Daniel Drezner, harrumphing audibly, but not (alas!) intelligibly

Okay, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on here, whole lotta’ unpackin’ goin’ on. A couple of weeks ago, WashPost guy Dan Drezner, whom I (sometimes) like, uncorked a whole lotta nonsense due to the death of Princeton professor of international affairs Robert Gilpin, writing in praise of Gilpin in a column bearing the pungent subhead “It’s Robert Gilpin’s world, we are just living in it.” and lauding, virtually to the skies, Gilpin’s magnum opus (as Dan tells it), War and Change in World Politics, published in 1981.

Dan praised in particular “Gilpin’s story of hegemonic decline, which was both detailed and prescient. He argued that over time, the costs to the hegemon of maintaining the status quo would rise relative to the benefits, for several reasons. First, the leading economy eventually hits a growth slowdown because of lagging innovation. Second, the cost of leading military technologies continues to escalate at the same time that an affluent population loses its ‘martial spirit.’ Third, personal and public consumption supplant more productive forms of investment spending. Fourth, the shift of the economy into the service sector makes productivity gains that much harder.”

For point five, Drezner let Gilpin speak for himself, prefacing the quote with the phrase “See if this sounds familiar”:

“Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this ‘corruption’ (a term used in its classical sense to mean decay) [says Gilpin] is the generation in the minds of a dominant people of the belief that the world they (or, rather, their forebears) created is the right, natural, and God-given state of affairs. To such a people the idea that the world of their rule and privilege could be otherwise becomes inconceivable. The goodness and benefits of the status quo, as they know it, are so obvious that all reasonable men will assent to its worth and preservation. With such a state of mind, a people neither concedes to the just demands of rising challengers nor makes the necessary sacrifices to defend its threatened world.”

First of all, with regard to Dan’s own “See if this sounds familiar,” my answer is “yeah, I’ve heard that sort of fatuous ‘thought’ all too often”. Second, if Dan is speaking to us poor Americans living in the Age of Trump, as I strongly suspect he is, I first of all am such a cockeyed optimist that I don’t want to believe it’s true, and, apart from that, even if it is true, Gilpin’s “story” of hegemonic decline wasn’t a meaningful predictor of our multitudinous woes.

So I didn’t like Dannie’s tone and I didn’t like Gilpin’s either—almost as if I were picky—which provoked me to start cooking up an idea for a pungent response to both men, but I wanted to get a little better idea of what Gilpin actually said before going, you know, full snark on the guy for, basically, saying what Dannie said he said when I really didn’t know if Dannie got it right.—without, however, having to go the full nine yards and actually read Gilpin’s book.

I tried several times to finesse the issue, reading a pretty good article about Gilpin’s ideas, “Gilpinian Realism and International Relations” by William C. Wohlforth, “Daniel Webster Professor of Government” at Dartmouth and a nice piece by Gilpin himself, “War is Too Important to Be Left to Ideological Amateurs” lambasting the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, with which I agree entirely, though the title “War is Too Important to Be Left to Liars and Fools” might have been more à propos. Still, that didn’t quite do it, so after some serious hemming and hawing, I finally resigned myself to reading War and Change in its entirety, so that I could unload on poor Dan—and, as it turns out, poor Bob—with, well, with a clear conscience.

War and Change, if you have a mind for the whole “Grand Strategy” thing—and I do, more than most, though not as much as some—is a pretty decent read.
In his essay, Dr. Wohlforth, besides providing us with an entertaining look at academic infighting, “explaining” why Dr. Gilpin’s book is both superior to, and far less cited than, his competitors’ offerings, praised War and Change in the following manner:

“Gilpin’s ‘red book’¹ is no less sweeping and addresses a set of questions no less central to both the realist tradition and IR [international relations] more generally: how to explain change in international politics; why defined international orders rise and decline; the causes of great wars and long periods of peace; and the rise and decline of hegemonic great powers. As I shall argue below, War and Change actually yields more relevant, testable middle-range theo¬ries than Theory [of International Politics, by Kenneth Waltz]. The book had the advantage over Waltz’s Theory, moreover, in its comprehensive historical sweep. While Waltz’s empirical references were almost wholly confined to the post-seventeenth-century European international system and its global successor, Gilpin’s analysis included pre- and non-European international systems stretching back to antiquity. And Gilpin’s book was arguably more comprehensive than Waltz’s in its explicit focus on the interaction between economics and politics.”

