Great Teachers and Two Wars
Episode Notes
Transcript
Eliot and Eric talk about great teachers including Eric’s undergraduate mentor at Cornell, the late Walter LaFeber and Eliot’s Harvard mentor Samuel Hungtington. They talk about the “Wisconsin School” of diplomatic history — its strengths and weaknesses, the nature and progress of historiography, the qualities that made LaFeber and Huntington such compelling scholars and instructors as well as the contemporary “over professionalization” of disciplines in the humanities. They also talk about the war in Ukraine, including the Time magazine article on Zelensky that depicts him as “delusional” as well as the Economist interview with Gen. Zaluzhny and the latter’s paper on the evolution of modern warfare in Ukraine. They cover the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and discuss how much time Israel has to accomplish its strategic objectives and the difficulties Israel faces in securing those ends as well as the fascinating and disturbing profile of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Financial Times. Finally, Eliot talks about the World War II museum and memorial in New Orleans and why the memory of World War II remains important for Americans to maintain.
https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/
https://infographics.economist.com/2023/ExternalContent/ZALUZHNYI_FULL_VERSION.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/for-israel-a-war-unlike-any-other-b8160908
https://www.ft.com/content/de78c7a0-f8f0-403e-b0db-eb86d6e76919
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to shield of the public, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two, that a balanced and strong foreign policy is the shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, counselor at the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments, Bulwark work contributor, and a non resident fellow at the Miller Center. And I’m joined by my partner. Elliott Cohen, the Robert Eazgood Professor of Strategy at the Johns Hopkins School advanced in National Studies and the Arleigh Burke chair and Strategy at the Center for Strategic International Studies. Elliott, how are you?
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No. I’m very well, Eric. So, you know, it seems this past year, I’ve been really peripatetic. I just got back from New Orleans, where I was there for the dedication of the last pavilion of the National World War II Museum, which is about liberation, which I had I helped, in a modest way design as a historical consultant. And so, thereby, Hank’s a tale.
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Maybe we can get into that But in fact, that that leads me to begin by saying that, we’ll we’ll get soon enough to the dismal stories of the wars around us, but could we start off perhaps with a little bit of high culture? You know, we’ve talked about books. Why don’t we talk about teachers?
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Yeah. It’s a really apropos because I spent not the past weekend, but the previous weekend up in New York, on Roosevelt Island at the Cornell Tech Center, which is a joint venture of Cornell and the tech neon in in Haifa. And Cornell, which, as you know, is one of my alma mater’s, has gotten some pretty bad press lately, given the threats against Jewish students that were apparently lodged by another student now under arrest and charged, but this was a kind of different event this past weekend. It was a tribute to one of my three, you know, great teachers in university, Walter Lofeber, who was my undergraduate advisor, and was a very distinguished historian of American foreign relations. And what I think is notable about him was he was a a phenomenal teacher, and a, a very good scholar, but you know, he came at things from a very different perspective than the one that I came to have.
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He was a a student of the so called Wisconsin school of revisionist diplomatic history that sought to put a, an economic interpretation of American foreign relations. It really was in some ways when you think about the big practitioners of this, William Appleman Williams and Fred, Fred Harvey Harrington, who were the teachers at Wisconsin, who started this, and then La fever and his two contemporaries, Tom McCormick, and Lloyd Gardner, one of whom is still alive, Lloyd Gardner, who is about ninety now, and and, actually spoke at this conference. They really were in some sense the last of the Beardsian progressives. You know, they weren’t so much Marxist, actually. They really came out of a a beardsian Marxist tradition and many of them were from the mid
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explain who who Charles?
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Charles Beard was an yeah, Charles, everybody knows. Yeah. Charles Beard was an American historian in early mid nineteenth century who wrote a book about the economic sources of the constitution which sought to explained positions taken by the founders based on, economic interest. Again, it wasn’t really Marxist, so much although it had kind of a, marksoid, I guess you would say tone to it, but it wasn’t so much about class interest as it was really about, you know, personal economic interests in terms of the constitution. Beard actually also wrote a book essentially, decrying, Roosevelt entrance into, World War two in nineteen, forty.
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And I the point I was gonna make was that, the Wisconsin school, many of the protagonist like Waltla Fieber who grew up in Indiana and, Gardner who I think came from Ohio and McCormick. I can’t remember where Tom McCormick came from. But they came from middle America, and they kinda represented a sort of progressive tradition, but which was also isolationist. You know, it was a progressive isolationist tradition that said the United States should not get involved in sort of the you know, affairs of Europe and Asia because it’ll taint American democracy, essentially. And it it has some strong overtones today.
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The thing about LaFieber as a teacher is, one, I think his views really evolved over time. It became much more focused on other not just intellectual, not not just economic, but also other intellectual forces that shaped American foreign policy. But he also was a a model teacher in the sense that he brooked disagreement for me, the thing that was great about his lectures and about his scholarship was despite this sort of beardsian sort of economic determineist sort of thing. He he insisted on the primacy of individuals and personalities in shaping policy. Those were kind of intention.
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I think in own writing and teaching, but it it had a profound impact on on me and he also was capable of, and and was a remarkable person because he was capable of, you know, accepting disagreement, including from, you know, young undergraduate students without, you know, being defensive or disagreeable, about it. And, you know, I maintained a a long friendship with him after I left school. I just passed some of my correspondence over to one of his, former graduate students to distinguish diplomatic historian, Frankus Digliola, who just published a quite good biography of George Cannon, actually. Princeton University Press just published it. And Frank is is working on a biography of Walt, and I passed my correspondence had a chance to review the correspondence over, you know, twenty year period and, you know, it was very affectionate, very warm, while I was in government, even though we disagreed about many policy things.
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And what was notable about this conference was he was a very modest person who absolutely did not wanna have a, the typical sort of fast drift done in his honor, a fast drift being a, collection of essays by the former graduate and sometimes undergraduate students of a distinguished professor as a tribute to them at the end of their career. He didn’t want a fresh shift but after he passed his students got together and said, we’re gonna do one kinda anyway. And, what’s gonna be in the book, which Cornell University Press will publish is a series of essays by his former students about each of his books, each of his major books, and kind of how well it has stood up over time and how scholarship has treated it over time and and reflections and, you know, after years of have passed since the writing of the book, and then two panels by his former students who did not become academics. You know, so I I was on a panel as a you know, practitioner because Walter had a number of students who went on to become Senior policy makers. You know, Paul Wolfowitz, Sandy Burger, Steve Hadley, myself, Stephen Sostanovich, Dan Freed.
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Paul Jones, who served on this panel who was ambassador in Malaysia to Pakistan. Bob Einhorn, husband of our former Dean at seis, Jessica Einhorn. One of your distinguished predecessors once removed as Dean and and Bob, of course, being a very, distinguished, practitioner in the area of, you know, nuclear non proliferation. And we had a panel of on, you know, the policy makers. Derek Schollet, who has been nominated, to hold my former position as under Secretary of Defense for Policy was supposed to come, because of what’s going on in Gaza, Derek was, you know, off on travel, and so Bob sort of pinch hit for him, but it was a very, you know, sort of interesting, panel.
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And then there was a panel of people who went into finance and industry. Including very senior executives of ExxonMobil and whatnot. So this was a person who, you know, had an enormous influence sort of on the historiography of American foreign relations on a number of people who actually went into government and and tried to, you know, work in the field as it were and who also just said an enormous, personal example of the ability of people to, you know, argue and, you know, in good faith with one another even if they held very, very different positions on the sub sense of policy.
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That’s a that’s a wonderful tribute. So the the only one of that the those who you mentioned among that generation of faculty was that I ever met was Tom McCormick, who I encountered at Cornell during a summer program at run by the telluride associations. This was between my junior and senior years in high school. You know, he was a a warm enough character. The the kind of I I will confess that the, the tendentiousness of some of the arguments put me off.
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Although, The thing that struck me is he he was writing primarily about, American policy towards Latin America. And I think for some parts of that, you know, United Fruit does have a lot to, to to answer for. Although I don’t think it it captures everything. And in fact, you know, as I’ve been doing some reading around the topic of Teddy Roosevelt, which will be the the next book after I finish flogging the the Shakespeare book, you know, you really see that our relationships with Latin America were always quite complicated. They were not simply adversarial, and there are a whole bunch of different themes that that that run through them.
