My Review of A. Wess Mitchell's "Great Power Diplomacy"

 The Art of the Deal

 

Diplomat/historian A. Wess Mitchell has offered us a long history of diplomacy starting with Sparta’s conflict with Athens in 400 BCE up to the Nixon/Kissinger opening of China in the 1970’s. Instead of the direct application of force Mitchell views active diplomacy as a way of getting the best out of a weak hand and as a way to strengthen a strong hand in the game of nations.

 

His case studies also include Byzantium’s struggle against the Huns and Persia, Venice making peace with Milan to engage the Ottoman’s, Austria’s many struggles in Central Europe, France’s grand strategy in the 1600’s, Bismarck’s in the 1800’s and Britain’s at the turn of the 20^th Century. Above all to Mitchell, interests triumph over ideology requiring a nation to play the hand with the cards it is dealt.

 

Especially interesting to me was Austria’s Prince Kaunitz, Metternich’s predecessor, using Louis XIV’s mistress Madame Pompadour as a go between to establish an alliance with France against Frederick the Great’s Prussia. A few years later we see Austria, guided by Metternich making an alliance with Prussia to stave off France. Indeed, interests are far more permanent than alliances. Also fascinating are the machinations of France’s Cardinal Richelieu making an alliance with Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austria. Mind you this is against the backdrop of huge religious strife in Europe.

 

Mitchell discusses at length Britain’s realization that by 1900 it was overstretched and had to reduce its global commitments. Mitchell follows Lord Landsdowne as he makes deals with Japan limiting its involvement in the Western Pacific, with Russia in Central Asia and with the Untied States in the America’s. All of this was necessary to gird the nation for the war that would come with Germany. If there is one message in the book is that core interests take precedence over peripheral interests. This blog previously reviewed Kori Schaki’s work on the same topic. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Kori Schake's "Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony" )

 

Another lesson of the book is the importance of mobilizing effective coalitions and isolating the enemy. The worst thing that can happen is to be isolated against a strong enemy. Opponents have to be constrained and if they can’t be constrained by the threat of force, bribery sometimes works as in the case of Byzantium buying off the Huns. But bribery should not be confused with appeasement of a direct rival. In the case mentioned Persia was the direct rival and the bribes enabled Byzantium to hold its own.

 

In reading Mitchell’s book, one has to shudder just to think about Trump’s foreign policy. Instead of making alliances, he is destroying them and making America more isolated while Russia and China are moving in the fill in the vacuum, not a pleasant sight. ( See: Shulmaven: Some Thoughts on Trump's National Security Strategy ) One would hope that at least a few Trump staffers would sneak away to read this valuable volume on foreign policy.

 

My Amazon Review of Rachel Chrastil's "Bismarck's War:....:

Organization vs. Incompetence

 

I was disappointed in reading Xavier history professor Rachel Chrastil’s history of the Franco-Prussian War. To be sure it is very detailed, and it included many personal vignettes, it leaves out much. In describing battles, she leaves out maps denoting the positioning of the forces and while included in the text, there should have been detailed exhibits consisting of the Tables of Organization and Equipment of the respective forces. I would have also liked to see some discussion in the economic sinews of war of both France and Prussia.

 

After tricking Napoleon III into declaring war against Prussia via the infamous Ems dispatch in July 1870, Prussia wipes France on September 2 at the Battle of Sedan. Napoleon III is captured and immediately a republic is declared in France. The war should have ended then and there, but France fights on for another year bringing with concomitant carnage on both sides. Chrastil rightly attributes Prussia’s victory to superior organization and generalship led by Helmut von Moltke over France’s incompetence.

 

To me it would have been a far better read if she spent more time on the big picture rather than the minute details of the battle. However, one detail did stand out to me. Coralie Cahen, a Jewish woman, helped organize the care for the French wounded and became the Florence Nightingale of the war. Who knew?

 

Europe learned the wrong lesson from the war. Instead of being fearful of mass carnage, the continent began arming to the teeth that would reach its zenith in 1914. 

For the full amazon URL see: Organization vs. Incompetence (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Shlomo Avineri's "Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution"

A False Prophet

Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri has written a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx under the auspices of the Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. Although Marx came from a family of Rabbi’s, he was not Jewish. His father converted to enjoy the benefits of post-Napoleonic Prussia.

Instead of portraying Marx like his all too many dogmatic disciples, Avineri’s Marx is not of the one size fits all school. Hence in witnessing the advances in democracy in England and later on the continent his Marx become more open to realizing his working class dreams through the ballot box rather than revolution. Hence he learned from the failures of the 1848 revolutions and contrary to Engels’ later writings, he was critical of the Paris Commune. Further he was very ambivalent about the prospects for revolution in Russia, Indeed aside from 1848-49 Marx never directly participated in revolutionary activity; his role was to be theorist studying the inner workings of the capitalist system.

He rarely discussed Jews and Judaism. Early on in 1844 he associated Judaism with the worship of money in a typical anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless in 1854 in his dispatches on the Crimean War to the New York Tribune he noted that Jerusalem was majority Jewish. This was 40 years before the establishment of Zionism as a political force.

For someone so focused on the working class Marx never lived among, worked with or studied directly real factory workers. He got his insights from the works of Engels and book learning. In a very real sense he was someone who loved humanity, but didn’t really like individual people; not too different from many liberals today.

What Avineri doesn’t touch on is that fact that in order to equalize society, the state doesn’t wither away, but rather it requires brute dictatorial force to keep people equal. Nevertheless for those readers interested in a short biography of Marx Avineri has offered up a very readable book.    

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/REBLW2QXDDEDG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv