Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fourth annual writing contest by sending us their thoughts on strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present one of the essays selected for Honorable Mention, from Kristofer Seibt, a student at Columbia University.

America’s global strategy, if there is one, tends to ignore the impact of American activity on how or whether international events unfold. This tendency may naturally seem counterintuitive, as even the smallest rumor from Washington can generate crisis or calm in far-flung regions. The same clearly cannot be said of Monrovia or Montevideo. On the other hand, every American knows the United States actively seeks to shape the world through its foreign policy, whether through economic sanctions, a dizzying array of military engagements, foreign aid, or other measures. The United States acts consciously at a surface level, but consistently ignores the depth of America’s impact by presupposing the United States exists outside an organic international community. This may also seem counterintuitive, considering the shape of the international order today bears America’s fingerprints. The United States acts upon the world, but not within the world. The United States understands other state or non-state actors to be working towards the United States, or not at all. Most give little thought to the agency of America’s international peers, their worldview, and the complex system of attitudes and events that shape their foreign policy decisions.

The United States must go further than rediscovering strategic empathy, as Lieutenant General McMaster has recently written.[1] The United States certainly must understand its strategic competitors, but America would benefit from seeing itself in a world where supremacy is neither pre-ordained nor permanent. American strategists must clearly define reasonable objectives to frame global and regional strategies, be willing to reassess strategic approaches as conditions evolve, and diligently red-team policy decisions. Empathy is only useful if it brings nuance to strategic thinking and decision making. It is less useful as intellectual window dressing for American ideals or domestic political interests, such as being able to articulate the true intentions of an enemy. Empathy should allow practitioners to understand how American actions impact the decisions others make. Strategic empathy should enable the U.S. government to shape external behavior and avoid short-sighted choices. American policymakers today must ask themselves routinely: If war breaks out in the South China Sea, may we have paved the road to war? Is this what our strategy or political objectives call for?

American policy has vacillated between flavors of extreme idealism throughout history. Comfortable and aloof, with benign neighbors in North America, Americans still drift between bouts of isolationism and selective engagement with the world. Since the turn of the 20th Century, Americans have also tended to conjure a quasi-crusader spirit and a sense of responsibility for the ills of the world. Thus, in 2020, American strategists face the competing influence of the America-first, democracy-for-export, and patronizing strands of orthodox American thinking. Counter to John Quincy Adams’ warning, all three strands of thought unwittingly promote the construction of monsters for the United States to slay. Such Manichean polarity undermines policymakers’ ability to consider the complexity of cause and effect in international affairs. They blind policymakers to the scale and trajectory of American decisions made in the present. Further, overlapping elements of national power and their linkages to political objectives suffer under any myopically idealized perspective.

American policymakers should be careful what they wish for. The rules-based international order is not perfect, and America has learned painfully in recent years that the world is not experiencing the end of history.[2] That does not mean a return to great power conflict is inevitable. In today’s environment, a descent towards great power war could be the unintended product of American strategy, rather than of actions ascribed to America’s perceived enemies. America does not lack confidence, but it does lack empathy. Simply put, America fails to fully see how its words and deeds interact within and therefore shape the world. America, unfortunately, prefers to see the world it wants versus the world that is.

In other words, realism provides a powerful antidote to the American predisposition for idealism. Realism must form the departure point for an effective strategy. Some may rightly argue the U.S. has long crafted its strategy along realist lines, and this was certainly true during the height of the Cold War. But the American brand of realism has always existed in tension with the American strands of idealism, as mentioned above and further expounded by thinkers such as Walter Russell Mead and Hans Morgenthau.[3] E.H. Carr, a British historian and diplomat, once championed a realist view of international affairs in his appraisal of the interwar period. Still, he also recognized the need for idealism to offer a necessary corrective.[4] Henry Kissinger carried forward an understanding of the benefits borne of integrating multilateralism and American exceptionalism into a realist view of the world.[5] Most, unfortunately, prefer to omit the nuance Kissinger and other realists champion. Realism hardly constitutes a doctrine with a coherent playbook, though. Richard Betts has highlighted the realist preference for consequentialism, utility, and empathy as a practical attitude for policymakers to parse decisions. He counseled policymakers to “focus not on acting against evil, but on which options will result in the least evil outcomes; and choose options supportable by the power at hand, not ones whose success requires adversaries to capitulate because they realize they are in the wrong.”[6]

