I keep coming across a lot of classical references recently with relation to the domain of politics, grand strategy and strategic thinking in general.

Here is a most engaging chapter

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from a book Theory of War and Strategy, published by the U.S. Army War College. The author, R. Craig Nation, has served as Professor of Strategy and Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies with the Department of National Security and Strategy, U.S. Army War College, since 1996.

In his analysis of the relevance of Thucydides‘ History of the Peloponnesian War to contemporary strategic thinking and planning, he identifies several aspects anyone involved in strategy development, whether military or civilian, would greatly benfit from reading. The gist of the argument is that while Thucydides’ work may not be of much use on the tactical/operational level since the tools and methods of waging wars have changed considerably, nevertheless, on a strategic level all has remained more or less static.

Further, he examines a topic not often covered when talking about Thucydides, namely the cultural dimension of war. While much of the History deals with detailed descriptions of major fleet actions, pitched battles, sieges, unconventional operations, plague, revolution, atrocity, massacre, and political confrontations, a sizable portion of the work is dedicated to examining the causes and nature of the Peloponnesean War and war in general, including the cultural opposition between Sparta - an agrarian oligarchy and Athens - a culturally innovative democracy.

Here is a (more) modern translation (1881) of Thucydides’ work by Benjamin Jowett and the very first English translation (1628) by the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Read here the full publication Theory of War and Strategy. It is open source, non-subscription based publication of the Strategic Studies Institute, which produces excellent analytical work on various security topics.

The Atlantic has published an excellent new article by Robert D. Kaplan, What Rumsfeld Got Right, summarizing Donald Rumsfeld’s career, including a well-balanced argument of the rights and wrongs of his strategic thinking from the 1990s U.S. intervention on the Balkans to present day Iraq. As usual, Kaplan is thought provoking, smart and beautifully versed - a good antidote to raving left critics and biased media reports.

Also of interest:

Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos - Kaplan’s lessons learned from Greek, Roman and Chinese history and military strategy for today’s political leadership

   It’s not all about energy resources when it comes to Russian interests in its former Central Asian republics. As this RFE/RL article reports, the Russians are deploying further troops to their air base at Kant outside the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. Reportedly housing some 400 personnel currently, the base has a U.S. “rival”, the 1000 staff U.S. air base at Manas also on the outskirts of Bishkek.

Though the Americans are paying a steep rent for the privilege of being allowed to maintain their only remaining military base in Central Asia, local governments are less warm to U.S. aid initiatives for a number of reasons, not least of which that the money allocated is meant to support human rights NGOs and the building of democratic institutions, which challenge the very foundation of the authoritarian Central Asian governments.

Russia, on the other hand, is seen as the most viable foreign partner despite obvious increase in its military presence in the region. In addition to proximity, cultural and historical ties, Russia is a profitable destination for impoverished migrant workers from Central Asia. Add to that Russian political support for regimes of the Islam Karimov type in Uzbekistan and talk of merging CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and Eurasec as a counterbalancing initiative to NATO and the EU, and the news of Russian further military deployment acquires the distinct taste of an offer Central Asian states just can’t refuse.

With George W. Bush paying his last tribute to European allies, and the potential for a strategic inflection point with the choice for a new American president, here are some thoughts for more benign supporters of the current administration (i.e. myself) on what I consider the President’s most enduring legacy of his mandate, namely The Patriot Act of 2001. It’s just my musings on intentions.

My aim here is to demonstrate how a single action can be perceived (and proven to be) both a success and a failure. First, I will outline the a priori argument, which shows the Patriot Act as an example of successful Congressional oversight. Second, I will look at the problem from an a posteriori approach, and try to show how and why the Patriot Act can also be perceived as a failure of Congressional intelligence oversight.

An a priori approach emphasizes the honorable intentions that prompted an action in the first place. An a priori argument is the notion that bad things are sometimes the right thing to do, not because the end is good, but because the motive is good. This argument falls in the domain of ontological ethics developed by the philosopher Emanuel Kant. In analyzing ulterior motives, Kant points out that something could look good, and really be bad, and vice versa. He argues that only if an action springs from a desire to do good with no expectation of reward or benefit, is the action truly good, and goes on to discuss under what conditions will people do good without ulterior motives and/or expectations. The answer is “duty”. Leo Strauss has summarized Kant’s doctrine succinctly: “The moral worth of an action proceeds from the goodness of the will by which that action is animated, which in turn means the purity of that will – the goodness of the will in its abstraction from every empirical end. Purity of will implies purification of the will of all substantive intention, the animation of the will only by its self-respect, its respect for the formal principle of will in general, in other words respect for law as such. Duty itself means the necessity of performing an action out of respect for law.”

