sending...
In Afghanistan at the moment (February 2010), U.S. Marines, allied troops, and Afghan government soldiers are embarked on an offensive at a town called Marja in Helmand province. American commander-in-chief General Stanley A. McChrystal here makes the first expression of the strategy that underlies the appeal for reinforcements that led to the Obama administration “surge” in that country. During the strategy deliberations which led to the surge decision President Obama called for advice from all quarters, and the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, contributed a set of diplomatic cables which called the U.S. strategy into question. McChrystal’s offensive may be in trouble already—air strikes have killed Afghan civilians and called into question U.S. promises for their safety—but events are also demonstrating the substance of Ambassador Eikenberry’s earlier objections. The Afghan government to which he is accredited is extremely weak, its institutions fragile, the apparatus that is supposed to take hold in Marja in many places nonexistent. The increasingly prevalent U.S. response of bypassing the national government to deal directly with local potentates promises not only to encourage competing centers of power but to further weaken the national government. This is a conundrum for American foreign policy.
I raise these matters today not to discuss Afghanistan, important as that is, but simply to illustrate issues that ought to be important to every diplomatic historian. What are the boundaries between diplomacy and military action? Many foreign policy issues involve military components—whether as objects of action, locations of vested interest (institutional or operational), or tools of implementing policy decisions. Not only is this blurring of boundaries true historically, in recent history (since World War II) and contemporary affairs it is even more central to policy decision. All of which begs the question, how much should the diplomatic historian know about military issues?
Two centuries ago today Europe stood in the midst of the upheavals that led German theorist Karl von Clausewitz to his dictum that war is the pursuit of policy by other means. Surely that is an expression of the same insight. And the connections between foreign and military policies have only drawn closer. Washington, London, and other allied capitals during World War II pushed hard to plan for the postwar era—and military officers were involved every step of the way. Those plans and that era—the great Cold War—have been the focus of a thousand diplomatic histories. The concept of and the very term “national security” evolved at the very end of World War II and from the beginning attempted to incorporate both foreign policy and military affairs. The term “political-military,” attached to various staffs, advisory units, and counselors from about the late 1940s represented the institutionalization of the notion that those spheres of action have commonalities that require joint consideration.
As a matter of historical study, however, we have too long been at pains to separate the diplomatic from the military. These are conceived as different fields of inquiry, and camps of historians working each side of this street have looked askance at colleagues on the other curb. Academic programs did not require much in the way of training across these subject boundaries. As for the relevant professional organizations, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Military History, for a very long time you could not find a historian who held membership in both those groups. Then there was one, then a few. The situation today is somewhat better but still far from where it needs to be. Diplomatic historians tend to regard military specialists as too narrow, military historians tend to see diplomatic experts as naïve and superficial. Not only does this bifurcation exist in an environment in which both schools of history are under challenge from other historical specialties, but in a real world in which, as argued here, both disciplines are necessary to properly analyze developments.
Already the instant the Cold War ended, the foreign policies of the Clinton years, and the evolution of American policy in the Persian Gulf and Iraq from the 1980s on have entered the lists of historical inquiry. The Afghan war itself—and the associated “war of terror”—are products of historical antecedents that beg for analysis. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, as it happens, is a retired general and even a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which may equip him for sophisticated analysis of political-military issues. He is exceptional even for what we have in mind. It is not practical to train diplomatic historians to the level of expertise of a long-serving military officer. It is possible—and it should be done—to provide students of diplomatic history with better feel for, knowledge of, and background in military affairs. This need not be a matter of course requirements and academic programs or any big fight over curricula. Such measures may be desirable and could be issues down the line, but much simpler is just to start by encouraging students to take more courses across the academic divide. It is also worth pointing out examples of good multi-disciplinary work to students who may thus be inspired to acquire requisite analytic skills. Anything we can do along these lines can only improve the quality of diplomatic history and that is something for which we should strive.
John Prados
John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author, most recently, of _Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1954-1975_ (University Press of Kansas) and _How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History_ (Potomac Books, forthcoming).