In addition to his “five signs o’ decline”, Bob has a five-point “framework for understanding international political change,” largely summed up in the first point, to wit: “An international system is stable (i.e., in a state of equilibrium) if no state believes it profitable to attempt to change the system.” Of course, the obvious corollary (point two) is that states will attempt to change the system if they do believe the benefits of the change will outweigh the costs. Points three and five are corollaries of the first point as well. The real kicker is point four, that equilibriums are inherently unstable, because “Once an equilibrium between the costs and benefits is reached, the tendency is for the economic costs of maintaining the status quo to rise faster than the economic capacity to support the status quo.” It’s notable that while point one and its corollaries are basically truisms (which doesn’t mean they’re true) that have the tenor of Newton’s “laws” (which doesn’t mean they’re “laws”), point four is a judgment call. It should be “the observed tendency” rather than “the tendency.”

Bob pulls together a pretty massive reading list,² that includes a good deal of economic analysis to back up point four, but, both amusingly and not too surprisingly, about 95% of Bob’s analytical framework, aka “philosophy”, comes from one author and one book, Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars.

There is no question, to my mind, that The Peloponnesian Wars is one of the greatest books ever written.³ But it hardly supplies the “key” to understanding all of world history, as Gilpin effectively pretends it does, and particularly not because of the selective way in which Gilpin applies its “lessons.”

Beyond that, Gilpin reveals himself to be, not merely an overly obsequious disciple of the Great Man, but a thoroughly (well, fairly thoroughly) besotted Hellenophile, when he tells us, with a straight face, that “At least since the time of the expeditions of the Greeks under Agamemnon against Troy, the control of trade routes has been an objective of states and a source of great wealth and power.”

The simple fact is that Agamemnon is no more an historical character than Moses or Abraham. Furthermore, the site of the city assumed to that of “Troy” was occupied several thousands of years before the supposed time of Agamemnon, as dated by the classical Greeks like Thucydides,⁴ for the very purpose of dominating the Dardanelles, and was very likely conquered by the ancient Hittites around 1900 BC for that purpose, and so Gilpin misdates the time at which “control of trade routes has been an objective of states” by several millennia for the purpose of shoehorning in a reference to a man who never existed.⁵ Such self-indulgence makes one doubt the overall reliability of his judgment.

Furthermore, if you actually try to apply Gilpin’s “five signs o’ hegemonic decline” that I mentioned earlier, you’ll find that they don’t fit very well to most (all?) of the hegemons one can identity in the “comprehensive sweep of history.” Gilpin himself mentions with general approval the wide-spread theory one can find expressed more recently in two books by Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For? and Why The West Rules—For Now, that from about 9000 BC until, well, “0”, civilization “paid”—civilized states tended to grow bigger and bigger, at the expense of the “barbarians” surrounding them. After the birth of Christ (who, of course, had nothing to do with it),⁶ however, barbarians learned enough of civilization’s tricks to wage effective, marauding wars against the “hegemons”. The civilized states didn’t always lose, but they couldn’t win consistently, as they always had before, and they couldn’t grow. Civilization stopped “paying”. According to this theory, the hegemons of the ancient world did not carry the seeds of their own destruction within them. It was the times that were against them.⁷

But this is the precise opposite of the moralizing tongue-clucking that Gilpin finds, and seconds, in the classical authors he favors—Thucydides most of all, of course, but also Polybius,⁸ and, naturally, Gibbon—that hegemons fall because of their own “corruption”.

The five-part “story” that Drezner describes, which puts heavy emphasis on economic causes, seems to be particularly shaped by studies in European history starting in the sixteenth century, with the rise of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, which were the first to cross the open seas, and thence to “modern times”, when technological progress became conscious rather than accidental—and, certainly since the Industrial Revolution, seemingly capable of indefinite improvement. But really the application of the story is no more impressive here than in ancient times. Portugal “fell” because it was tiny. Spain, the Dutch Republic, and France were all reduced far more by an excess of “martial spirit”—endless grinding war—than the lack of it. All failed to solve the one problem that no European nation ever solved—how to dominate on both land and sea.

In fact, a great deal of Gilpin’s “analysis” is keyed to exactly two examples—the British Empire and the United States, and, even here, the arguments are faulty as well. It’s true that in the latter part of the nineteenth century British industrial innovation lagged in comparison to both Germany and the United States, for a variety of reasons, but the simple fact is, both the U.S. and Germany were significantly larger countries—76 million and 56 million versus 39 million in 1900. “Even” Japan was 43 million, while Russia was 120 million. As these other countries industrialized, the British advantage would shrivel to nothing. And, certainly, there was no evidence that an “affluent population” was losing its “martial spirit”. Sentimentalists who dream of the glorious days of “Empire”, like Niall Ferguson, wish that Great Britain had avoided World War I.

