The View From Olympus: Another Personnel Blunder

On policy matters, President Trump usually does well when he follows his instincts.  But that does not appear to be the case on personnel decisions.  His worst, to date, was choosing John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.  We are already paying for that decision in worsening relations with a number of other countries.

If, on the one hand, you are going to raise the risk of hostilities, on the other hand you should be improving the quality of your military leaders.  But in another poor personnel decision, President Trump has chosen Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  The combination of Bolton and Milley would be like choosing Ribbentrop to run your foreign policy and Graziani to command your army in the resulting wars.

By the low standards we set for our senior military leaders, Milley is not especially awful.  His main sin, which he shares with his colleagues atop the other services, is doing nothing about the fact that the Army is a Second Generation military in a Fourth Generation war.

Actually, in a way, General Milley did do something about that: he made it official.  Not long ago, he ordered the U.S. Army to return to its World War II-era uniforms, the so-called “pinks and greens”.  As costumes, the old/new uniforms will be a great improvement.  The fact that they are costumes recognizes the reality that a Second Generation army is useless for a real war and exists only to stage public entertainments.  All our Second Generation services are like armored knights on horseback in the 16th century.  Their heavy plate armor has reached its highest stage of perfection, but real battlefields are filling up with low-born musketeers and the knights “fight” only in tournaments, where damsels swoon, someone is occasionally unhorsed and nothing is decided.

I am hopeful that General Milley will do as Chairman of the JCS what he has done as Army Chief of Staff and make the theatrical nature of the other services official too.  The Air Force will go back to biplanes that stage dogfights over NFL football games.  Ironically, that might also make it more combat effective in the air, at least in what really counts, supporting the man on the ground.  World War I ground-support aircraft such as the Halberstadt and Hannoveraner CL IIs are better suited by far to the close air support mission than are F-35s.  And Fokker D VIIs are usually ready to fly and fight, which means they can easily defeat F-22s stuck in their hangers by their enormous maintenance requirements. 

The Navy tried to make its irrelevance official in the 1980s by bringing back the battleships, which look very impressive.  That effort, however, failed, because it did not go back far enough.  Chairman Milley, I hope, will direct the Navy to start building some new Constitution-class frigates, which will not only put on splendid shows on Navy Day but will require real sailors to man them, which might in turn compel the Navy to find some.  The new Zumwalt-class destroyers already look like zombie versions of C.S.S. Virginia; why not build some real Monitors and Confederate ironclads and stage naval battles in the Reflecting Pool, as the Romans used to do in the Coliseum (which could be flooded)?  And bringing back airships like Akron and Macon will wow the public while doing what the Ford-class carriers cannot, namely launch and recover airplanes (both of those airships carried Sparrowhawk scout aircraft).

The Marine Corps should not be touched.  Its continued focus on making amphibious landings on heavily defended beaches had already rendered it son et lumiere.

Regrettably, these wonderful follow-ons to the pinks and greens require vision, and general Milley has none.  We can, however, probably count on him to try to push the new Physical Fitness Test he decreed for the Army down the other services’ throats, so they too can witness a mass exodus of their staff NCOs.  Staff NCOs are the backbone of any military in combat, but what does combat have to do with “armed services” full of women?  Our military theater has reversed the roles in kabuki: it has women playing men.

There is an old saying on Capitol Hill that the Air Force is deceptive, the Navy is dishonest, and the Army is dumb.  As Burke noted, stereotypes arise from observation.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 7

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

General McChrystal and General Lee

It is interesting that General Stan McChrystal recently admitted to getting rid of a portrait he had long cherished of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  One would think that McChrystal would have some sympathy for Lee, considering both presided over failed wars.  There is a world of difference between these two men and McChrystal does not benefit from the comparison.

Since his dismissal by President Obama, McChrystal has become an author in an attempt to trade on his celebrity status and high rank.  He has done well, with several popular books to his name.  At a recent book signing, McChrystal admitted his best advice was for the U.S. to continue to “muddle through” in Afghanistan.

Think about this for a moment.  McChrystal held the top command in Afghanistan for a full year (2009–2010) during which he was unable to chart a course to success.  He has had 9 years since he left command to reflect on his experience and the direction of the war.  After all this time, the best he can come up with is to “muddle through”?

No response could better encapsulate the professional failure and moral bankruptcy of our senior military leaders.  For the last 17 years, general after general has told a succession of U.S. presidents, “We can succeed in Afghanistan.”  McChrystal was one of them.  Afraid to be the one tagged with presiding over a defeat, each general believes the U.S. should stay the course, blindly hoping for a change of fortune which is unlikely to occur.  Doubtless no one wishes to signal all the sacrifice in blood and treasure has ultimately proven futile.  Unfortunately, that is the reality.  

McChrystal was a proud graduate of U.S. military schools.  He was carefully groomed for high rank and selected for great responsibility.  And he failed miserably.

It’s ironic McChrystal has decided to publicize his decision to give away a picture of Robert E. Lee.  Lee faced different challenges during the Civil War than did McChrystal in Afghanistan.  Unlike McChrystal, Lee actually had a plan to win the war he fought.  It may not have worked, but at least Lee knew what he was doing.  McChrystal cannot make this claim.  If Lee were alive today, he would likely get rid of McChrystal’s picture – if he were foolish enough to have one in the first place.

The View From Olympus: Hurrah for the President!

Finally, President Trump is doing what he was elected to do, namely ending our involvement in wars halfway around the world in which we have no interests at stake.  President Trump was elected as a peace president.  He promised to bring the boys home.  His opponent, Hillary Clinton, was neo-lib/neo-con interventionist.  He won, she lost.

Mr. Trump won not because he is a liberal peacenik who appealed to the Left.  His constituency was and remains the Heartland Americans whose sons do the fighting and dying in these wars.  They do not understand why we are involved in the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq and Syria, and neither do I.  They know why we went to Afghanistan after 9/11, but not why we are still fighting there seventeen years later.  Again, neither do I, although I understand that military incompetence at the senior levels has something to do with it.  The Washington Establishment has careers and budgets at stake, so of course it wants wars to continue.  That’s not much of an argument in the rest of the country.

The President’s decisions to get out of Syria and Afghanistan are not only wise but necessary.  In Syria, if we stay much longer, we will have to choose sides between the Kurds and the Turks.  Turkey is going to go after the Syrian Kurds militarily, whether we like it or not.  If we side with the Kurds we will find ourselves in the inconvenient situation of going to war with a member of NATO.  We will also lose, simply because of geography: the conflict would be on Turkey’s border with Syria, where our logistics lines can only support a small American force.  If we side with the Turks or try to remain neutral, we would lose our only local ally who can actually fight.  At that point our forces in Syria would be surrounded by lots of enemies with no one to help.  As President Trump would say, “Not good.”  So we need to get out, now. 

In Afghanistan, our position is deteriorating at an ever more rapid clip.  President Trump is trying to negotiate with the Taliban for the only possible outcome that is not a catastrophe, an orderly and safe exit of our forces.  The alternative is a sauve qui peut rout where our losses could be serious.  Just ask the Brits.

The Establishment is running in circles, screaming and shouting.  It’s fun to watch.  Their latest cause for panic is Secretary Jim Mattis’s resignation.  Frankly, there is little reason to regret his departure.

I know General Mattis only slightly.  We had one meeting when he commanded the “Marine Corps University” at Quantico.  (As Universities go, it has more in common with McDonald’s Hamburger U than with Harvard.) No actions resulted from that meeting.

Mattis is unquestionably well-read, and I had great hopes for him as SecDef.  But he proved to be no better than his less well-read predecessors.  He did nothing to reform either the services or the Pentagon itself.  He promoted the strategic idiocy of turning away from preparing for Fourth Generation wars, the wars of the future, and instead making Russia and China our enemies of choice.  Does he not know that both are nuclear powers?  Is he unaware of why both the U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided direct engagements with each other’s forces throughout the Cold War, namely that whichever side were losing would feel immense pressure to go nuclear?  The Pentagon likes such a “strategy” because “peer competitors” justify vast budgets and programs, but the Secretary of Defense is supposed to represent the real world.  Mattis failed to do so.

Secretary Mattis began one initiative that deserves to continue after his departure.  Called the “Close Combat Lethality Task Force” (CCLTF), its purpose is to provide more resources and better training for the men who do most of the dying, the infantry.  They get a pittance of the resources devoted to, for example, tac air.  The CCLTF aims to change that, and it would be a pity if it died because its sponsor was gone.  The current concept for the CCLTF has some weakness, which I will address in a future column.  But the need for it is real.

So hurrah for the president!  He is ending stupid wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, trying to mend fences with North Korea and wants a good relationship with Russia.  All those initiatives are very much in America’s interest.  Could that be why the Washington Establishment hates him so bitterly?

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 6

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Reality Principle

No one was more important than Herbert Marcuse to the effort to inject Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the Boomer generation.  His book Eros and Civilization, which became the Left’s bible in the 1960s, argued for replacing the “reality principle” with the “pleasure principle”.  The result, Marcuse promised, would be a world of all play and no work.

The actual result has been a culture of instant gratification and with it the growing social pathologies now engulfing us.  If we want to reverse America’s decline, we must again enthrone the reality principle.  The reality principle says that to succeed, our actions must be based on reality, on conditions as they are and not as we might like them to be.  This is especially urgent in five areas, where the relativities are:

• State capitalism is failing.  State capitalism is capitalism where cozy relationships between business and government change the basis for a company’s success from building a better product at a lower price to getting special deals from government.  Also known as “rent seeking”, state capitalism leads to ever-larger and more powerful corporate entities because the bigger a company is, the more money it has to give to politicians, and the more money it gives to politicians the less appetite the government has to rein in bad corporate behavior.  State capitalism leads to a society with a tiny, super-wealthy elite and an even-poorer middle class.  This is what the “yellow vests” in France are protesting, in what I think is only the beginning of a powerful political movement.  There is an alternative to state capitalism: not socialism, which impoverishes everyone, but a regulated market that has strict limits on scale.  Most finance, production, and consumption should be local.
• America’s grasp for world hegemony has already failed.  After the end of the Cold War, instead of bringing our troops home and minding our own business, the foreign policy elite and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex (the MIC) attempted to make America the only superpower, “the universal monarchy” as it used to be known when Hapsburg Spain tried the same thing.  The result for both countries was mountains of debt, military failure, and economic decline.  (The best book on Spain’s experience is J.H. Elliott’s The Count-Duke of Olivares; the parallels are striking).  We have ended up force-feeding the flames of Fourth Generation war, war our military does not know how to fight, putting the whole state system at risk, and spurring massive invasions of Europe and North America by barbarians from the global south.  There is a plausible alternative:  America First, which means bringing our legions home and using them to man the limes, as President Trump is trying to do while the MIC works to block him.
• The civil rights movement has proven to be a false road for America’s blacks.  While it has allowed some blacks to integrate into the middle class, it has left a large residue in urban ghettos where they have essentially been written off.  Overrun by crime, drugs, illegitimacy, and welfare dependence, America’s urban black neighborhoods, too many of them, are factories of disorder, something no state can tolerate indefinitely without risking its own legitimacy.  In the hands of America’s current black “leaders”, civil rights has come to mean little more than endless demands for more handouts.  The promising alternative is the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who argued that instead of saying “We’re victims, do something for us,” blacks should show by their own efforts that they can perform at the same level as whites.  I’m willing to bet they can.  If not, well, then they are not equal, and future policy will have to be based on that reality.
• Feminism has been a disaster for most women.  While it has benefitted a small elite in business and politics, feminism, with its demand for no-fault divorce, destroyed what most women depend on for lifetime security, marriage.  Men do better on their own than women, and the Boomer generation’s women find themselves, too often, alone, poor, and without a future as they get older.  Feminism’s pretense that men and women are interchangeable has led to growing dysfunction in more and more areas, as women are soldiers, cops, firemen, etc.  Can’t do the job but also can’t be let go.  The #MeToo movement is leaving young men afraid to approach women, which is building enormous anger in men cut off from sex.  When women get angry, they squawk.  When men get angry, they kill.  For both sexes, the alternative we know works is the Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres”, where women’s sphere, which Victorians considered the higher one, is home and family while the man brings home the bacon and both can look forward to a comfortable old age in each other’s arms.
• Cultural Marxism has proven greater failure than the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union.  Both lead to the loss of freedom of thought and expression, but economic Marxism’s shared poverty was more bearable than the isolation and anomie cultural Marxism creates as every natural relationship is perverted and every difference is rubbed raw.  Cultural Marxism makes life in society impossible, which is just what its founders, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse, wanted it to do.  Their goal was “negation” or “negative dialectics”, more commonly known as nihilism: simply bringing everything down.  Unless we want to live amid the ruins of our civilization, we need to turn to an alternative: retroculture.  Retroculture dismisses all ideologies and says, “We’re going to return to the old ways of doing things in our own lives and the lives of our families.”  As Gertrude Himmelfarb, the preeminent historian of the Victorians, has written, through the Victorian period the incidence of social problems steadily went down, while since the 1960s the incidence of social problems in our society has steadily risen.  There’s a lesson in that.

There are other areas where we need to restore the reality principle; indeed, we need it everywhere if we expect our actions to yield the results we intend.  Acting on any basis other than reality leads to randomness of results, disorder, entropy, and collapse.  It is John Boyd’s “false orientation”.  We’ve been doing it on a massive scale since the 1960s.  In each case, there are reality-based alternatives that could work.  Maybe it’s time for middle class Americans to start putting on those French yellow vests.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 5

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Marxism That Must Not Be Named

Much to my delight, the New York Times recently published an op-ed, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old”, written by Yale professor Samuel Moyn, that attacks me and Thomas Hobbes’ novel Victoria (for which I am proud to be agent).  The professor dislikes the book and me because both oppose cultural Marxism, the now-dominant ideology among Western elites that condemns Whites, males, Western culture and the Christian religion as “oppressive”.  But the professor does more than defend cultural Marxism; he writes, “Nothing of the kind actually exists.”

Well, yes, it does.  Cultural Marxism is, as the Times headline indicates, now 100 years old.  Its initial conception goes back to 1919, the year when Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, working independently, concluded that Communism could not be brought about in the West until the Christian religion and Western culture were destroyed.  Gramsci argued that Christianity blinded the working class to its “true” Marxist class interests, while Lukacs, when he was Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, wailed “Who will save us from Western Civilization?”  Lukacs began a program of what he called “cultural terrorism” that included introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools, because he knew that if you could destroy a country’s sexual morals you would take a giant step toward destroying its traditional culture.  

The detailed development of cultural Marxism, which most people now know as “political correctness”, began in 1930 when the Frankfurt School undertook the task.  The Frankfurt School, official known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally to be named the Institute for Marxism.  But its founders, who include Lukacs, decided they could be more effective if they gave it a neutral-sounding name.  That began cultural Marxism’s ongoing practice of concealing its real nature and objectives.  Is that conspiratorial?  What else does the word mean?

Professor Moyn simply denies historical reality.  He writes:

A number of conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German--and mostly Jewish--intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers.  Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America.  These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.

My answer to the professor (of history no less) is “Read some history.”  The literature on the Frankfurt School is immense and most of it is written by scholars on the Left.  The definitive work is Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School.  Martin Jay is the principal American scholar of the Frankfurt School, and his book The Dialectical Imagination is also quite good, although it ends in 1950 and thus misses most of Herbert Marcuse’s influence.  Lorenz Jager’s recent biography of Theodor Adorno, simply titled Adorno, is excellent.  No open-minded person can read these books and not find in the Frankfurt School’s work the origins of what we now know as political correctness.

If Professor Moyn is too busy to read books--trying to nullify facts by calling them names must take a good deal of thought--I recommend the video documentary “The History of Political Correctness”, which only takes about twenty minutes.  It includes an interview with Martin Jay, then the Chairman of the History Department at Berkeley and no conservative, where Jay says that the Frankfurt School’s product is a version of Marxism and is also a basis of political correctness.  

And if all the volumes of scholarship are not enough, the parallels between Marxism-Leninism and cultural Marxism are obvious:

• Both eliminate freedom of thought and expression and attempt to impose totalitarianism on their suffering subjects, as we see on too many American university campuses.  Stalin’s and Mao’s tyranny was more oppressive than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s and killed far more people, probably at least ten times as many.
• Both see history as a product of only one factor, in Marxism-Leninism ownership of the means of production and in cultural Marxism which groups, defined by race and gender, have power over which other groups.
• Both define some groups of people as good and others as evil regardless of what individuals do.  Marxism-Leninism defines workers and peasants as good and capitalists and members of the middle class (the hated bourgeoisie) as evil, while cultural Marxism says whites, males, heterosexuals, and non-feminist women are evil while blacks, third world immigrants, gays, and feminists are good.
• Professor Moyn even quotes Victoria’s Governor Kraft as pointing to another parallel:  “Classical Marxists, where they obtain power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state.  Where you (cultural Marxists) obtained power, you expropriated the rights of White men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like.”  Does Professor Moyn deny this has happened in universities all over the country, including probably at Yale where he teaches?

