The Scholar's Stage

Sino-American Competition and the Search For Historical Analogies

19 November, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Entangling Alliances, History, The Middle Kingdom

In the most recent issue of American Affairs, Walter Hudson argues against “the pull of the Cold War analogy.”θ Cold War analogies for 21st century Sino-American relations are natural yet insufficient. A friend of mine recently complained to me about the thoughtlessness of these analogies. “It is not difficult to rail against lazy Cold War thinking,” I responded. “What is difficult is fleshing out a more illuminating analogy to fill the gap.” Hudson faces this challenge squarely. He argues that the mirror we seek will be found in the eclipse of the British Empire by the United States.

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vulcans

26 October, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Narrative, Small and Simple Things, The Presidency

The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, America’s most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials… were the exact same set of people. The authors of America’s Cold War victory were the architects of America’s 21st century defeats. There lies the mystery! With more collective experience under their belts than any foreign policy team since the Founding Era, with a greater list of accomplishments than any group of national security elites since the creation of the modern national security state, the statesmen-officials of the second Bush administration should have accomplished glorious deeds. They should have lived up to their track records. Instead, they delivered failure and catastrophe. How could this have happened?

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New York City Meet Up and Other October Community Announcements

24 October, 2021Site Announcements

Two announcements for the Scholar’s Stage community members. First of all, I will be visiting New York City shortly. On the afternoon of Sunday, November 7th I will be holding a meet up for readers of the Scholar’s Stage who would like to meet me and other readers in person! This meet up is for […]

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Yale and the Education of Governing Elites

07 October, 2021Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Education, History, Monied Interests, Political Theory, Possessions For All Time

The resignation of Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale and director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program, is the great brouhaha of the last weekend.

I am not a graduate of the grand strategy course, but have followed its development over the last decade and a half.

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Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order

28 September, 2021Complex Systems, Culture, Monied Interests, Political Theory, Tyranny

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Assumptions of Donald Rumsfeld

07 September, 2021Bactria, Bargaining and Balancing, Books and Literature, Dogs of War, History, Iraq

One hopes for statesmen chastened by defeat. In this world of our hopes, the authors of catastrophe would discuss their mistakes with the humility, introspection, and sense of disgrace these mistakes deserve. Decisions that led to death—death in its thousands and hundreds of thousands—would be examined with probing honesty. The decision makers behind them would be seized with a fierce guilt and urgency. They would quest to understand the nature of their errors. They would incessantly press upon us the lessons of experience, gripped with fear that the next generation might repeat their calamities.

One can imagine such a statesman, chastened by defeat. Douglas Feith is not he.

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Community Announcements: August 2021

27 August, 2021Site Announcements

Two announcements for the Scholar’s Stage community members.

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As the Generations Churn: The Strategic Consequences of Cultural Change in Communist Russia… and China?

26 August, 2021Culture, Demographics, Diplomacy, History, Narrative, Oligarchy, Russia, Small and Simple Things, The Middle Kingdom

Vladislav M. Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, “Culture Wars are Long Wars.” That essay proposed a general theory of cultural change. Key to its thesis was the observation that most cultural change does not occur because people change their ideas, but because people with new ideas replace people with old ones. As most people form their essential political worldview by the time they are 30 and only adapt it on the edges to new circumstances, only the most earth shaking events have the power to fundamentally shift the frameworks and values that the majority filter their politics through. Large scale cultural shift is largely a story of generational churn.

While the focus of that piece was on American domestic politics, this is a general phenomena that applies across cultures and time periods. Vladislav Zubok understands this. The generational nature of political change is a recurring theme of Failed Empire, which chronicles the ups and downs of Soviet diplomacy from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While we often describe Soviet history in terms of the leader reigning at the top of the system, Zubok argues that shifts in Soviet strategic behavior reflected not only the differing leadership styles of the various CPSU General Secretaries, but broader transitions from one generation of leaders to another.

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We Must Learn From Our Defeat

21 August, 2021Bactria, Dogs of War, Narrative, The Legislature, The Presidency

Twenty years ago a nation comfortable but aimless was thrust by violence into a new reality. “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?,” asked one conservative columnist a few weeks later. “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events.” But he was not the only one to feel this way.

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Fighting Like Taliban

01 August, 2021Bactria, Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War

Over the last month or so we have seen several reports out of Afghanistan registering the shock of the Americans, the Afghani government, and even the Taliban itself with the speed at which the Taliban forces have captured the Afghani countryside.

I am surprised with this surprise.

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