Yet Gilpin harps repeatedly in the need for aggressiveness, effectively extending the “French fry” theory of prison life to international politics: if a man steals a French fry from your plate, you must demand that he return it, and if he fails to do so, you must take it back by force—deadly force, if necessary. Otherwise, you’ll either be grabbing your ankles or living on your knees.

To make this point more elegantly, Gilpin cites the master himself, Thucydides, first on the subject of relations between Sparta and an alliance led by the city of Corinth. According to Gilpin, Sparta weakened itself by failing to respond to Athens’ provocative actions, and quotes approvingly the speech Thucydides puts in the mouth of the representatives of the alliance:

“For this [the growth of Athenian power] you are responsible. You it was who allowed them to fortify their city after the Median war, and afterwards to erect the long walls—you who, then and now, are always depriving of freedom not only those whom they have enslaved, but also those who have as yet been your allies.”

But is this even true? Did Thucydides reproduce the sentiments of the Corinthian league accurately?⁹ And if he did, how can we know that the league diagnosed the situation correctly? Since they were asking for assistance from Sparta, they naturally wished to argue that it was in Sparta’s interest to provide it. Later, Gilpin suggests that Sparta might be compared to Germany on the eve of World War I, pulled into a war it might have avoided due to an unnecessary and entangling alliance—which means that the Spartans shouldn’t have listened.¹⁰

Yet Gilpin returns to the French fry theory once more, with another quotation from Thucydides, this one attributed to Pericles, warning the Athenians not to trust the Spartans bearing anything:

“I hope that you will none of you think that we shall we going to war for a trifle if we refuse to revoke the Megara decree, which appears in the front of their complaints, and the revocation of which is to save us from war … Why, this trifle contains the whole seal and trial of your resolution. If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first instance; while a firm refusal will make them clearly understand that they must treat you more as equals.”

Strangely, Gilpin doesn’t mention at all what is for many the most memorable, and the most tragic, portion of Thucydides’ great work, “the Sicilian Expedition”—the great exercise in Athenian hubris that led to the destruction of two hundred ships and thousands of Athenian soldiers and sailors in a vain attempt to obtain the support, or at least the neutrality, of the major Greek colonies sited on the coast of Sicily in Athens’ continuing struggle against Sparta. Nor does he mention Gibbon’s frequently quoted remark that “there is nothing more contrary to nature than the attempt to hold in obedience distant provinces”.

Gilpin labels Vietnam a “debacle” and faults the U.S. for intervening so massively and so uselessly in a country “of no vital concern of the United States”, but his constant use of the “classical” term of “corruption”, his almost “classical” admiration for the “martial spirit” as a sine qua non of a “healthy hegemon”, as well as his almost constant assumption that hegemons fall as a result of internal weakness rather than overextension or outside events—that any hegemon can “save itself” if it really wants to—all push his thought towards the judgmentalism that I objected to at the beginning of my post.

Furthermore, he often neglects, or passes over, hegemons whose fate runs counter to his predictions. What did the Persian Empire do that was “wrong,” other than lose three battles to Alexander? Suppose Alexander had died in the first battle, as he easily could have done, since he always fought in the front ranks? Suppose, on the other hand, he had lived a long life, becoming “orientalized” to the extent he became, in effect, the successor to Darius III rather than his conqueror?

And why did the Byzantine Empire, pretty “corrupt” for centuries, manage to survive for so long? Did it reverse any of its failings, or was it simply the fact that none of its adversaries quite had the force to knock it over? Gilpin is baffled by its quasi-successor, the Ottoman Empire for failing to “modernize” itself for so long. But perhaps the “corrupt” elite that ruled the Empire could sense, well enough, that they would have no place in a “modern” Ottoman Empire, whatever that might look like. For centuries, the political divisions of Europe, plus a modicum of military competence, kept the Ottoman rulers in business, and that was all they cared about. The notion that rulers have a duty to “the nation”, or anyone or anything other than themselves, is really a recent product of western European thinking, developed in the 18th century by a variety of thinkers, including Locke, Kant, and Rousseau, and reaching its fruition in 19th century nationalists. Its application to other times and climes is inherently irrational.

Though it doesn’t occupy much space in the book, the whole “point” of War and Change is a discussion of the world position of the United States circa 1981, presented largely as a comparison of U.S. “strategy” compared to that of Great Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, because Gilpin sees them both as “declining” hegemons.

