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By William S. Lind
April 18, 2006
One of the goals of the next conservatism should be to restore
the American republic rather than continue our march toward
empire, with the loss of liberties that inevitably entails.
Restoring the republic, in turn, means restoring the grand
strategy America followed through most of its history. That
grand strategy was defensive, not offensive.
The Washington Establishment seems to think
that wars can be won only by taking the offensive. Over and
over, we hear that in the misnamed “war on terror,”
America is on the offensive (which guarantees more war). We
are all supposed to accept this as something good.
Clausewitz, the great Prussian military
theorist, would disagree. Early in his book ¬On War, Clausewitz
wrote,
. . . defense is simply the stronger form
of war, the one that makes the enemy’s defeat more certain
. . . We maintain unequivocally that the form of warfare we
call defense not only offers greater probability of victory
than attack, but that its victories can attain the same proportions
and results.
What would an American defensive grand
strategy look like in a 21st Century that is likely to be
dominated by Fourth Generation war, war waged by non-state
entities such as al Qaeda? Before we can answer that question
we first must address two others. The first is, what do we
mean by grand strategy?
The greatest American military theorist,
Colonel John Boyd USAF (whom I knew well), defined grand strategy
as the art of connecting yourself to as many other independent
power centers as possible, while isolating the enemy from
as many independent power centers as possible. Connection
and isolation is the essence of the art of strategy.
The second question is, in what environment
must we seek connection and isolation? Looking outward from
the United States and the West, in a century whose most important
feature will be the decline of the state, we will find a world
divided into centers of order and centers or sources of disorder.
As I wrote in an earlier column on the Next Conservatism,
those centers of order may reflect our traditional culture
or they may derive their order from the “soft totalitarianism”
of Brave New World. The latter is a deadly enemy to conservatives
and all we stand for, but as an internal threat it is not
our focus here.
Putting these two answers together, we
can see what a defensive grand strategy would look like. It
means we should seek to connect our country with as many other
centers of order as possible, while isolating ourselves from
as many centers and sources of disorder a possible. In simple
terms, this means we would leave centers and sources of disorder
alone, militarily and in other ways, unless they attacked
us. But if they did attack us, our response would be Roman,
which is to say annihilating.
The Washington Establishment will immediately
howl in protest at any “isolation,” even when we
are talking about isolating ourselves from dangerous disorder.
That Establishment lives richly off playing the Great Power
game and it has no desire to lose its meal ticket.
The next conservatism should not allow
itself to be scared away from sound strategic thinking by
bogeymen. When a plague is raging somewhere else, as the plague
of violent disorder will rage throughout most of the world
as the state fades away, prudence calls for a quarantine.
American intervention in centers of disorder will not return
them to order; it is more likely to import their disorder
here, in the form of refugees and immigrants. Nor does a defensive
grand strategy call for “isolationism.” We would
not only maintain but strengthen our ties to other parts of
the world that remained centers of order, of which China may
emerge as the most important.
A defensive grand strategy is what America
followed through most of its history and it served us well.
It helped keep the federal government small and it allowed
our capital to go into industry rather than armaments. As
conservatives we know that what worked once can work again.
In the Fourth Generation world of a disordered 21st Century,
we will do well to maintain both order and liberty here at
home. Crusades to “make the world safe for democracy”
will render neither the world nor our own country safer for
anything.
William S. Lind is Director for the
Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
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