The easiest way to tell you are dealing with cultural Marxist is if he denies the existence of cultural Marxism.  Cultural Marxists seek to work in the dark because they know daylight is fatal to their cause.  If the average person figures out political correctness is a form of Marxism, he rejects it.  That is happening more and more widely, leaving the cultural Marxists with nothing to say but “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  Their frantic name-calling and denials of historical fact sound more and more desperate because they are losing and are about to be swept from the board.

Meanwhile, read Thomas Hobbes’ Victoria.  That Professor Moyn doesn’t like it means you will. 

tR Live, Episode 4

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week's news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The View From Olympus: Our Failing Strategy

An article in the November 21 New York Times revealed two aspects of our ongoing strategic failure in Fourth Generation war.  First, it quoted a new study by CSIS that found the number of Sunni 4GW fighters has grown, not shrunk, since we began the “war on terror” on 9/11:

Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic state, a new independent study concludes.

That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. . .

. . .the Islamic State remains the predominant threat, with as many as about 40,000 members globally this year, up from 30,200 in 2014, when the group’s fighters seized the northern third of Iraq.

Second, the Times turned to another study to look at what our current strategy has cost:

Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Cost of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counter terrorism campaign by October 2019.

So, the war of attrition waged largely from the air that is our chosen 4GW strategy has, in seventeen years, cost us almost $6 trillion (not billion) while multiplying our Islamic enemies fourfold.  Can we see this as anything other than strategic failure on a grand scale?

The failure was easy to predict.  If we consider strategy not only at the physical level but at Col. John Boyd’s mental and moral levels, a war of attrition in which we remain largely untouchable, high above the clouds, could only work to rally young men everywhere to join whomever we are fighting.  Of course the number of our enemies has grown; we have spent nearly $6 trillion recruiting them.  Every time an American drone hovers ahead, every time we launch an airstrike, every time we flaunt our wealth and power as we bomb people who are poor and weak, we recruit more 4GW enemies.  We nourish and feed the hydra, then wring our hands as it grows more heads.

What might we do instead?  What alternative strategies should we consider? The Times quotes the CSIS study on one alternative:

 “Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances,” the 71-page study concluded.

That won’t work either.  Just as our military fights wars of attrition because that is all it knows how to do, so our foreign policy establishment remains trapped in the ruins of Wilsonianism, the wholly unrealistic belief that we can instruct other people on how to run their countries and cultures.  We can tell them, but they are not going to listen, in part for the good reason that we are likely to be wrong.  Our policy elites’ understanding of how other societies work is both shallow and warped by “Globalist” ideology.  Outside Washington, almost everybody has figured that out, so no one listens to them.

There is an alternative strategy I think might work, or at least work better than recruiting more enemies.  It has two components.  The first is tight border security, far tighter than anything President Trump is planning, tight enough to keep all varieties of 4GW fighters from entering (we will still face the home-grown variety, who in the long run will be more dangerous).  The second component is invisibility.  Since what we are doing now feeds hydra, stop it.  Stop all overt actions around the world.  Bring the troops, planes, drones, and ships home.  Disappear, and thus take away our enemies’ main recruiting tool.  No longer will Somalis or Yemenis or Libyans or Syrians live with the constant hum of American drones overhead, waiting for the Hellfire missile in the night. There may still be drones, but they will not be American drones.  They will have to fight someone else.

And that will be just what we want them to do.  It’s the old strategy of “use barbarians to fight barbarians.”  Sunni jihadis have a lot of enemies besides us: Shiites, Alawites, Hindus, other Sunnis, other tribes, etc. ad infinitum.  Removing our overt presence will remove a unifying factor and encourage them to fight each other.  Covertly, there will be ways for us to ramp up that fighting--and we should.  In some cases, we may even be able to make money doing it.  Have we no Sir Basil Zaharoff?

Chosen as a strategy, inaction can be a form of action, one with far less blowback that our current failing strategy has generated--and far less expensive.  How many more years and trillions will we waste doing more of what does not work?

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

tR Live: Episode 3

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week’s news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: A Major Policy Blunder

A frequent sin of conservative governments is throwing away what they have achieved domestically by making major foreign policy blunders.  That danger now looms over President Trump’s government.  His domestic agenda is successful.  The economy is booming, new conservative judges are sitting on important benches and Left-wing regulations are being rolled back.  In the recent elections, a blue wave was met by an equal red wave.  The result was a normal off-year election for the party holding the White House, except the Republicans gained seats in the Senate.  There was no repudiation of President Trump or his agenda.

All this is now being put at risk because of the administration’s China policy.  President Trump has been right to challenge China on trade issues.  Free trade on our part has allowed a mercantilist China to hollow out our industry, depriving Americans of millions of good paying jobs.  China regularly steals intellectual property and forces American companies to turn over trade secrets if they wish to do business with China.  All this should have been challenged by previous presidents, Republican and Democrat.  Their failures to act left President Trump to deal with the whole mess.  To his credit, he is doing so. 

But that does not mean we want a generally hostile relationship with China.  On the contrary, friendship between China, Russia, and the United States is of central importance in confronting the Fourth Generation threat, the danger of state failure and collapse that will define the 21st century.  At stake is the state system itself, and a new Triple Alliance of the three Great Powers is essential to maintaining a world of states.  The alternative is anarchy. 

American policy should seek to separate trade from other issues, confronting China on the former while stressing cooperation in all other fields.  Regrettably, that does not appear to be where the administration is headed.  As the New York Times reported on November 19, “From Mr. Trump’s tweets to defense position papers and a major speech by Mr. Pence on Oct. 4, the United States has made clear that it sees China as a strategic threat.”  That is a blunder of the first order.

The worst of it, so far at least, is that the U.S. is raising the old Taiwan issue.  The administration cut off aid to several central American countries that withdrew diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and established relations with the People’s Republic of China (Beijing).  The White House has been making noises indicating we could strengthen our relationship with Taiwan, including militarily.  This is playing with fire. 

China can compromise on other matters, even her claims to the South China Sea.  But she cannot compromise on Taiwan.  I fear Washington does not understand why that is the case.

Throughout Chinese history, the greatest threat to China has always been internal disunion, break-up into warring states.  This happened over and over again, most recently in the 1920s and 1930s.  Every time it occurs, millions of Chinese die, civil war plunges China into renewed poverty and foreigners take advantage of China’s weakness to invade.  Every Chinese person knows this history, and any Chinese government that hopes to have legitimacy must make it clear that preventing such disunion is its top priority.

The danger Taiwan poses is that it is a Chinese province.  Both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang agree on that.  If one province, Taiwan, can gain independence from China, so can others.  Beijing cannot allow that precedent to be established.  It is an existential threat, and China must and will go to the wall to prevent it.  If that means war with the United States, China has to fight that war.

The Pentagon may think that a naval and air war with China will be an easy win.  China is highly vulnerable to a distant naval blockade.  But if the U.S. Navy were to intervene directly in an attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, our losses could be severe.  China has developed long-range ballistic missiles that can hit aircraft carriers, or at least come close enough to them, with nuclear warheads, they can either sink them or, with EMP blasts, fry all their electronics and render them floating scrap metal.  Such losses would mark the end of American naval dominance.  Worse yet, because Taiwanese independence is an existential threat to China, if China were losing at sea and in the air, she would feel immense pressure to escalate to the strategic nuclear level.

It is not too late for the administration to separate trade from other issues, continue to confront China on the former while acting to restore good relations in other areas.  Even the trade problem has an obvious solution: managed trade, where the U.S. and China agree on what each is to buy from the other so that the balance of payments is roughly even.  China has made some offers along these lines.  We can and should encourage them to do so until we can agree on the specifics.

Throughout the 20th century, conservative governments around the world overreached in foreign policy, got into wars that did not go well and ended up in disasters that put the Left in power at home.  I hope President Trump is aware of that history. 

 Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

traditionalRIGHT Live, Episode 2

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week's news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: An Emerging Dimension of 4GW?

The recent mass shooting at a country music bar in California again raises an important question: are such shootings, at least some of them, an aspect of Fourth Generation war?

When the killing is done in the name of Islam or some other cause, the answer, obviously, is yes.  But so far we know no motive for the California shooter.  So where, if anywhere, does it fit into Fourth Generation war?

The answer, I think, may be that this and similar cases are men’s reply to the war on men being waged by feminism.  When women get seriously angry, they talk.  When men get seriously angry, they kill.  And feminism’s war on men, which is being carried to ever-greater extremes, is making more and more men, especially young men, very angry.

The so-called “#MeToo” campaign is only the latest absurdity.  Of course most women have been subject of sexual advances from men.  It is hard-wired into human nature, and into the nature of most of the animal kingdom, that the male takes the initiative in sexual encounters.  Most women expect and want men to do so.  Remember the old saying, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”?  It was understood by all that girls want boys to make passes.  Pity the wallflower and the heart that is broken after the ball.

But feminism now decrees that any man taking the initiative risks being charged with that most heinous of all crimes, “sexual harassment”.  Even if the woman welcomed his advances at the time, if she later changes her mind, he is guilty.  He is presumed guilty until proven innocent and the woman’s word must be taken as true.  The man who is convicted is thrown out of school, loses his job, and may find his whole career path closed to him--all on nothing more than a woman’s word.  Of course men are getting angry.

There is another 4GW dimension that enters the picture here.  As women move into a field, men lose interest in it.  This has been evident in sports for a long time.  But as feminism drives women into more and more previously male venues, men find those venues no longer attractive.  The military is a case in point.  Absurdly, women are now present even in combat units.  Men have traditionally joined armed services in part to prove their manhood.  How do they do that when they have to take orders from women and be terrified that the women around them, in whom they must show no sexual interest, may make the dreaded “sexual harassment” charge against them?  Not surprisingly, the U.S. armed forces find it more and more difficult to recruit.

The Left is busy celebrating the large number of women elected to public office this November.  But one effect of this may be to alienate men further from the political system.  As I have pointed out many times, Fourth Generation war is above all a war for legitimacy.  Will a woman-dominated politics still be legitimate in men’s eyes?  Or will young men in particular respond by transferring their loyalty away from a state that has become a tool of female oppression to something else?  Such transference of primary loyalty lies at the heart of 4GW.

Feminism’s war on men is part of a broader drive of cultural Marxism to the extreme.  It seeks to outlaw more and more aspects of human nature.  Men are to be subjected to women, native-born Americans to immigrants, whites to blacks, and straights to gays.  This is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values”, which the Frankfurt School made a central element of cultural Marxism.

But when human nature is forced into false channels, it rebels.  As the last two elections have shown, native Americans are rebelling against being submerged in a sea of immigrants and whites are rebelling by raising their own racial consciousness.  Few rebellions are likely to be more powerful than men’s rebellion against feminism, because few aspects of human nature are more powerful motivators than sex.  It may turn out that the “gender war” is more than a metaphor.  If so, it will take far more than gun control to prevent angry young men from killing.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Get Out While We Can

The American position in Afghanistan is not just deteriorating, it is deteriorating at an accelerating rate.  Historically, that is the last stage before a military collapse.

The November 3 New York Times reported in detail how a Taliban infiltrator penetrated a top-level meeting in Kandahar, killed one of Afghanistan’s top generals and almost got the American general commanding our forces there, General Austin S. Miller.  Our reaction made the bad situation worse.  The Times wrote,

The scramble to get the Americans out of the governor’s compound after General Raziq was killed led to a brief firefight between Americans and Afghan security forces, with the Americans crashing through a gate and shooting at least one Afghan officer dead as they left, American officials said.