Is China wrong to promote its interests at the expense of its neighbors and the prevailing sensibilities of international order? Is Russia wrong to promote its interest along its periphery at the expense of European postwar sensibilities? Most Western policymakers would respond in the affirmative. The West, however, continues to prioritize national interest at the expense of other nations or even the international order. The United States through the 20th Century, and Britain before it, had historically steered the international order to comport with their national interest, casting a cynical realist glow on the liberal universalist foundations of international institutions.[7] The United States continues this trend today in preferring to cast aside the World Health Organization during a pandemic—a byproduct of national competition at odds with the notion that liberal international institutions bind nations, foster cooperation, and incentivize communication.[8]

Western hypocrisy aside, how can American policymakers look beyond perceived wrongdoing to craft a reasonable evolution of the international system? Strategists realize the cost of doing business this way yields less benefit as time marches on. Robert Gilpin has sketched the trajectories inherent in hegemonic conflict, especially the decisions incumbent hegemons face as the resource cost of maintaining the status quo climbs and revisionist powers build capacity.[9] Americans should recall that accommodation and retrenchment are viable decisions only the United States can make. The balance of power in China’s near abroad is shifting rapidly away from America’s favor. The cost of maintaining America’s interest in East Asia climbs as it becomes more economical for China to achieve its interests close to home. Despite heightened tensions today, America can still choose to beware but engage, rather than retreat towards the comfort of the American strands of Manichean idealism.

Further, America has historically demonstrated the verve and imagination to shape an international order with broad appeal. Will America lead the world towards an evolved international order with more widespread appeal, or go to war to preserve the one under assault by human and natural forces today? Contrary to popular passions, China, over the long duration, has demonstrated the capacity to cooperate as a stakeholder more so than as an ideological thorn in America’s side.[10]

McMaster is right, as Kissinger was before him, to look to history as a departure point for understanding America’s international peers. Understanding the Forbidden City, the Century of Humiliation, and the tributary methodology of Chinese imperialism millennia ago only go so far towards understanding China in the here and now, acting organically and under a different perspective in a shared world. Rather than offering continuity in Chinese thinking as a means for predicting or judging their behavior, history better serves in reflecting on how nations interact and perceive one another. In applying a historical lens, one trades predictive power for a greater appreciation of complexity and what is possible.

To fully attain strategic empathy, especially vis-à-vis China, Americans must overcome their tendency to erect impenetrable mystique around or, worse, to other those from vastly different cultures. It is appropriate to look for lessons in more familiar territory. Some characterize Russia’s annexation of Crimea six years ago as a geopolitical response to unilateral Western encroachment into Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. This was known then as the dual enlargement of NATO and the European Union.[11] Foreign policy professionals, realists foremost among them, warned of such at the time.[12] Debate on this point continues in the West.[13] Finding objective truth of this sort will remain elusive, but the causal assertion of liberal overreach contains a potent lesson for decision-makers with short memories and grand imaginations. Even the world’s sole hegemon cannot wish away other nations’ insecurities, sensibilities, or ambitions.

Most Americans today equate Crimea with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. American practitioners have understandably evoked language from the Cold War and have restored NATO’s security orientation towards a potential Russian threat. But Crimea’s enduring position in history is the eponymous site of avoidable great power war. Americans may be forgiven for paying more considerable attention to the American Civil War. Still, it is more likely the return of great power conflict will resemble the Crimean War than the world wars of the 20th Century.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) resulted in an imperially ambitious Britain, a revisionist France, and an opportunistic Ottoman Empire defeating the Russian Empire after a grueling preview of modern land warfare on the Crimean Peninsula and modern naval strategy in the Black and Baltic Seas. The Russian Empire was considered the supreme land power in Europe at that time, coming off decades of imperial expansion and a decisive victory over Napoleon.[14] Contrary to Americans’ modern understanding of Russia, the Russian Empire of the early- to mid-19th Century was a satisfied power that favored the status quo.[15] The Concert of Europe, forged after the Napoleonic Wars, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, maintained a relatively stable European order until it rapidly eroded amid the escalating crisis around the Black Sea.[16] The Concert worked insofar as the Crimean War is widely regarded among historians as avoidable and characterized by a preference for diplomacy in the conflict’s opening acts. Andrew Lambert has written how the continental system, namely the interests of the German states, prevented the conflict from becoming an unlimited hegemonic conflict.[17] The conflict was not a war of Russian aggression, nor a simple balance correction under the principles of Vienna. In a multi-polar Eurasia, a generation removed from the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, each nation held different views of the world and the Concert system. Notably, the Ottoman Empire remained outside the Concert system’s mechanisms.

