and why than whether.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I am not too well versed in International Relations, though my curiosity would be, how does this compare against the old Athenian Hegemony?

[K. A. Pital]

But both slavery and imperialism are still around and doing quite well

Despite slavery still existing, it's share in the total world population has fallen dramatically; just as decolonization has sharply reduced formal imperial domain numbers.

Their forms and outer appearance shift to match with changing times

Slavery? It's definitions are very strict, all forms are adhering to a particular form of relations, that is ownership relations towards human beings; likewise imperialism, hence why the second half of XX century and early XXI century actions of nations were dubbed "neoimperialism", and different mechanisms other than direct formal government are at work here.

As I said, there are theories of international relations which don't call for a hegemon but none of them feature very strongly in the US body politic so they're not really relevent here.

Ah. In that case I agree, of course it is so, and if we're speaking about the currently existing exopolitical decisions in the US, it's quite certain the absolute majority of them are made in adherence to this principle.

[Stuart]

I am not too well versed in International Relations, though my curiosity would be, how does this compare against the old Athenian Hegemony?

To be honest, I have no idea, I know almost nothing about this era. Perhaps somebody else can pick this up?

[Darth Wong]

But if the true nature of the situation is at least recognized by those in power, it is much more likely that they will take actions consistent with that goal, which is less likely to create the kind of expensive and thoroughly unconstructive public-relations fiascoes that the United States all too often gets itself into.

I think the problem is recognized by the authorities (they spend enough money on it) but the problem lies deeper. Americans have an inbred assumption that everybody else in the world secretly wants to be American. I suspect that comes from the fact that we are a nation of immigrants and everybody who is here originated from people who wanted to be here (or perhaps found everywhere else too unpleasant). Therefore there is a presumption that other people are like our ancestors and want to be here and be us. The idea that they might not just doesn't occur to people.

Indeed. This is one of the most aggravating aspects of Americans: their tendency to believe that the rest of the world shares their values and cultural beliefs. I've lost count of the number of times I've encountered Americans quoting their Constitution or Founding Fathers at me. I'm Canadian; my country's founders thought that that your country's founders were traitors! Why would an American assume that I should share your reverence for these men?

Unfortunately, a lot of what makes America tick doesn't make good publicity all the time (the aggressive competition for example, which is what makes the US economy what it is, doesn't fare too well when translated to an international political scene. What we need are people who can actually understand what makes the rest of the world tick. They're hard to find

I think the problem runs deeper than that. It would be easy to find people who understood the rest of the world; simply recruit from the rest of the world. The problem is that Americans are not inclined to take advice from people who disagree with their worldview, and this comes from the simplistic "good vs evil" mindset that a lot of Americans are afflicted with. In this worldview, the American way of looking at things is "good" (use "freedom" or whatever fancy phrase you want in place of "good", but we all know what it really means), and competing worldviews are either evil or corrupted by evil. As a result, when Americans do receive input on alternate points of view, they have a tendency to dismiss them. Even if they did recruit from outside their borders, they would make sure to recruit people who are sympathetic to their way of looking at things, thus defeating the purpose.

I agree we have a lot of catching up to do. However, al-Quaeda has much the same problems as the US does (in fact, they are stunningly like the US in a lot of ways; they assume that everybody secretly wants to be like them and will become them if they only understood what it all means). For example, down in the Yemen, one of their screeds carefully explains why beating women is a good thing. That may go down well in certain parts of their home constituency and on some porn sites but as a political concept it has all the flying characteristics of a lead brick. al-Quaeda has its moments but they're propaganda is pretty amateurish and in most cases counter-productive. Where they do excel is using the Internet as an internal information and C4I resource - in effect we supply them with their C4I system.

True, although they get the automatic underdog bonus in terms of public opinion, and that's their biggest playing card. Al-Quaeda recruiting videos often stress the damage wrought by American policy upon weaker countries, taking maximum advantage of America's perceived bully status (in effect, taking the Hegemon Theory and turning it around by using it for booster points in a propaganda war).

The real danger is what will happen fo we come across an enemy who is REALLY good at playing the info-war game. For example, an old friend of mine is a senior (star rank) officer in a foreign army. We were talking about what would happen if her army had to take on the United States one day. After the usual crack about dying gloriously, she said that they'd be the nicest, politest, most chivalrous enemy the US has ever fought. Why? "because it is much easier to make Americans feel guilty than to make them feel frightened". By playing the good guy very obviously and very blatantly, they'd undercut American home front support and hopefully bring the war to a half before they lost.

Sounds pretty smart. Another thing I don't understand about American military people and politicians is their tendency to act as though morale issues are somehow not "real" military concerns. You often hear people saying that America won the war in Vietnam on military grounds, but lost in the political arena. You can't divorce them like that: public morale is as real a component of strategy as logistics or firepower. Sun Tzu understood that 2500 years ago; why have we apparently forgotten that today?

[Thanas]

I am not too well versed in International Relations, though my curiosity would be, how does this compare against the old Athenian Hegemony?

It does not compare at all, because of various reasons - first of all, there was no Athenian "hegomony" - if anything, they controlled an area centered around Greece and made a few headways into Asia Minor. Furthermore, the Athenian league was little more than "extort money from city x to fund the athenian navy".

Also, Athen can be said to have failed in a struggle to be a hegomon - they never defeated Sparta/Thebes, nor were they the masters of the Persian empire.

So Athen is a very poor comparison to the great powers like Great Britain who dominated the earth for over a century. Athen never was in that position. It was a great power, but no hegomon. If anything, one might compare the persian empire with Great Britain, and here we have in fact an argument in favor of the forming of coalitions against the hegomon. Same with the Roman empire.