Great Britain is given points for responding intelligently to rising powers at both the western and eastern fringes of its Empire, conceding, Gilpin tells us, U.S. naval dominance on the Caribbean and generally adopting the policy of “do nothing to anger the United States”, while establishing a formal alliance with Japan, recognizing that nation as a naval power. The U.S., again according to Gilpin, responded with similar acquiescence to rise of the Middle Eastern oil cartel, accepting the emergence of a new player in the game instead of trying to stifle it with a risky invasion. The ultimate retreat from Vietnam was a far clumsier, though ultimately cautious move. The U.S was able to make the decision to cut its losses and accept a defeat rather than play for table stakes.

The “problem” with this analysis by comparison, of course, is that ultimately the British hegemon faced a challenge it could not finesse, leading to the enormous losses the country sustained in the two world wars. It seems that, according to Gilpin’s “ineluctable” (my word) analytical framework, particularly the nefarious point four, the U.S. is, well, doomed!

Gilpin evades that grim conclusion, it seems to me, emerging “cautiously optimistic”, simply by not following his framework to its logical conclusion. He might have freed himself more honestly if he had forthrightly abandoned his classically inspired conviction that hegemons fall through their own vices, rather than circumstances beyond their control. He might have acknowledged differences between the “declining” U.K. and the “declining” U.S. as well as similarities. On the eve of World War I, the British and German Empires had similar GDPs, (estimated $225 billion versus $235 billion, in 1990 dollars, versus $517 billion for the U.S.),¹¹ but during the 70s and 80s the U.S. economy was always more than twice the size of that of the U.S.S.R.

It is “arguable” that Great Britain might have deterred Imperial Germany from attempting to conquer both France and Russia at the outset of World War I if it had created a “continental style” army of perhaps 350,000-500,000 men based in Britain. (In fact, the British had less than 200,000 soldiers in Britain at the start of the war.) This would have been a complete departure from the centuries-old British tradition against a standing army, much less a draft, and would have been a considerable strain on the British taxpayer, when coupled with the “dreadnought” competition with Germany. In contrast, the U.S. economy could, and did, easily support the burden of military competition with the Soviets. Gilpin’s notions of economic decline and “corruption” affecting the U.S. were based on both the aristocratic moralizing of the classical authors he admired and the “contemporary wisdom” of the 1970s that drastically misinterpreted the so-called “de-industrializing” of the U.S., which really reflected a cliched understanding of what constitutes economic strength.

Gilpin in fact acknowledges that the U.S. “dwarfed” the U.S.S.R. economically, but failed to note the extent to which, in the 70s and 80s, the U.S.S.R. was moving backwards. Prior to World War I, Russia was one of the great grain exporters of the world, despite relying on a workforce composed of illiterate peasants using agricultural techniques that had not changed for centuries. In the 1970s and 80s the Soviets frequently had to import grain, despite all the advances that had been made in agricultural technology over the decades, despite the advances in hybrid crops, despite having a far more educated work force, and despite having some of the best agricultural land in the world. Today, Russia is again a major grain exporter.

Gilpin was aware of some of the challenges facing the U.S.S.R., which he summarized as follows, even as he believed it was “rising”, as it was not:

“At the present juncture, it is the United States whose position is threatened by the rise of Soviet power. In the decades ahead, however, the Soviet Union also must adjust to the differential growth of power among states. For the Soviet Union, the burden of adjusting to the transformation of the international system from a bipolar system to a tripolar or even multipolar system could be even more severe than it would prove for the United States. In the wake of the collapse of Communist ideological unity and the rise of a rival ideological center in Peking [sic], the Soviet Union finds itself surrounded by potentially threatening and growing centers of industrial power. Although it possesses unprecedented military strength, it could lose the reassurance of its ideology, and it is sluggish with respect to economic growth and technological development. If its neighboring powers, (Japan, western Europe, and China) continue to grow in economic power and military potential, Russia’s logistical advantage of occupying a central position on the Eurasian continent is also a political liability. On all sides, centrifugal forces could pull at this last of the great multiethnic empires as neighbors make demands for revision of the territorial status quo and as subordinate non-Russian peoples seek greater equality and autonomy. Such external and internal challenges could give rise to powerful defensive reactions on the part of the Soviet governing elite.”

It is “interesting” that Gilpin can see the U.S. as being threatened by the “rise of the Soviet power” at the same time that he recognizes that the U.S. economy is vastly superior in size and that the Soviets, already so far behind, are already growing “sluggish with respect to economic growth and technological development.” He is aware of the burgeoning economy of Japan but doesn’t wonder if there is something significant to the fact that a nation of perhaps 110 million can have a larger economy than a supposed superpower with a population of perhaps 250 million. The whole equation “British Empire versus Germany equals U.S. versus U.S.S.R.” was so hypnotic, seen in the analytical framework that enshrined classical notions of “corruption” and “decline,” that it blinded observers like Gilpin to the massive disparities. One could also point out that the total weight of the powerful nations allied with the United States—western Europe plus Japan (and perhaps Saudi Arabia)—“dwarfed” the almost naked U.S.S.R. by an even more massive margin.

