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STEN RYNNING

The argument that the power of Western government has a pedigree going back to Graeco-Roman civilization ultimately rests on the case that such power is derived from the inspiration and restraint offered by particular values embedded in political and military institutions.¹ Politically the power of Western government arose from the social environment of a free city, or the freedom of citizens to elect their governments and hold them accountable. Militarily this power emerged from the ability of civic engagement to mobilize society into coherent, tightly organized, and determined combat formations that sought rather than shied away from battle. The face of this power was first the Greek phalanx and later the Roman legion, both superior in shock combat.

If Western military power thus builds on a unique combination of political and military institutional development, it raises the question of whether “civic militarism”—defined as self-governing citizens committed to both martial values and the defense of their republic—is uniquely Western. As noted in the introduction to this volume, this question has engendered vigorous debate. The enduring reference point concerns liberal (or republican) government and military power and not least the question of how to keep one from corrupting the other. Ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle strove to separate the just from the advantageous, which rulers tended to conflate. War among civilized people (the Greeks) must be just, these thinkers argued, whereas it can be unrestrained against barbarians. If we are not able to keep justice and advantage in balance, Thucydides argued in his realist theory of history, we corrupt our own purpose and court defeat. Later, as Western thinking advanced, the limited circle of restrained warfare (Greeks, Romans, Christians …) was enlarged to all of humanity. Unrestrained warfare itself then became seen by the West as barbaric, and the human right to life increasingly became the bedrock on which modern ideas of states’ rights and duties in war developed—be it for going to war (jus ad bellum) or conducting it (jus in bello). In its latest garbs, Western thinking is asking whether human rights, as opposed to states’ rights, should not be the bedrock for justice in armed conflict; this would represent a leap in the constraints imposed by liberal thought on the Western conduct of war.

Emerging from this history is the critical question of whether the West has lost its balance in terms of “civic militarism”—whether liberal doctrine has grown so large and principled that it can no longer form a partnership with martial virtue within Western institutions. Is it possible that recent Western difficulties in winning wars are symptomatic of a larger and potentially catastrophic disconnect within Western institutions between a military cult of moving fast to destroy things and a political cult of denying war any role in the realm of justice? David Rodin likens this challenge to one of “contingent pacifism,” whereby war in theory is permissible but in practice is so constrained by doctrinal liberal and human rights claims that it can never be fought.² This first section of the book inquiries into this issue. In particular, it examines whether the conceptions of time embedded in liberal ideals and martial virtue—transcendent and progressive versus cyclical and pragmatic—have become fundamentally disconnected inside Western institutions, eroding the “civic militarism” balancing act that allegedly lay at the heart of Western military power.

Four aspects of this issue are investigated: first, the nature of the modern state and the longevity of a heralded compromise between liberal and military communities within the state; second, whether the type of strategic thought that the liberal state has tended to engender continues to be relevant; third, whether the proclivity of the modern liberal state to act in collective, alliance format according to the liberal principle of multilateralism translates into effective military operations; and finally, whether the West is in fact a mirage behind which not much beside US hegemony is to be found.

The first chapter enters the debate that took off with Michael Roberts’s by-now classic argument that European-style modern war represented a revolution in military affairs. The revolution was evident, Roberts argued, in the large-scale deployment of drilled and disciplined troops commanded by a rationalized government capable of mass organization, taxation, logistics, and command.³ Critics counter that Roberts exaggerated the revolutionary break between a medieval past and modern present and that the modern (Western) state only thrived for a brief period from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.⁴ Today the Western state has reverted to early modern practices of contracting out and privatizing war, and one might even cease to think of the modern state as relevant to war.⁵

In chapter 1 Sarah Kreps and Adi Rao take a long view of these questions, tracing a decline of civic militarism that means fewer large-scale wars but also less civic engagement with conflict, and a corresponding decreasing political ability to control the pace of wars. Kreps and Rao focus on the modern state’s financial extraction capacity, which, because it involves taxation for war purposes, involves the citizenry directly in war.⁶ Unlike borrowing, taxation offers the state both financial muscle and future freedom of maneuver, but the price to pay for this freedom is the consent of the citizenry and thus a “civic militarism” compact. Kreps and Rao are not able to trace such a capacity over the centuries through which we encounter the “modern” state. Rather, they align with Roberts’s critics in arguing for a short-lived modern state. There was indeed a compromise between liberal and military communities within the West, but it was fragile and impermanent. Balanced civic militarism was, they conclude, a historical blip.

