Joseph Fouche

Two COINs for a Sunday Night

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Dominoes
Dominoes

Rufus Phillips

Rufus Phillips:

In 1954, as a young Army officer detailed to the CIA with little experience, Rufus Phillips became a member of what was then called the Saigon Military Mission – several years before America’s military involvement in Vietnam became a matter of public record. He worked directly under Col. Edward Lansdale, the Air Force officer working for the CIA who was responsible for managing the U.S. presence and advising the nascent South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem – trying, for example, to convince Diem to post realistic-looking election results. As the war progressed and America’s involvement deepened, Phillips led counterinsurgency efforts and won the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit for his work; later, he became a consultant for the State Department and served as an adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey until the 1968 election.

Phillips wrote a book Why Vietnam Matters and gave a lecture and Q&A session on it at the Pritzker Military Library on 11.22.2008. Phillips was concerned with outlining the lessons he learned in Vietnam and how they applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. One interesting observation Phillips made is on the domino theory in response to an audience question. He argued that the domino theory was very much in play in the mid-1950s in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. There was no organized native government at all so a few Commie insurgents showing up with a rifle was enough to constitute a government. This was less true in later years when those nations had developed some institutional strength, though it’s interesting that Laos and Cambodia followed South Vietnam in succumbing to Communist rule rather quickly…almost like dominoes.

There is a video of the lecture here and an MP3 here.

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Industry Leanings In Things Political

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Data analysis guru and fellow Pythonista Drew Conway of Zero Intelligence Agents linked to Ideological Cartography, a blog whose author, Adam Bonica, posts interesting visualizations of political data. This post (Ideologically aligned and ideologically divided industries) had some interesting visualizations of the left-right ideological leanings of people in various industries as revealed by their campaign contributions (all data is from 2008):

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Worth Reading: Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft

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Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft comes close to fulfilling the premise of its title. Written by Angelo M. Codevilla, it may be the clearest discussion of statecraft you’re likely to get from an American.

Codevilla puts a great deal of emphasis on two themes throughout the book:

  1. Seriousness.
  2. Proper naming.

He argues that American statecraft has been haunted by three spirits of obfuscation and unseriousness since around 1900: Liberal Internationalism, Realism, and Neoconservatism. Codevilla sums up the three: “As Liberals think that all well-administered peoples are alike and Neoconservatives that all democrats are alike, Realists think that all “moderates” are alike.” The fundamental problem Codevilla finds with all three strains of American foreign policy thinking is that they:

  1. Assume everyone in the world is an American under their skin.
  2. Assume foreign policy consists of scratching foreigners until the true inner American is revealed.
  3. Are ignorant or deliberately paper over the essential proposition that foreign policy deals with foreigners.
  4. Obfuscate the meaning of words such as diplomacy and war away from their basic dictionary meanings.

Codevilla is not kind to what he sees as the wanton unseriousness and obfuscation of America’s twentieth and twenty-first century elites:

Twentieth-century American elites, however, have committed our country to the grandest of ends but have not measured them against the means necessary to achieve them—ends hazily imagined, and means they might not have used even if they had them. Instead of scaling up means or scaling down ends, they invented vocabularies to describe a fantasy in which the means with which they felt comfortable would suffice to remake the world. This meant abandoning the wisdom concerning peace, war, diplomacy, intelligence, prestige, and economics accumulated in our civilization over millennia. In the new, unprecedented world they imagined, any given instance of peace was not the product of a particular peace victory and arrangement of power but rather the absence of conflict. Diplomacy was not a set of tools but a substitute for force. Intelligence was not a matter of a few hidden details but a magic wand to uncover the secret to effortless success. Prestige was a reputation, not for being effective but for being pleasant. Wealth was not one of many elements of power but everyone’s overriding purpose.
 
To be other than sorcerers’ apprentices, American statesmen had better deal with reality as described in dictionaries. This book does not impose its own categories. It looks at international affairs as the interactions of individuals and groups who are what they are, want what they want, and do what they do. It is about the consequences of forgetting common-sense definitions: that diplomacy is mere communication, that international intercourse requires a positive imbalance of means over ends, that allies are available in inverse proportion to the need for them, and that war is the avenue to peace via the gateway of the enemy’s death or submission.

Codevilla covers each major element of statecraft in its own chapter: diplomacy, economic power (money—money—money), war, intelligence, and civil defense (also known by the heavily Teutonic name of “homeland security”).

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Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization

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A fable agreed upon
A fable agreed upon

Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines black swans as events that:

  1. Are totally unpredictable by mortal minds.
  2. Have a disproportionately large impact.
  3. Have retroactive predictability imposed on them through the foresight of 20/20 hindsight.

Taleb frequently points to the outbreak of World War I as an example of a black swan. He scoffs at historical accounts that present the outbreak as the result of trends that built up over the preceding decades, dismissing them as manifestations of the narrative fallacy:

Narrative fallacy: our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts.

As evidence of the narrative fallacy in histories of World War I, Taleb cites Niall Ferguson’s The Pity Of War on the failure of bond investors to price the possibility of war into their trades right before the war broke out. Ferguson now returns the favor in Complexity and Collapse, citing Taleb in his excoriation of historians who peddle epic theories of social collapse likeGiambattista Vico, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Kennedy, and Jared Diamond. After any major historical event, Ferguson complains:

…historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of “fat tail” events—the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as “the narrative fallacy”: the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Drawing casual inferences about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long, historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government’s 1966 execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood. Most recently, the financial crisis that began in 2007 has been attributed to measures of financial deregulation taken in the United States in the 1980s.

Ferguson proclaims that the real truth is found in the opposite direction:

In reality, the proximate triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess. Thus, World War I was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of 9/11 lie in the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and the financial crisis was principally due to errors in monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve and to China’s rapid accumulation of dollar reserves after 2001. Most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

I’m going to quibble with the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History here.

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The Machiavellians: Principle II

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The struggle for power
The struggle for power

The second principle outlined in James Burnham’s 1943 political science classic The Machiavellians is the fundamental truth about politics:

2. The primary subject-matter of political science is the struggle for social power in its diverse open and concealed forms.

(Contrary views hold that political thought deals with the general welfare, the common good, and other such entities that are from time to time invented by the theorists.)

To paraphrase Clausewitz:

[Politics] is nothing but a duel on a large scale. Countless duels go to make up [politics], but a picture of the whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries…to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance.

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