Popular memory in the West suggests that Russia started the war. The story goes that Russian troops occupied the Danube principalities in response to Ottoman resistance towards Russian infringement on Ottoman sovereignty over their Orthodox Christian subjects. Russian ships then destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Sinop off the Turkish coast. Western policymakers feared Russian expansion into or suzerainty over Ottoman territories, most notably the Turkish Straits. Meanwhile, the British press revived orientalist notions of Russian barbarism and tyranny. British military thinkers feared a growing Russian navy and the prospect of the Russian army threatening India. The French Emperor, Napoleon III, sought prestige abroad by unilaterally negotiating the restoration of Catholic rights to holy sites in Jerusalem, under their 18th Century purview in protecting Ottoman Catholics. Taking the Western point of view, even acknowledging the failure of diplomacy, the Crimean War seems justified in checking an aggressive Russia and protecting a vulnerable Ottoman Empire. Such a perspective indicates that Russia upset the balance of power that had defined a stable international system.

However, employing a little strategic empathy and observing events unfold interactively reveals that Russia had no concrete designs on the straits, had preferred preserving the Ottoman Empire, and had placed status-quo diplomatic offramps from the outset of the crisis. The Russian occupation of the Danube principalities was commonly accepted practice in Europe, occurring as recently as 1852 with Ottoman approval and tacit acknowledgment from the European powers. Since the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, Russia had a history of communicating on behalf of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The Orthodox Christians, via Russian agreements with the Ottoman Empire, maintained the rights to the holy sites in the Holy Land. Ottoman pre-emptive attacks over land had spurred Russia to launch its Black Sea fleet, where at Sinop the Ottoman fleet technically fired first.[18]

The real tragedy of the road to war in 1853 was that Russo-Ottoman activities lay outside the Concert system. Europe treated Russia’s activity in the Ottoman sphere as a bilateral affair, and Europe stayed mostly aloof until the short Russo-Ottoman alliance of 1833 awakened British strategists to the specter of Russian control of the Turkish straits and unfettered access beyond the Caucasus.[19] Russia’s actions, in hindsight, are those of a status-quo power operating towards national self-interest. The West’s actions also demonstrated national self-interest, but with a revisionist streak colored by memories of 1848. The Ottoman Empire sought guarantees of its sovereignty. France wished to revise the European order, while Britain blended its unique continental-aloofness, orientalism, and idealism. British idealism stemmed from the new weight afforded to public opinion and the increased capacities of communications technology and the press. Ultimately, all parties operated off imperfect information, misguided perceptions of their competitors’ motives, and incongruent views towards the prevailing international order. The postwar decision to integrate the Ottoman Empire into the Concert, with its sovereignty guaranteed, confirms how Europeans assessed the Concert’s temporary lapse.

Of course, there’s little benefit in attempting to draw direct parallels to the arrayal of power in today’s international system. Instead, American policymakers would do well to consider the Russian position in 1853. The Russians did not appreciate the perception of their actions reflected against British or Ottoman interests. Their status-quo vantage reinforced a narrow and static image of the world. French revisionism rankled traditional Russian sensibilities in the religious realm. Still, despite offering the initial pretext for war, all parties resolved the question of holy sites diplomatically before hostilities broke out.[20] Russia took its position and international precedent for granted. The result was a shocking defeat on Russian soil and the erasure of the Russian fleet. Russia’s defeat initiated painful and overdue internal reform.

History also offers a sober reminder that different lessons can be drawn from the same or similar events, such that realists and idealists alike were wrong in appraising 1914 and 1938.[21] This year of pandemic within the era of “great power competition” has reinvigorated comparisons to those fateful years and their attendant cataclysms.[22] Practitioners should also recall the 19th Century and unlearn the 1938 lesson of revisionist power accommodation. The Revolutions of 1848 tested and altered the Concert of Europe but did not break it. The global and regional crises of 2008 threaten to do the same today. Chinese assertiveness on the international stage tastes funny to America and its allies, just as the Russo-Turkish alliance of 1833 did to British strategists. Yet confrontation in 1853 was avoidable and far more contained than it had the potential to be under the designs of the revisionist powers.[23] Russia, the status quo power, took its position for granted and could not accommodate new paradigms, despite the revisionists mostly working within the norms of the international system.

Russia’s temporary retreat from European affairs after 1856 contributed to the necessary condition for German unification. Russia’s eventual recovery followed Germany’s rise and renewed the potential for great power conflict at the turn of the Century, as demonstrated in its 1894 alliance with France. Would an unforeseen defeat in the South China Sea, or defeat in a limited conflict over Taiwan, doom American hegemony to a similar fate? Would such a blow result in America recoiling from world affairs, offering up decades for China to realize American policymakers’ worst fears? Or decades for Russian imperatives in Eurasia? Would Europe rediscover geopolitics and act apart from American interest? America risks losing the initiative and its shaping hand over an idealized vision of a status quo that does not comport with reality. American strategists must rediscover what the world is, not what they wish the world to be, or what they wish the world still was. They must view other nations as co-habitants of a complex and organic international community. Should Americans imagine their global position eternal, yet perennially threatened by nefarious adversaries, then they must be careful what they wish for.