Now, in the days that have followed, the Americans are being accused of General Raziq’s death, rattling the relationship between the allies.

 Perhaps not surprisingly, the November 4 Times reported another “green on blue” shooting, with one American soldier dead.

Afghanistan has a long history of being a place easy to get into but hard to get out of.  Successful retreats are perhaps the most difficult of all military operations no matter where they are conducted.  Conducting a successful retreat from Afghanistan is near the top of the list of daunting military tasks.

Everyone knows we have lost and will be leaving soon.  We are trying to obtain a peace deal from the Taliban which will permit us at least an orderly withdrawal.  That is wise on our part, and the Taliban are showing some interest.

If that does not happen, what we may face is a widespread realignment within Afghanistan in which everyone tries to get on the good side of the victor, i.e., the Taliban, with American forces still there.  Afghan government soldiers and police will have a tempting opportunity to do that by turning their weapons on any nearby Americans.  In that part of the world, “piling on” the loser is a time-honored way of changing sides to preserve your own neck.

The apparently widespread rumor that the Americans were responsible for General Raziq’s death illustrates the high level of distrust and dislike already present between U.S. and Afghan government forces.  This is one of the strategic factors that are almost always present when an outside power intervenes in someone else’s civil war.  We are foreigners, we have a different religion, our soldiers get far better pay, food, living conditions, and medical care than do Afghan soldiers and police, and we think we know what we are doing in a place we do not understand.  Add to that volatile mix the growing realization that the Taliban are winning and we will soon be leaving, and the incentive for Afghans to change sides grows.

It does not help matters that of our two exit routes, one goes through Pakistan and the other eventually goes through Russia.  Thanks to the usual idiocies from the Washington foreign policy establishment, we have bad relations with both countries.  Pakistan probably won’t slam the door in our face because they want the Taliban to win.  Why?  Because we stupidly allow the current Afghan government to align with India.  Does anyone in Washington know how to think strategically?  Apparently not.

What is needed most now is detailed planning by the Pentagon for a fighting withdrawal.  I am not saying we want to get out that way.  It is contingency planning in case we have to.  I fear that planning will not be done because it will be politically incorrect, since the military leadership still pretends we are winning.  Subordinates will be afraid to initiate planning that contradicts their superiors’ public statements.  But if we have to put a fighting withdrawal together on the fly, a difficult situation will become a great deal more hazardous.  I hope some majors and lieutenant colonels are developing the necessary plan now, even if they can’t tell their bosses what they are doing.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: Invasion

The column or caravan of Central Americans slowly moving north through Mexico with the intention of crossing into the U.S. is a classic Fourth Generation war invasion.  An invasion by immigrants is more, not less, dangerous than an invasion by a hostile army because the army eventually goes home while immigrants stay, permanently altering the cultural landscape.  In this case, they would not alter it for the better.

If this country is to survive in a 4GW world, we recognize that this invasion threat is just the flea sitting on the top of the penguin sitting on top of the iceberg.  If this invasion is successful, the next caravan will be larger.  The one after that will be larger still.  A combination of state failure, economic ruin, climate change, and population pressures means millions, tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions of people around the world will be trying to move from south to north.  If we don’t stop them, our societies, those north of the equator, will be turned into their societies, which is to say the places they are fleeing because they don’t work.  That may not be their intention (in the case of Islamics, it is their intention), but it will be the result because it is all they know.  Their numbers will be such that they cannot be acculturated by their new societies before those societies are engulfed, overwhelmed, and snuffed out.  

President Trump is right that we cannot allow these people to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum or refugee status.  In the time it will take for their cases to be evaluated, they will simply disappear among the millions of illegal immigrants already here.  They must be stopped at the border or before the border.  Again, this is true not just for the current caravan but for the millions who will be following them.  The question is how to do it.

An old practice, one that was almost universal up to World War II, would help: requiring visas.  To cross a border required not just a passport, which is issued by the country of the person’s origin, but also a visa, which is issued by the country they want to enter.  No visa, no crossing the border.  Some countries still require visas for entry.  Sometimes they can be obtained at the point and time of entry, but more often a would-be border crosser must obtain a visa well beforehand.  Crying “refugee” or “asylum” makes no difference: you still have to have a visa.

Visas would help, but as the 21st century unrolls, the numbers of migrants will be such that the borders will still be overwhelmed.  When ten million people are all heading for your border at once, only one thing will stop them: deadly force.  Again, at least up until World War II, anyone attempting an illegal border crossing was at a substantial risk of getting shot.  Border guards everywhere had standing “shoot to kill” orders.  Snipers were posted to shoot swimmers.  Unless borders are defended by force, they don’t really exist. 

Here we quickly run into one of the most confounding aspects of Fourth Generation war, the power of weakness.  At the moral level, having border guards shoot down women and children is a disaster.  The moral level is more powerful than the physical level, which means states will have great difficulty overcoming public pressure not to shoot.  But if they don’t shoot, they will be invaded and, both as states and as cultures, wiped out.

There are at least a couple of partial answers to this problem.  The first is to make border defenses automatic.  In most cases this should be feasible on land borders.  Defend the borders wherever possible not with men, but with automatic machine guns and the like.  The power of weakness is diminished because the invaders, knowingly walking into deadly threats, look stupid.  Instead of reacting with horror, people will say, “how dumb can you get?”

A second answer is to make the necessary violence invisible.  If invaders come by sea, a la The Camp of the Saints, automatic defenses are less visible.  But if their ships are torpedoed by submarines and spurlos gesenkt, the moral blowback will be less than if the evening news shows a destroyer pumping shells into a ship as desperate people swim for their lives -- and are not rescued.