To his credit, Gilpin was not a prisoner of these notions when critiquing the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.¹² First of all, he correctly pointed out that the objectives of the Bush Administration had nothing to do with addressing the terrorist activities of al Qaeda. Rather, the invasion reflected the priorities of two groups—the “ultra-nationalists” and the “neocons”. The ultra-nationalists, led by Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, saw 9/11 as an opportunity to obtain direct control of the world’s oil supply via military intervention in the Middle East, discarding the earlier policy of the Nixon Administration, praised by Gilpin in War and Change, of implicitly “accepting the just demands of rising challengers” and letting the oil-producing nations control their own oil. With the absence of the Soviet threat, Cheney et al. saw no reason to continue a policy of “justice.”

One can wonder if Gilpin’s persistent (and, well, “just”) criticism of the “neocons”, by which he means “Jewish neocons”, in this article is one reason why he left such a limited paper trail on the web. The original “neocon” effort in foreign affairs, to oppose the Nixon Administration’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union, was in large part a WASP affair. And at the present time, many of the most earnest neocons are not Jewish.¹³ But the demise of the Soviet Union left the fate of Israel—an increasingly combative and fundamentalist Israel—as the centerpiece of neocon concern. The cause of Israel, defined by its right-wing leadership, became the emotional obsession, not only of a relative handful of conservative Jewish intellectuals, but of millions of evangelical Christians, many of whom see events in the present-day Middle East as a sort of “living Bible”—God’s Will manifesting itself before our eyes.¹⁴ George Bush, an evangelical moderate himself, was elected largely through the enthusiastic support of these voters.

As Gilpin explains, the Bush Administration had no interest in making its policy goals clear, and, as events kept embarrassing them, kept redefining the goals, until finally the president declared, in his second inaugural address, that the U.S. would, in effect, liberate the world, as, he believed, he had liberated Iraq, a policy whose possibility was quickly invalidated by events in that country.

We now continue to be prisoners of the ruin of the Bush Administration’s policy of intervention. The Obama Administration was almost as much a prisoner of the lure of “regime change” as its predecessor, and Hillary Clinton ran as the champion of regime change, boasting of her “victory” in Libya and promising further aggression in Syria. Half of the opposition to Trump among neocons is the persistent fear that he will make good his early threats to renounce America’s expanded post-Cold War leadership role, despite his own compulsive aggressiveness and despite filling his administration with hard-liners of the most blinkered and vicious stripe.

To revert, at last, to the five signs o’ decline enunciated by Mr. Drezner from his reading of Dr. Gilpin’s “War and Change*, which prompted this now-extended dithyramb, I don’t see that the first four supposed signs of “softness and decay” (my language) are at all either accurate or relevant to our current condition. As to point five, regarding “a people [that] neither concedes to the just demands of rising challengers nor makes the necessary sacrifices to defend its threatened world,” we really have not “rising challengers” nor is our world “threatened”. What we have is an out of control military industrial complex that demands to be fed and manufactures enemies to justify its appetite.

Our continuing operations in Afghanistan I would say have no real purpose other than to supply American corpses and thus make possible the demand that we “honor” the dead by continuing a policy of aggression as an end in itself. The Trump Administration seems transfixed by the fantasy of regime change in Iran even though nothing is more obvious than that such an undertaking would be half a dozen times more costly than the debacle in Iraq, which is still far from over. Our generals can estimate the costs on the back of an envelope, but they love their budgets more than their country.

China, of course, is the ultimate “rising challenger”, but that collision is at least buffered by 6,000 miles of ocean, plus the disinclination of the Chinese to get in an arms race with the U.S. Certainly within the next fifty years, of course, the weight of civilization will shift to the East as China and India approximate the level of economic and intellectual development of the West. But whether that will lead to war seems to me to be a very obscure question.

Afterwords
Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian War in “real” time, dying before it ended, and did not know he was writing the epitaph of Athens, which of course only makes it all the more poignant. Anyone who has a glimmering of the greatness of the Greeks finds it hard to read Thucydides, knowing what loss awaits at the conclusion. Gibbon, whose famous work I have previously discussed, with limited enthusiasm, in a linked, seven-part series that begins here, felt he was describing the fall, not of a city or even an empire, but civilization itself. The “fall” of the British Empire, linked as it is to the near destruction of Western Civilization, is the third great loss that both cries out for explanation and serves as a warning to the present.