[Thanas]

Ghetto edit - Also, calling ancient states "nations" is definitely not the way to go.

[Elfdart]

Err, no. You're grotesquely oversimplifying things and Chomsky's talking a load of rancid dingoes kidneys as usual.

I didn't say I agreed with Chomsky. My personal view is that Vietnam, like Iraq today was mainly about personal vanity and domestic political ambition.

I suggest you read Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict by Michael Lind.

I have, and it's terrible. Considering that I'm a fan of Lind's other books, I was surprised how bad it was.

Lind makes a lot of mistakes (for example he attributes the acceptable length of duration of American involvement in a conflict to casualties when, in fact, the determining factor is time) and some of his judgements are off-beam but his analysis of why the U.S. got involved in Vietnam is essentially accurate. Put into a nutshell, the big mistake we made was ever getting interested in Vietnam in the first place (the Eisenhower approach was Viet-where? They didn't want to know, gave the place no importance and refused to get involved on anything more than the most superficial of levels.

First of all, Eisenhower wasn't the first to screw with Vietnam. That dis-honor belongs to Harry Truman. FDR was genuinely anti-imperialist (when it came to those other empires, of course) and wanted independence for Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh even requested that after the war, Vietnam be made a protectorate of the United States. Truman told Ho to fuck off, re-armed the French and encouraged them to take back Indochina. I can't remember the name of the book, but it points out that the first demonstrations against meddling in Vietnam were NOT the work of DFHs, but GIs in Europe after WW2 who were livid when the transports that were originally sent to bring them home were instead used to ship French troops and government officials to Indochina.

The US didn't give a damn whether colonies of allied states broke free or not (on quiet reflection we rather hoped they would but that was just us) it wasn't a matter of any great concern to us.

Uncle Sam had a funny way of showing it. Aside from Ike telling the British and French to piss off over Suez, American foreign policy has been to encourage colonial powers to keep control over their old colonies as much as possible, whether through direct action (backing the French in Vietnam) or by installing loyal clients in those countries that got independence. This is one of the things that has earned Washington hostility from most Third World countries and caused one bloodbath after another.

Because it wasn't a matter of any great concern to us, it couldn't be used as a challenge against us (Thailand, on the other hand was a different matter). It was the Kennedys who made Vietnam a matter of significant interest to the United States and therefore opened us up to a challenge there to which we had to respond.

Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon kept upping the ante, but it had zilch to do with foreign policy and everything to do with not being the one left holding the bag. But they weren't the ones who started the lunacy, they just piled on.
Lind's book reminds me of how my dad used to get cases of the shivers from time to time thanks to malaria he contracted during the war, even though it had been almost 20 years earlier. Lind used to write for National Review, a war whore publication, so I think his Vietnam book is a case of intellectual shivers that still afflicts him even though he is an ex-right-winger.

[Stuart]

I think the problem runs deeper than that. It would be easy to find people who understood the rest of the world; simply recruit from the rest of the world.

That is done, primarily two ways. One is finding people outside the US and bringing them in, the other is sorting through the tide of immigrants (legal and otherwise) who arrive here every year and finding those who have usable skills and knowledge - that happens a lot more than one might think. So, there is access to outside opinion. The problem is that opinion gets interpreted by people higher up the food chain in the light of their "everybody wants to be American" preconception.

Even if they did recruit from outside their borders, they would make sure to recruit people who are sympathetic to their way of looking at things, thus defeating the purpose.

Not so, from personal experience that's definately not the case. What happens is that as contrary opinions go up the food chain they get diluted at each step until they bear no relation to what was originally said. "This is a damned stupid idea" gets diluted to "this isn't a good idea" to "there are problems with this idea" to "although interesting, this idea has some problems' to "this idea is fundamentally good but has problems" to "this is a good idea with some minor difficulties" to "this is a good idea"

True, although they get the automatic underdog bonus in terms of public opinion, and that's their biggest playing card. Al-Quaeda recruiting videos often stress the damage wrought by American policy upon weaker countries, taking maximum advantage of America's perceived bully status (in effect, taking the Hegemon Theory and turning it around by using it for booster points in a propaganda war).

True, although I must point out that Maximal Realism isn't a policy per se, its a theory of international relations and policies are derived on the presumption that its a correct theory. Its a niggling difference but a significant one.

Sounds pretty smart. Another thing I don't understand about American military people and politicians is their tendency to act as though morale issues are somehow not "real" military concerns. You often hear people saying that America won the war in Vietnam on military grounds, but lost in the political arena. You can't divorce them like that: public morale is as real a component of strategy as logistics or firepower. Sun Tzu understood that 2500 years ago; why have we apparently forgotten that today?

A very smart lady. The problem with Sun Tzu (if he was one person; I've read theories that 'Sun Tzu' was actually the Chinese equivalent of the General Staff) is that he isn't American. If his name had been Billie-Bob Kravitz, he'd be a lot more widely accepted. You're right on Vietnam, it runs back to the time thing I mentioned earlier. The US can support a war for 5 years, no more. If it isn't won in that time then the US wants out. Casualties don't matter, cost doesn't matter, time does matter. That's pretty finely understood at a lot of high levels hence the US formulation of ideal strategy (devastate, defeat and didimau). Oddly that is a pretty good strategy for handling the so-called "Arab way of war" which is essentially a war of raiding. So we raid back doing what we're good at - blowing things up.

Once that five-year limit is born in mind, a lot of things become much clearer. That was the original thought behind the much-misquoted "exit strategy". The original concept behind that phrase was "we know we have to get out in five years time at most. So what do we have to do to make sure we've won within that time limit and can thus leave".

That's a pretty good question