The feminized culture of sentiment that now rules in Western countries makes any defense difficult.  The strategic key to the West’s defense is to replace that culture with a more masculine culture that wants to fight.  That will happen.  Whether it happens in time is the question.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

traditionalRIGHT Live

William S. Lind and the tR editors talk about the week's news and how it plays into some bigger metapolitical topics. Look for a new livestream each week. If you have questions for a Q&A session with Mr. Lind, submit them as comments on this page, email us here, or use the live chat feature on the next stream.

The View From Olympus: Losing at the Moral/Strategic Level

One of war’s few rules is that failure at a higher level negates the successes at lower levels.  This led to Germany’s defeats in both World Wars; she usually won at the tactical and operational levels but lost at the strategic level.  The result was lost victories.

To look at our own situation today, we need to add John Boyd’s three levels of war, physical, mental, and moral, to the classic levels of tactical, operational, and strategic.  If we plot these categories on a grid, we see that the highest and most powerful level of war is the moral/strategic.  If we look at what we are doing around the world, we see that at the moral/strategic level we are taking actions likely to result in our defeat.

Three examples come readily to mind.  The first is North Korea.  President Trump made a major breakthrough toward ending the danger of another Korean War by meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.  Unfortunately, since that meeting, the President’s advisors have worked to undercut his achievement.  Kim Jong-un wants the U.S. to declare a formal end to the Korean War, which at present is halted only with an armistice.  South Korea favors it, Mr. Trump is said to favor it, and we risk nothing by giving it.  But the President’s advisors are working against it.  Their position is that we should give North Korea nothing until it completes denuclearization.  That treats North Korea as something it is not, a defeated enemy.  Not surprisingly, North Korea is rejecting that approach, which gives the foreign policy Establishment what it wants -- a continuation of the Korean stand-off and all the budgets and careers that hang from it.

The second example is so bizarre it defies belief.  Washington has placed new sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals because China bought weapons from Russia.  Huh?  What business it is of ours who China buys weapons from?  Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1950 China has bought most of the weapons it has imported from Russia.  Of course it is going to continue to do so.  It is not as if we want to sell weapons to China; we don’t.   This action is so outlandish and absurd it turns the U.S. into Don Quixote, a madman wandering the world tilting at windmills.  Who does Washington think it is?

The third case is similar, in that it is an attempt to dictate to other sovereign countries in matters that are none of our business.  In one of his few serious foreign policy blunders, the President withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal with Iran.  Wisely, the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese are working together to keep Iran in and thus avoid a war in the Persian Gulf, with all that would mean for the world’s oil supply.  Washington has responded by threatening any foreign company or bank that does business with Iran.  The October 10 New York Times quoted President Trump’s court jester, John Bolton, as saying, “We do not intend to allow our sanctions to be evaded by Europe or anyone else.”  Again, who do we think we are to tell Europe or anyone else whom they may trade with?  If the EU had a backbone, which it does not, it would forbid any and all European companies to capitulate to unilateral American sanctions.

Each of these cases represents something history has seen all too often, usually from countries that were past their peak as powers and on the downhill slide: the arrogance of power.  We are playing the swaggering bully (just before his nose gets bloodied), wandering around the playground telling everyone else what to do.  It doesn’t go over well.

But each case is more than that: it is a self-inflicted defeat at the moral/strategic level, the highest and most powerful level of conflict.  Morally, it turns us into Goliath (a rather weak-kneed Goliath, given our military record), someone everyone fears but also hates and looks for a chance to get back at.  Strategically, we are pushing China, Russia, and now Europe too, together against us.  If, as Boyd argued, strategy is a game of connection and isolation, we are connecting everyone else and isolating ourselves.

Teddy Roosevelt famously urged America to talk softly and carry a big stick.  Instead, we are yelling for all we’re worth while waving a broken reed, a military that can’t win, and that soon, thanks to feminization, won’t even be able to fight.  That is not likely to end well.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

Weimar America?

The battle over the Kavanaugh nomination saw the Left take yet another giant step toward unreason.  Apparently serious people argued that any woman’s accusation against any man must be believed.  Suddenly, three thousand years of history and literature, in which perfidy of women, their lies and plots that brought disaster, loom large are to be tossed aside.  In their place we are to believe that today’s women carry a “truth serum” gene that makes lies impossible.  Even the (desirable) Victorian elevation of women did not go as far as this.  Victorian women, presented with the idea that women cannot lie, would have responded with gales of laughter.

The left’s rejection of facts and reason in favor of romantic faith in “feelings” is yet another sign of our cultural decay.  That decay has gone far enough to raise the question of whether we are following the path of Weimar Germany, Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.  

To summarize a complex historical period, the collapse of morals and culture in Germany in the 1920s alienated the German middle class from the Weimar Republic.  When the Great Depression hit, that alienation was joined by deep anger at the government’s inability to set the economy right and provide jobs.  Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists rode this mixture of alienation and anger to power (legally, by winning an election).  They then abolished the Weimar constitution, reaffirmed traditional middle-class morality, pulled Germany out of the Depression, and gave jobs to everyone who wanted one (for which the brilliant head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, deserves much of the credit).

I was in Berlin for ten days in August, where my search for Germany’s history was aided by an excellent guidebook in the Companion Guides series, Berlin by Brian Ladd.  Ladd quotes the interwar novelist Stefan Zweig’s description of Berlin in 1923, during the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation:

I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.  All values were changed, and not only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.  Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks, sprang up like mushrooms. . . the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodological organization into the perversion.Along the entire Kurfurstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without shame.  Even the Rome of Suetonious has never seen such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police.In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakable in their probity.Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, to be sixteen and still under the suspicion of virginity would have been considered a disgrace in any school of Berlin at that time…

Does this sound all too familiar?  America now witnesses such behavior not only in one city, but throughout the land.  And the Establishment media promote it, bless it, and denounce anyone who rejects it as a “hater”.  A large portion of America’s middle class finds it alienating.

