Ain’t Gonna Study (Cold) War No More

As media Clausewitzes and hyperthyroid pols keep demanding that President George Bush formulate a “grand strategy,” I am simply pleased that events in Eastern Europe and Russia have moved at such a pace that all the Washington deepthinkers are bogged down in last week’s crisis. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, who in January 1944 was plagued by critics in search of his overall strategic concept, what we need is an “underall strategic concept.” The fundament of this approach should be the maxim: “Never get mixed up in the religious wars of other people’s churches.”

To say this is not to suggest for a moment that the time has come to take a nice nap. We are watching a movement of political tectonic plates unmatched since the breakup of the old European order at the end of World War I, and—as the inhabitants of San Francisco can testify—plate movement generates earthquakes. However, suppressing the inordinate hubris that seems to be an ingredient of what Tocqueville called “American exceptionalism,” we have to realize that while we can blowup the world, we simply can’t persuade Azeris to be lovable toward Armenians, or vice versa.

As media Clausewitzes and hyperthyroid pols keep demanding that President George Bush formulate a “grand strategy,” I am simply pleased that events in Eastern Europe and Russia have moved at such a pace that all the Washington deepthinkers are bogged down in last week’s crisis. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, who in January 1944 was plagued by critics in search of his overall strategic concept, what we need is an “underall strategic concept.” The fundament of this approach should be the maxim: “Never get mixed up in the religious wars of other people’s churches.”

To say this is not to suggest for a moment that the time has come to take a nice nap. We are watching a movement of political tectonic plates unmatched since the breakup of the old European order at the end of World War I, and—as the inhabitants of San Francisco can testify—plate movement generates earthquakes. However, suppressing the inordinate hubris that seems to be an ingredient of what Tocqueville called “American exceptionalism,” we have to realize that while we can blowup the world, we simply can’t persuade Azeris to be lovable toward Armenians, or vice versa.