War: no longer politics by other means — Clausewitz, Fukuyama and Ukraine

Only the most dedicated academic has actually read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. The rest of us gravely intone the well-worn, and paraphrased, aphorism that “war is politics by other means” and hope to bluff our way as savants of the Prusso-German canon of strategic thought. But Clausewitz was on to something and how curious it is to note that in the real world, in the wars we fight now, the link between war and politics has become ever more tenuous.

Volodymyr Zelensky is not entirely correct when he asserts that all wars have to end with some sort of agreement. Wars of national survival usually demand the unconditional surrender of one side, as the smoking ruins of Berlin and Hiroshima in 1945 testify. The Russian invasion of Ukraine may feel like a war of national survival seen from Kyiv, but patently not so from Moscow. For the Russians, the military operations now underway only serve the purpose of shaping the peace from which they intend to derive strategic advantage; or, alternatively stated, war as politics by other means.

Unfortunately for them, the Russians have been so incompetent in their conduct of the invasion that the damage they continue to inflict, the resistance they have provoked in the Ukrainian people and the newly found unity they have cemented in the West mean that their full political objectives will almost certainly not be met. The military means have been used in so indiscriminate and disproportionate a manner as to render the political ends untenable.

It shouldn’t have been like this. The Russian intention to conduct a quick and substantially bloodless decapitation of the Ukrainian state would have established a conducive relationship between means and ends. Indeed, their initial military plan may have been reverse engineered to achieve precisely the lightness of touch that would deliver the political objectives. But the relationship between strategic means and ends is moderated by the ways employed. The Russian failures in planning, intelligence, logistics and tactics have shattered what should be the seamless link between means, ways as ends beloved of strategic doctrine.

Not that the Russians have any monopoly on strategic ineptitude. The immediate American response to 9/11 was to declare a Global War on Terrorism, a reaction entirely understandable at a visceral level but barely intelligible in strategic terms. To be effective, military strategy needs clear objectives, a definable enemy and a recognisable theatre of operations, none of which existed under the war on terror.

Fighting terrorism — a condition, at best a tactic — was hardly consistent with the clarity that was the first condition of success; while declaring a war served only to make the groups being targeted cohere in way that would not have occurred if civil/criminal mechanisms had been invoked. Finally, and most importantly, a global condition that had to be addressed wherever it raised its head created an automatic asymmetry between means and ends that would eventually exhaust even the strategic inventory of the United States.

And then the shooting started. The 2001/2 campaign in Afghanistan was remarkable for its brevity and effectiveness. Completely disregarding conventional military wisdom, Donald Rumsfeld made it up as he went along and put together irresistible volumes of indirect fire: CIA agents playing a 21st-century version of the Great Game, a ready-made infantry in the shape of the Northern Alliance and an urbane and, at least then, compliant political leader in waiting in Hamid Kharzi. In a seminal example of asymmetric engagement, American-led forces shattered the Taliban and drove its remnants into Pakistan or back to their villages.

At this point, the military instrument of strategy had created the conditions to deliver a series of political objectives: the complete disruption of Al Qaeda, the defeat of the Taliban, the chastening and compliance of Pakistan and a salutary illustration of what happened if you messed with America. All that remained was to draw the Taliban back into a negotiation that would concede their defeat but recognise their role and invite the United Nations to internationalise a solution that would leave the United States free to accept the laurels of victory — and depart.

In the event, none of that happened. America became distracted by the siren call of Iraq and ended up leaving Afghanistan in the worst of all possible worlds: with a residual responsibility to put the place back together but with neither the resource nor the ambition to do so. It is difficult to imagine the incredulity with which the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban leadership watched this passage of events. When America and NATO returned in force in 2007 the moment had passed and the attenuated tragedy of western intervention in Afghanistan only ended with the chaotic withdrawal in August 2021.

Meanwhile, Anglo-American forces were busy invading Iraq. For the military anoraks looking on, the American envelopment of Baghdad had all the combined arms elegance that the Russian envelopment of Kyiv has so singularly lacked. But at the moment of military victory it became clear that the Iraqi people did not share President George W. Bush’s faith in the self-evident virtue of democracy and America had no plan to reveal it to them. That revelation was then compounded by the complete demolition of the western casus belli when no weapons of mass destruction were found and the entire enterprise of liberal intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan became tainted by association with what appeared to many to be political duplicity.

In the Russian example, war is failing politics; in the American-led example, politics failed war. That American-led example is now seen clearly as a failure of historic proportions and the Russian example has every chance of following suit. While we should be content to let our potential enemies stew in their own juice, we must recognise the profound questions this separation of two of the fundamental strands of strategy poses for our own generals and politicians.

For the generals, contemporary illustrations of the utility of force are elusive. Military violence of itself has no purpose and it is only the link to political outcome that can possibly justify it, morally or strategically. For the politicians, national security is the first responsibility of government but the statesmanship to exploit military success or mitigate military failure has been conspicuously absent in recent conflict. All of which can only lead to a reciprocal lack of confidence between the uniforms and the suits and a collective lack of confidence in the process of strategic authorship.

And that really matters because we are at the start of one of those competitions between world systems that only comes once in a generation, perhaps once a century. Think of Reconquista Spain, the Thirty Years’ War, revolutionary France against the European monarchies or Fascism against Communism in the mid-20th century. The emerging competition between Liberal Democracy and what The Economist is now terming the Axis of Autocracy is set to be the defining confrontation of our times.

Those of us living under Liberal Democracy have sat fat and happy for the last 30 years confident in the historic triumph of our system, as captured by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. That’s not how it looks seen from elsewhere. Viewed from Beijing, the radical individualism of the West is inimical to the shared values and narratives society needs in order to function. What’s more, the inherent flaws of democracy empower vested interests at the expense of The People in a way that can only lead to an historically inevitable collapse of the system.

The view that the West is in a state of decadent decline is also attracting the attention of political elites in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and sub-Saharan Africa, while India appears strangely ambivalent and leaders in the Middle East wait and see. And, of course, the less than edifying conduct of the British parliamentary system in negotiating Brexit or the chaotic scenes around the Capitol building in Washington at the last gasp of the Trump presidency would give even the most avid supporter of Liberal Democracy pause for thought.

In contrast, under autocracy, the trains tend to run on time and, in the case of China, the largest leap in economic prosperity in history has been achieved in a single generation. If you are an on-looking Nigerian, Sri Lankan or Kazak, the case for autocracy looks compelling —until, that is, Vladimir Putin blunders into Ukraine and makes a convincing case for any available alternative. The obverse of the rather brittle patina of autocracy is the tendency to bombast, fantasy narrative and advice taken in a sycophantic echo chamber that marked out the careers of Hitler and Mussolini and now characterises the leadership of Putin. It’s not a good look and has not only galvanised the West but also devalued the case for autocracy, as President Xi must be ruefully concluding.

So, two imperfect systems in historic competition and both in search of the philosopher’s stone that will again make war politics by other means. How appropriate then that Francis Fukuyama has just released Liberalism and its Discontents, a book with none of the hubris of The End of History and the Last Man but one which affirms, despite all the frailties of Liberal Democracy, that we are on the right side. It may be a tract for our times.

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