Carl von Clausewitz, the West’s premier philosopher of war, is most famous for his observation that war is an extension of politics. He also made a second point — war is subordinate to politics and so is shaped by it, making “its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail.”
We see this today in the Middle East, where deadly hostage rescue attempts and bigwig assassinations, like the one that killed the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, might be guided as much by political point scoring as by a desire to end the war as quickly as possible. On the other side of the equation, Iran’s latest flock of ballistic missiles, most of which exploded harmlessly over Israel, appear to have been an act of political theater intended primarily to buoy morale on the home front.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, not to mention the future American president, would do well to read Geoffrey Wawro’s THE VIETNAM WAR: A Military History (Basic Books, 652 pp., $40). It is the best overview of America’s misadventure in Southeast Asia, and it is sure to become the standard one-volume book on the war. As we follow the agony in the Middle East, it also offers powerful lessons about the dangers of conducting an open-ended war without any real strategy.
Most histories of the Vietnam War focus on the diplomacy and politics of the conflict, going back to military operations only for major events such as the Tet offensive and the Battle of Hue City. Wawro, a historian at the University of North Texas, takes a more illuminating approach.
In Wawro’s account, the American intervention in Vietnam was a master class in how not to wage war. A mindless belief in the efficacy of sheer firepower led to devastating American bombing campaigns that, Wawro writes, “defoliated one-seventh of South Vietnam’s territory” and “created five million internal refugees” in the hopes of drawing the Vietcong into the open. The Communist foe declined to fight that way, instead engaging quickly and then withdrawing when the Americans responded with a whirlwind of artillery fire and airstrikes. Meanwhile, the more President Lyndon Johnson, no student of Clausewitz, tried to disconnect the war from politics — lying about its costs and declining to mobilize the military reserves — the more political it became, dominating American discourse and then knocking him out of the presidency.
America did no better with targeted assaults. Like Israel’s exploding beepers, the C.I.A.’s Phoenix program to assassinate members of the Vietcong “emphasized ‘capture or kill’ over accuracy,” Wawro writes, and led to innocent casualties. It also did not bring the war to a quicker conclusion, because the entire program was based on “cooked numbers,” he explains, “not reality.” The program was another way to kill people without understanding the war.
Reading Wawro’s remarkable history made me think of a new corollary to Clausewitz’s theories: The less coherent the strategy is in a war, the more politicized it will become. The United States entered the war for vague political and diplomatic reasons. (Looking tough to Cold War adversaries is not an endgame.) Two decades in, the brief and shambolic invasion of southern Laos by South Vietnamese ground forces and American air power was, he writes, “political theater, not war.” With no end in sight as the 1972 presidential election approached, the assault was motivated by President Richard Nixon’s desire to make it appear that South Vietnam was taking over the fighting. Instead, it further unsettled the region and did little to cut off enemy supply lines.
Thankfully, during World War II, the United States used politics to serve the war effort instead of the other way around, although not everyone sees it that way. In AMERICA FIRST: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War (Doubleday, 444 pp., $35), H.W. Brands depicts the aviation celebrity Charles Lindbergh, who argued for isolationism in national radio broadcasts, as naïve but honest, while he portrays President Franklin Roosevelt as remarkably deceitful in his efforts to bring the United States into the war.
F.D.R. does offer a big target for that charge. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” the president vowed in 1940 as he campaigned for an unprecedented third term. Roosevelt’s son James questioned his father about taking that stance. “Jimmy, I knew we were going to war. I was sure there was no way out of it,” his father explained. “I had to educate people to the inevitable, gradually, step by step.” Deceitful perhaps, but this politicking helped get Americans to buy into the war effort. Clausewitz would be proud.
Meanwhile, when Lindbergh declines to call for the defeat of Germany as late as January 1941, he brings to mind Donald Trump’s refusal to support the Ukrainian fight against Russian aggression. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, takes note of Lindbergh’s softness on Nazi Germany, but, in painting a sympathetic portrait of the man, leaves out many details that appear in other books like A. Scott Berg’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.
Brands doesn’t mention, for instance, that in May 1940 Lindbergh dismissed talk about the dangers of a Nazi victory as “hysterical chatter,” or that, in the same year, the aviator’s wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh put out “The Wave of the Future,” which argued that the new era belonged to authoritarian systems. This was a man of such suspicious loyalties that even after Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh said (in remarks that Brands also leaves out), “Britain is the real cause of all the trouble in the world today.”
Such omissions make Brands’s book feel more like a tendentious brief for Lindbergh than a dispassionate historical account. “Lindbergh got much right in his campaign against modernity,” Brands writes, “but Lindbergh got one big thing wrong” — he didn’t see that Americans were willing to intervene in foreign conflicts. I would argue that Lindbergh got a lot more wrong than that: He toyed with antisemitism, something Brands downplays, and, surprisingly for a famous aviator, really didn’t seem to have much insight into the role of air power in the war. Even in the most sympathetic reading, Clausewitz would be beside himself.
The old Prussian general is the subject of a caustic yet provocative new analysis by Azar Gat, an intellectual historian at Tel Aviv University. In THE CLAUSEWITZ MYTH: Or the Emperor’s New Clothes (Chronos, 228 pp., paperback, $15.95), Gat contends that Clausewitz’s “On War” is influential mainly because it is so confusing. “Much of the book’s reputation rests on lingering misunderstandings of what it actually means,” he concludes.
There are essentially two Clausewitzes: one who early in his career wrote much of “On War” while seeking to understand Napoleon’s rapid and crushing victories over Prussia, and another who years later was trying to chart a course for Prussia to regain its standing in Europe. Yet rather than write a second book, Gat writes, the Prussian officer went back and revised “On War” in ways that wildly contradicted some of the earlier parts. Clausewitz had started off writing that victory depended on a quick defeat of the enemy in one big battle. Later, he realized that many actors, especially weaker ones, might have a reason to drag the fighting out. He started revising, but didn’t have time to resolve this tension before he died in 1831.
As I read Gat’s book, I kept thinking that he missed the larger point. It may be that classic works are always greatly imperfect, offering more questions than answers, a surer route to lasting through time. Indeed, one of Clausewitz’s most famous observations was about posing questions. Before the violence ramps up, he argues, thoughtful leaders must ask themselves: What kind of war is this? What does my nation want to achieve? And can it really do that?
These are good considerations. Pursuing an endless war of attrition, whether in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, is likely to lead only to more chaos and death. Likewise, if American leaders had seriously grappled with the endgame before invading Vietnam, not to mention Iraq or Afghanistan, those wars might have gone far better — or might not have happened at all.
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