Recommended: On Grand Strategy

Back in February I recommend Paul Kennedy’s book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, and I pointed out that besides introducing us to the engineers who helped win World War II, it also taught the reader a great deal about grand strategy, and about the issues strategists need to deal with. Kennedy co-teaches a course on Grand Strategy at Yale with several other people, one of whom is John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale.

Gaddis has just published a new book On Grand Strategy, which is a distillation of his work in the course over many years, and it is well worth reading.  It deals with grand strategy by examining historical conflicts, beginning with the Persian wars with the Greek city states, and with the conflicts between Athens and Sparta, and moving on to the maneuvering between England’s Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain (she provides examples of  good strategy and he provides examples of flawed strategy), and the American Civil war. The lessons about strategy from these historical events are as applicable today as they were back then.

This is a book well worth reading.

Re-recommended: The Black Swan

I just got back from a long series of airplane rides and airport layovers (don’t ask – air travel has gotten to be a nightmare!) and so I spent much of the time continuing my recent trend of re-reading significant books. In this case I listened to an audiobook version of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 book The Black Swan. I have to report that listening to the book on audio gave me new insights I had not gotten when I first read the book – something about its being auditory rather than visual. It encourages me to try audiobook versions of other books I have found interesting, to see if I get new insights from them as well.

Taleb writes with a certain arrogant sarcasm which in most other writers would eventually be wearing, but really I think his arrogant sarcasm is mostly justified, so it doesn’t bother me.

But this book contains some really important ideas, some of which I already knew about but which he explains again with wonderful clarity, and some of which really are new to me. His concept of “scalability” of professions and its impact on creating inequality and winner-take-all economies is really profound. And his disdain for the fallacious mathematics used by economists and bankers and market traders to delude themselves and their customers about the real nature of the risks they are taking is justified (and in fact is the whole point of the book).

But beyond that, Talib deals extensively with the nature of human thinking, and the sorts of systematic reasoning mistakes we humans constantly make because of our biological makeup – because of the way our brains work. This is not a mass-market 5-point book for the popular press – it takes hard work to follow his reasoning, but it is important.

So again, I am re-recommending this book.

Re-recommended: Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

Continuing my re-reading of George Friedman's works, I have just finished re-reading his 2016 book Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe. This book addresses the question of whether Europe can continue to be peaceful or whether inevitably it will fall back into the violent patterns of the last thousand or so years.

Friedman begins by a marvelous and thought-provoking  review of the dynamics of Europe since Henry the Navigator of Portugal began the age of exploration that eventually lead to the various European empires and made Europe the great artistic and intellectual center of the Western world. That occupies the first third of the book, and it would be well worth reading the book just for this sweeping review of European history. Then he examines the geopolitical forces that produced the 31 years of unimaginable destruction and brutality that comprise the first and second world wars of the 20th century, in which despite the high level of civilization Europe had reached, it tore itself apart. Finally, with that as a necessary background, he discusses Europe's likely future.

Much of human thinking, and especially of ideologies, is based on the fantasy that humans somehow will of stop acting like humans. Friedman argues that this is true of those who envision a united Europe. Europe is a continent packed with very different ethnicities and nationalities and cultures, who have lived cheek-by-jowl with each other for millennia and fought with each other through most of that time. As he says, for many of these groups the outrages and massacres of 500 years ago are still as fresh in their memories as if they happened yesterday. Temporary prosperity papered over those differences for a while, but when times get hard (as they are now) these old prejudices and distrusts and hatreds reemerge, and reshape (or perhaps more accurately, restore) the geopolitical landscape.

This book is an education in itself, and worth not only reading but re-reading several times.

Recommended: Friedman’s “Geopolitical Futures” subscription

The real battle these days is to find news sources that are (a) relatively unbiased, and (b) truly knowledgeable, and that (c) focus on the issues of real significance, as opposed to whatever the media or some activists choose to feature to stir us up for the day. For domestic affairs the best I have found thus far is The Economist magazine.

Re-reading George Friedman’s 2011 book, as discussed in the previous post, reminded me again how good his analyses of foreign affairs are, so I went looking to see if he has any new books  out since his 2016 book Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe (also previously recommended). It turns out that he has a new book scheduled for publication in June of 2019, The New American Century: Crisis, Endurance, and the Future of the United States. However my search also revealed that he has a subscription website at https://geopoliticalfutures.com that contains continuing analysis by him and his team. So I went ahead and subscribed for a year ($139/year at current discount), and I have to say the material is well worth the price. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in understanding current geopolitics.

As Friedman himself says, he is interested in exploring what is likely to happen, not what he personally wishes would happen. And his pragmatic approach deals with the geopolitical problems nations and regions face, and the limited range of option they have for dealing with these problems. As he mentions in one of his books, it’s not too hard to guess where most nations will go in their foreign policy because culture, geography, economics and demographics sharply limit their options.  

Unfortunately most Americans, certainly most voters and even supposedly more knowledgeable people in government, academia and the media, have views shaped and distorted by their politics and ideologies, and tend too often to narrow their focus to spectacular but in the long run inconsequential issues, and ignore the issues that really matter to the nation in the long term. An example Friedman offers is the current “war on terror”, in which we are expending an enormous amount of national resource on an issue that truly is not an existential threat to the nation, whatever the media thinks. More people are killed in US traffic accidents in a few days than all the Americans ever killed by terrorists, including 9/11. (37,461 were killed in US traffic accidents in 2016). Indeed, more Americans kill themselves in a few days then all Americans ever killed by terrorists (there were 44,965 recorded suicides in the US in 2016). By contrast between 1995 and 2016 3,277 Americans were killed in attacks in the United States – 2,902 of them in the September 11 attacks.

Friedman’s writings help to correct this tendency to focus on the wrong things.. I highly recommend subscribing to his site.

Re-recommending: The Next Decade: Where We Have Been…and Where We Are Going

I have been re-reading George Friedman's 2011 book The Next Decade: Where We Have Been…and Where We Are Going, listed in my book list (see sidebar) and recommended several years ago. Seven years on some things have changed and evolved (for example, the EU is in chaos and ISIS has come - and largely gone again - and the Arab Spring has come - and largely gone again). But in general the same major geopolitical issues remain, and his 2011 analysis of them is still relevant.

Friedman argues in this book for the things the US ought to do in its foreign policy to attend to its real national interests in a pragmatic way (as opposed to ideological fantasies). The Trump administration thus far is doing some of them, but by no means all of them. On the other hand, the Trump administration is probably doing more of them than a Clinton administration would have, or for that matter than Sanders or Rubio or any of the other also-rans in the last election would have done. 

Rereading the book reminds me again how shallow the public (meaning the voters, the political activists, and the media commentators) understanding is of either the history of most major foreign policy issues, or of the pragmatic realities of dealing with international relations.

I strongly recommended this book at the time. I re-recommend it now - a re-reading is a worthwhile activity as we watch the Trump administration evolve.