When the Patriot Act was signed into law in 2001, it met with almost unanimous support from all directions of the political spectrum. It was seen as “the right thing to do”, as the nation’s “duty” to protect the ultimate raison d’etre of a democratic state – the rule of law (or in Kantian terms, Rechtstaat). Congress approved the Patriot Act in order to try to better deal with the new challenges emerging in the geopolitical arena: the rise of non-state, transnational and asymmetric threats, most notably exemplified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While terrorism is not a new phenomenon, 21st century transnational terrorism poses an unprecedented challenge. It challenges the institutional and legal foundation of intelligence by combining features of both internal and external threats because it operates both inside and outside boundaries. The Patriot Act was successful in identifying this new challenge and saw to it that former strict divisions between external and internal intelligence, i.e. between the CIA and the FBI, erected in the aftermath of Watergate in the 1970s, were less strictly enforced. It allowed for freer and better information exchange and collaboration between the different intelligence agencies, including the FBI. Further, it allowed non-citizen terrorist suspects to be detained for up to 7 days without a hearing, and in some cases where an individual was certified to be a threat, it allowed that the individual could be held indefinitely. Moreover, non-citizens, who were found to have raised funds for terrorist activities could be deported. The FBI was granted greater freedom in accessing electronic communications. The Treasury was authorized to order banks to reveal sources of suspicious accounts and sanction uncooperative institutions.

Having looked at the Patriot Act from an a priori point of view, which shows that Congressional oversight was, for all intents and purposes – doing one’s duty in the name of national security – good in its inceptions, I would like now to turn to an a posteriori approach and show the results, and to a large extent unintended consequences, of the passing of the Patriot Act. It could be argued that the Patriot Act has, in a number of ways, infringed upon the notion of good governance as understood in a democratic society.

An a posteriori argument is a classic example of Aristotelean teleological ethics, according to which the end justifies the means. In other words, sometimes bad things need to happen because the consequences are good. Timing plays a major role in teleological ethics, with a focus on short-term consequences sometimes taking precedence over long-term. If we want to speak of the Patriot Act as a failure of Congressional intelligence oversight, it is precisely the failure of focusing on the short-term rather than the long-term consequences. Thus, while the Patriot Act enabled greater access to information and inter-agency cooperablity, it did so at the expense of departing from constitutional norms and civil rights and liberties which characterize democracy, with dire consequences for the U.S.’ public image both on the national level and abroad.

An a priori approach is one essentially based on retribution, eye for an eye, and is incompatible with the rule of law. It postulates that people who lie, deceive, or otherwise treat other people as a means to an end, deserve to be treated in exactly the same way. Since the war on terrorism is not a traditional military one, but rather politico-ideological and psychological, the aim of terrorist groups to destroy Western values, namely, to erode and destroy democratic institutions and governance, the Patriot Act has done little to reinforce democratic values. Instead, it has focused on revenge and the application of tactics which may have sufficed to deal with Cold War threats, but have clearly come short in addressing 21st century challenges and threats. Blurring the division between external and internal intelligence, while honorable in intent, has produced a number of unintended bad consequences for civil rights: uninformed surveillance of individuals, not always justified infringements on the “rights” of immigrants, asylum seekers an ethnic and religious groups, limiting or altogether eroding the rule of law that everyone should be treated equally before the law.

In conclusion, since it is mainly the internal intelligence activities that have come under attack in light of the civil rights infringement debate, Congress would do well to focus on those provisions of the Patriot Act which deal with foreign intelligence, allowing greater freedom of action, while enforcing stricter control, supervision and oversight internally. It should be careful to avoid extreme positions which leave little room for flexibility and adaptability. The rigidity of categorical imperatives are simply ill-suited to deal with the threat of transnational terrorism. Whatever approach Congress decides to adopt in the future, it should leave enough space for manoeuvring as the external and internal environments change. It should also develop the capability to respond as close to real-time as possible as an inability to do so will undermine even the most successful policy or approach. I came across a blog entry recently, entitled “Is your watchdog a lapdog or an attack dog?” Humor aside, let us not fool ourselves: neither a Bolognese nor a Rottweiler make for good watchdogs; size matters, but so does personality. Personally, I would feel safer with a German Shepherd.

