What to Do About Clausewitz: Saving Strategic Studies From Itself
For strategic studies to be worth a damn in the 21st century, it must 1) treat force as a problem not just a solution, 2) relate the political context, and 3) aspire toward self-abnegation.
“A specter is haunting strategic studies—the specter of peace.” These bizarre words are from Richard Betts, who provocatively presented peace itself as a problem in a largely forgotten article from 1997 asking, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?”
Betts answered his title question in the affirmative. As one of the most prominent scholars that strategic studies has ever produced, it’s unsurprising Betts would come to the field’s defense. It’s more surprising, though, considering that Betts has a long record warning about the limits of the use of force and expressing skepticism about the possibilities of strategy generally.
But Betts also offered a revealing confession (and massive understatement) in his plea to preserve strategic studies that illustrates the problem with keeping the field as it has always been: “For whatever reason, the United States finds itself in a war or crisis in almost every generation.”
Violence: From Unrealistic Obsession to Cause of Incuriosity
Strategic studies is the most violence-centered sub-field of international relations. Since its origins in the early Cold War, it has been consumed by questions of military force. For many strategic theorists, force is literally what it’s about. That confined gaze has not only impaired strategists’ ability to see beyond proximate causes of security problems to the issues at their root; it has also straightjacketed the means by which to address security problems. The tools of the national security state are, in most cases, antithetical to peace, yet the only tools of relevance in strategic theory.
Betts’s shrug that, “for whatever reason,” the United States constantly finds itself in war affirms what I’m saying. If you do not look past proximate causes, then conflicts really do just exist “for whatever reason.” What’s in front of you is all that matters.
If this is how you think, then history’s only salience for you is whether it can help you fashion more efficient military means to achieve political ends. Strategic studies, in other words, encourages an incuriosity about the historical circumstances that create the problems that occupy it even though it also celebrates selective dead men of history (Clausewitz etc).