Kristofer Seibt is a U.S. Army officer and a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: The Congress of Vienna. (German History in Documents and Images Database)

Notes:

[1] See H. R. McMaster, “How China Sees the World,” The Atlantic, May 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/mcmaster-china-strategy/609088/.

[2] See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18; See also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

[3] See Ross Douthat, “Andrew Jackson in the Persian Gulf,” The New York Times, January 7, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/trump-soleimani-iran.html; See also Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Pathology of American Power,” International Security 1, no. 3 (1977): 3–20.

[4] For a concise review, see J. D. B. Miller, “E.H. Carr: The Realist’s Realist,” The National Interest, September 1, 1991. https://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/eh-carr-the-realists-realist-1234.

[5] See John Bew, “The Kissinger Effect on Realpolitik,” War on the Rocks, December 29, 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/12/the-kissinger-effect-on-realpolitik/; See also Richard K. Betts, “Realism Is an Attitude, Not a Doctrine,” The National Interest, August 24, 2015. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/realism-attitude-not-doctrine-13659.

[6] Betts, “Realism is an Attitude, Not a Doctrine.”

[7] See Stephen Legg, ed., Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, (New York: Routledge, 2011); See also Luigi Federzoni, “Hegemony in the Mediterranean,” Foreign Affairs, April 1936, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-africa/1936-04-01/hegemony-mediterranean; Carl Schmitt’s appraisal of the Monroe Doctrine and international institutions and Luigi Federzoni’s Italian critique of British hegemony provide a window into revisionist thinking during the post-Versailles international order.

[8] See Donald G. McNeil Jr and Andrew Jacobs, “Blaming China for Pandemic, Trump Says U.S. Will Leave the W.H.O.,” The New York Times, May 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/virus-who.html.

[9] See Robert Gilpin, “Hegemonic War and International Change,” in Richard K. Betts, ed. Conflict After the Cold War: Arguments on Causes of War and Peace, Third Edition (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2008).

[10] See Robert B. Zoellick, “The China Challenge,” The National Interest, February 14, 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-challenge-123271; See also Kevin Rudd, “How to Avoid an Avoidable War,” Foreign Affairs, December 4, 2018. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-10-22/how-avoid-avoidable-war.

[11] See “Putin Says Annexation of Crimea Partly a Response to NATO Enlargement,” Reuters, April 17, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-nato-idUSBREA3G22A20140417.

[12] See, for example, offhand observations in Stephen Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories,” Foreign Policy, Spring 1998.

[13] See Kimberly Marten, “NATO Enlargement: Evaluating Its Consequences in Russia,” International Politics, 2020.

[14] The name “Crimean War” belies the multi-theater and geostrategic character of the war. Crimea captured the popular imagination because of Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade. The Crimean War was known at the time in Britain as “The Russian War.” See Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–56 (London: Routledge, 2016)

[15] See Matthew Rendall, “Defensive Realism and the Concert of Europe,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2006): 523–40; See also Jennifer Mitzen, “Things Fall Apart: From a Russo-Turkish Dispute to the Crimean War, 1853–56,” In Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Rendall discusses Russian restraint and so-called defensive realism after 1815. Mitzen traces state interaction and perception as the Concert of Europe descended into the Crimean War.

[16] This statement does not imply that Europe was tranquil. Rather, the Concert proved effective at managing crises to a degree acceptable to all European states who had been party to the Congress of Vienna. Multilateralism, diplomacy, and balance of power formed a workable mix until 1853.

[17] Lambert, The Crimean War, 33.

[18] See Lambert, Rendall, and Mitzen.

[19] See Mitzen, “Things Fall Apart.”

[20] Ibid.

[21] Betts, “Realism is an Attitude, Not a Doctrine.”

[22] See Kevin Rudd, “The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy,” Foreign Affairs, May 15, 2020. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-05-06/coming-post-covid-anarchy; See also Richard Haass, “The Pandemic Will Accelerate History Rather Than Reshape It,” Foreign Affairs, April 15, 2020; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-04-07/pandemic-will-accelerate-history-rather-reshape-it; For the US government’s articulation of “great power competition,” see the 2017 National Security Strategy: “A New National Security Strategy for a New Era,” The White House, December 18, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/new-national-security-strategy-new-era/.

[23] See Lambert, The Crimean War, for discussion of British strategies toward unlimited war.