Kreps and Rao thus raise concerns about the institutional foundation of Western strategy and the ability of Western governments to close wars. As the control of war is left in the hands of unchecked governments with easy access to borrowed funds, political vagaries move to the forefront at the expense of strategic control. The second chapter zooms in further on such issues of strategy and the Western experience since the Napoleonic wars. Prominent scholars have questioned the ability of the West to produce solid strategy with reference to the balance between the liberal and military communities: Lawrence Freedman has argued that the underlying antagonism of these communities produces dysfunctional strategy; Michael Howard observed disjointed strategy resulting from disconnected liberal thought, which became possible when bourgeois citizens were freed of military engagement as long as they paid for it; and Hew Strachan finds that liberal society increasingly tends to conflate strategy with policy.⁷

Paul Brister enters into this fray in chapter 2, drawing particular attention to the lure of new military technologies that follow from information technology and industry 4.0 developments. Where Western governments tend to focus on “revolutions” and “transformations” in war, Brister points not only to the accelerating pace of modern tactical operations but also to the simultaneous deceleration of strategic pace. War, Brister finds, has two paces and therefore multiple, parallel trajectories. This makes it even harder to maintain the compromise between liberal progressive thought and the tragic vision of politics inherent in the military domain. Brister argues that the West must “slow down to succeed,” by which he means favoring defensive strategies adapted not merely to the battlefield but also to the trajectory of political power. Building on the conclusions drawn by Kreps and Rao, Brister also questions whether this longue durée mindset will come to dominate, given the lure of fast-paced action inherent in emerging technologies. He raises issues that are discussed in detail in the third section of this book.

Chapter 3 turns to Clausewitz. One of the attractions of his work was his balancing act between the idea that time can be mastered by those educated to understand the principles of war and the idea that time is but a complex framework within which humans grapple with emotions, impulses, and culture. Put differently, in the clash between the science of military precision and the romanticism of martial virtue, Clausewitz refused to choose sides.⁸ In war, he contended, one-sided efforts will fail: if war is to serve political objectives, governments must allow representatives of both strains of thought to influence policy and the conduct of war.

If Kreps and Rao and Brister caution that Western governments may not be predisposed by institutional design and strategic culture to work both sides of the equation, the question is whether enhanced international cooperation and partnering—so prevalent in modern war—offers a corrective to or rather exacerbates the West’s inclination to lose its balance in always seeking to impose speed on war. The literature on NATO and modern war indicates on the one hand that NATO is experiencing distinct difficulties in coping with the exigencies of connected, complex, and contested international military operations,⁹ but on the other hand that NATO and Western militaries more generally are able to learn and adapt, albeit mostly in ad hoc fashion.¹⁰

Rebecca R. Moore cuts into this debate in chapter 3 with an assessment of NATO, focusing on the role of NATO partners in Alliance operations, and ultimately NATO’s ability to leverage partnerships for the good of strategy—and thus to reject the temptation to go for speed. NATO has been engaged in a balancing act, Moore writes, between its liberal impulse to build broad security institutions and its military need to zoom in on only those partners that serve operational needs. Moore is critical of NATO’s effort to maintain its “civic military” balance in this respect, especially as it has been tempted time and again to work with partners that were illiberal but effective on the ground. Moore here detects a flaw in NATO’s armor—a fracture between its liberal order within Europe and its operational practice beyond Europe. She cautions that the Alliance setting might exacerbate the tendency of Western governments to confuse time and commitment, or to opt for illiberal partnerships in the belief that, in war, time is not on their side.

Finally, in chapter 4, Tobias Bunde considers an overarching question: is the strength of the Western community a mere mirage hiding a reality of American power and hegemony? If this power is subtracted from NATO, does the West disappears entirely? If that is the case, then perhaps the West was powerful only in the long nineteenth century when the modern state ruled, or it may have been powerful in a longer historical perspective stretching back to the ancient world, which just no longer applies. Bunde starts by presenting a key scenario that might result from a US departure from NATO, before addressing this intriguing question of institutional legacy and power. Building on the observations of Kreps and Rao, Brister, and Moore, Bunde identifies a crisis in the balanced civic militarism in the West and provokes the reader to ponder its causes.