Today, 16 June, is Bloomsday. It is the day on which events take place in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and which has become a commemorative occasion for Joyce’s afficionados celebrating the Irish genius.

For me, personally, it also commemorates 7 years since I first came to Zürich, the city where James Joyce rests in peace under the beautiful folliage of Züriberg’s Fluntern cemetery, and in the esteemed company of Elias Canetti’s neighbouring memorial.

I was on this trip with my father who is a Joycean scholar and beamed at the prospect of making the trip from down south in Lugano, where he was a visiting lecturer, to Zürich on the 16th of June 2001. By a most spectacularly serendipitous occurrence, as we were crossing the gate of the cemetery, we ran across a small group of people speaking English, who were clearly on the same pilgrimage as us. It turned out, in fact, the group was lead by Fritz Senn, a Joycean scholar my father admires. The group was indeed on a walking tour of Joyce’s Zürich, which we were only too pleased to attend, including an apéro in the evening at The James Joyce Foundation. The foundation is home to an impressive library with translations of the author’s work into every language imaginable. What a delightful surprise, nevertheless, when among the balancing of canapés, glasses of wine and verbal juggling, Fritz Senn appeared with a copy of a translation my father had done almost 20 years ago of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Bulgarian!

At the time, I had no idea that 2 years later I would end up moving to Switzerland and Zürich. It’s been a garden of forking paths…

For Joyce enthusiasts:

James Joyce Walking into Eternity Dublin Tour

Part 1

Part 2

Also of interest:

• The Linati Schema of Ulysses
• An online annotated Ulysses from Columbia Univ
• Ulysses for Dummies (a pretty funny java cartoon)

Cogdogroo is an excellent wiki compilation of web applications that can add pizazz to a dull text presentation or digital reports and stories.

Thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing, wishtank and its sister web project on 5th generation warfare skilluminati, are an illuminating presence on the web of the type of critical thinking the intelligence community would greatly benefit from.

Cheers! Keep it up.

In an amusing article, What can Boris learn from the classics?, Finlo Rohrer writes for BBC News that classical education can give great insights into politics and the psychology of political leadership. The article is less about Boris Johnson, London’s new mayor, than about the role of classics in contemporary education.

Being a Classist by education myself, I could not agree more with Rohrer. All I ever needed to know I learned in Greek and Latin 101.

In light of my recent posts on Russia and my discussion on perception vs. reality in the situation assessment, I just couldn’t resist adding this video. It’s a hoot!

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Here is the final version of my part of the project on Russia. I hope to be able to publish here the team’s final report, which includes an analysis of competing hypotheses on Russian Reorganization of the Civilian Nuclear Energy Sector, a cost benefit analysis of Russia - Ukraine energy security relations, and a social network analysis of Dmitry Medvedev’s Leadership Network. However, I’m waiting for the permission of the other team members and the instructor to do so.

A brief evaluation of the effectiveness of the technique in relation to the topic

Using situation assessment to analyze Russia’s foreign policy toward the Balkans has as both its principal advantage and disadvantage the flexibility and resulting breadth of scope it offers. On the positive side, this flexibility functions to fill deficiencies in more formalized methodologies, where restriction of sub-methods and limitations of scope can result in an exaggerated focus on the particular details, failing to detect an over-arching pattern or structure. On the negative side, the potentially limitless options this method offers to the analyst can result in either oversimplification through generalization, or a lack of focus altogether. One way to avoid losing the string would be to commission situation assessments not of individual analysts but of an inter-disciplinary team. I believe this would only add to the potential multi-faceted direction this method is open to, while at the same time, keep the more wild fancies on a leash of peer review.

The elements I chose to include in this situation assessment, which in retrospect were best suited to the topic were the various IR theories on power and regionalism. In this spirit, I would advocate the use of open source analyses by various think tanks, especially if the analyst is not an area specialist. The potential pitfall of arriving at politicized information could be safeguarded against by a thorough source reliability check, which would take an infinitely shorter time than self-education of the analyst on a broad theme under the duress of a deadline.

Finally, the informal, descriptive nature of a situation assessment is conducive to writing in a narrative style, which is less prone to jargon and offers the analyst the opportunity to engage and “talk” to his/her client/decision-maker as the analysis unfolds. Not only does this make the reading experience of a person tired of reading report after report with uninspiring technical and/or management, or worse, bureaucratic language, but has the potential to establish good rapport between the two sides, minimize misunderstandings hidden in vague and ambiguous language, and add a dialogue-element to the analyst’s otherwise rather lonely job.