So far, the alienation is tempered by the good economy.  But the Big One is coming, a world-wide debt crisis that will bring not just a recession but a depression and a long-lasting one.  Unlike the Great Depression, I expect this one to be inflationary because central banks will respond to it by creating massive liquidity.  At this point, it is all they know how to do.

If you take widespread cultural alienation, economic collapse, massive unemployment, and inflation and wrap them all up together, you get Weimar America.  Someone will take political advantage of the situation.  I expect that as in Germany under the Weimar constitution, you will have a faceoff between a populist, extreme Left--we’ve certainly seen enough Leftist extremism in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle-- and a populist Right.  At present, only a small slice of the populist Right is extreme.  Most of it is well represented by President Trump, who is a very long way indeed from Adolf Hitler.  President Trump is anti-Establishment, but his agenda lies well within the historical mainstream of American politics.  After all, for most of its history the Republican party was the party of high tariffs.

As in Weimar Germany, the initial push to the extremes has come from the Left, which seems to imagine it can go as far as it wants without eliciting a reaction from the Right.  In Germany, the SA arose largely to counter violence from the Communists.  Here, the Left thought it could raise racial consciousness among blacks and Hispanics without creating a similar rise in racial consciousness on the part of the whites.  It was wrong.  Now, it is openly advocating violence against Republican Party leaders and other prominent conservatives, harassing them in public places, vandalizing their property, and threatening their families.  This too will bring an equal reaction from the Right, and the Left will find to its sorrow that the Right fights rather better than the Left.  

Conservatives do not want to see our public life move in these directions.  The first conservative principle is order: safety of persons and property.  But as in Weimar Germany, the combination of cultural decadence and economic collapse will drive politics to its extremes.  Conservatives should work with moderates and such liberals as dare defy the extreme Left to preserve order.  But if that fails, then only one thing will matter: winning.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

A Second Reformation?

Rome has fallen.

Beginning in the 1960s, most mainline Protestant churches fractured over two divergent understandings of Christianity.  In one camp are those who believe Christianity was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, in Holy Scripture, and in the traditions of the early church.  The duty of present-day Christians is to pass that heritage, unaltered and undiminished to future generations until the Lord comes again.  In the other camp are those who believe the faith must reflect the Zeitgeist, altering itself as necessary to maintain a broad appeal.  They see revelation as an ongoing process in which new commandments can override old. 

Under a veneer of unity, this same tension has been present within the Roman Catholic church.  With the release of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s recent letter attributing priestly pedophilia to a widespread toleration of homosexuality among Roman clergy, the fracture is in the open.  The Zeitgeist has proclaimed homosexuality normal and, as in the mainline Protestant churches, the faction within the Roman church that follows the Zeitgeist must follow suit.  To traditional Christians this is anathema.  Rome appears headed for schism.

This may be good news.  A schism within the Roman church and the emergence of a sizeable Roman “continuing church” would create the possibility of a second Reformation, with the difference that this Reformation would unify rather than divide.  “Continuing church” Protestants and Catholics would have more in common with each other than with modernizers in their own denominations; the same would be true for the other side.  It is conceivable that Catholics and Protestants could unite in two new churches, one reflecting Zeitgeist, the other upholding traditional Christianity.  Given the number of both Catholic and Protestants traditionalists, a new, united “continuing church” might be the larger--large enough to wield substantial cultural and political power. 

To be sure, the obstacles would be significant, especially for the traditionalists.  Traditional Protestants and Catholics would each have to look back before the Reformation to find common ground.  Protestants would have to accept a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and adopt a valid liturgy for their communion services (even some Baptist churches had liturgy up into the early 1900s).  Catholics would have to share the Apostolic Succession with non-Catholic male clergy and forego requiring that Protestants accept the innovations arising out of the Council of Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II.  The Holy Spirit would have to do some heavy lifting to make a union come about. 

What might be the strategic implications of such a second Reformation?  Since the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the West has discounted religion as a strategic factor.  But at present, the primary strategic weakness of the West is that it no longer believes in itself.  Western culture’s will to live died in World War I, in the mud and slaughter of the Western Front.  After the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, the best lacked all conviction.  Fascism attempted to recover by exalting the will, but fascism failed, felled by its own errors.  And so today as the old West, Europe, is invaded by hordes of mendicants from strange cultures, the European elites offer their countries as doormats.  

As Russell Kirk wrote, “Culture comes from the cult.”  Religion has been at the heart of most, perhaps all cultures since human culture arose.  While the First World War collapsed the West’s faith in itself, the religion at the core of Western culture had long been under assault by rationalism.  Fractured by the first Reformation, the church could no longer speak with the united voice necessary to reply convincingly (about this, see Brad S. Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation).  To Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” a united church would have answered, “Non est.  Dues cogitavit, ergo es.”

How can Western culture recover the will to live when, in Europe, the churches are empty because most of the clergy no longer believe the Nicene Creed, while in the U.S. many of the most popular churches preach a therapeutic narcissism that has little to do with taking up your cross and following Jesus?  Among the ruling elites in both Europe and America, Christian faith is regarded as spiritual eczema, an unfortunate condition to be covered up in public.  It can have no role to play in strategy; the very notion is absurd.

This, then, is the potential strategic significance of a second Reformation, one that unites all traditional Christians in one church:  the West’s recovery of the will to live.  Far from being strategically unimportant, religion is now as it always has been, one of the most powerful strategic factors, a lesson the Islamics teach us regularly on our own soil.  Culture comes from the cult, and a united church, marching as to war, could revive Western people's’ belief in their culture and in themselves.  Deus vult.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.