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But I do remember reading, at that during that summer seminar, LeFibers, book on, was it the American empire? The new empire? You know, which I think does, as I recall, really does bring out what you’re saying. It’ll be as this chapter on Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, and, you know, some of the thinkers, but then there’s this kind of I always I guess I thought of it as sort of soft economic determinism. I I’d always heard that he was a wonderful teacher, and and that his attitude towards the United States, what and I think this may be, you know, where some of these people diverge from the Marks, view of things was always the sort of pained feeling that this country, you know, does does things that shouldn’t do for because of, somewhat malign economic forces.
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I think it’s fair to say that that basic argument is not held up particularly well. And it and it like all arguments, it runs the, of that kind that are sort of monocasal. It it it runs the risk of oversimplification, although he, you know, he was clearly the best of that bunch. I mean, to go back to I I do wanna talk about his teacher, and I’ll I’ll mention what’s some of my own teachers, I I do think that that that whole school of the, beards because it was both Charles Beard and his wife, Mary Beards. You know, it it it does show you where how ideas can affect policy.
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I mean, these people were writing the, nineteen thirties, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and then as you say, they were critical of the entry into the war. And it did help create an atmosphere in which you know, you could have these efforts to restrict American exports of arms to, you know, the countries that were gonna stand up to Hitler. And make people extremely, much worrier than they ought to have been about American engagement in issues having to do with the security of Europe. And, you know, that that whole drift of interpretation is actually and in many ways, I think it’s actually more than problematic because what it tends to do is to kinda undermine interest in let alone commitment to the ideas behind American founding and the ideas which drive American foreign policy for better origin. I’ll say one last thing.
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And to some extent, this is a a complaint I often have about American historians, which is they’re not particularly interested in Okay. Well, how does this stack up to other countries around the world? It it’s a somewhat solipsistic view of things. No. None of this, by the way, is to detract in any way from your tribute to to to Moscow fever, which was beautiful.
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A couple of points there, Elliott, because you really, you know, I think cut right to the heart of a lot of this. One thing is, I think there is a tendency. It’s not just in this school, but in general, among American, historians of foreign relations to attribute far more, agency to the United States than it actually has in international affairs, which is not to say that the United States is not, you know, incredibly powerful and important in the international system and and it it, you know, frankly, to get anything to happen in the international system. You know, the United States has to organize it, but there’s a tendency of bad things happen to say, well, it must be that the United States is responsible for it. Yeah.
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You know, and it’s a one one example that we’ve addressed on a past show when we had Ray takei on to talk about his book, about the last shaw. You know, a year and a half ago or two years ago now. Yes. The United States and the United Kingdom played some role in the nineteen fifty three overthrow of and the, you know, and the replacement of the shah. But that role, I think, as Ray argues very powerfully in his book was really pretty marginal.
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It’s really iranians, the bazzaris, and the clerics who now don’t, you know, have kind of white washed that part of history. Because they they were very anti because he was a socialist and they were opposed to that. So, you know, it denies the agency to the, you know, other other actors and, you know, my experience in government is we’re never quite as powerful as we think we are and as as, you know, people attribute to us. And I think that’s one failing of of the not just the Wisconsin school, but in general, I think American, diplomatic historians. The the second thing I would say is I don’t wanna take away from the achievement of beard and other historians in that progressive school.
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At the time that they wrote, there was really probably insufficient attention to the economic, you know, elements, that, you know, are important. You know, that that was a contribution. And the way scholarship advances is by people introducing new considerations that have not previously been taken into account by going into new archives that have not yet been opened or have only recently been opened and bringing to bear, you know, that evidence. And then essentially, that is a challenge to other scholars to then say, well, they got this part right, but here’s the thing they didn’t consider. And that’s how scholarship you know, advances.
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And I think, you know, Walt’s book new empire that you mentioned was one book that really enormously influenced me, and I only realized this, by the way, when I was at this conference. The other one was the origins of the New South by C Van Bulwark, who was one of my teachers at Yale. And that was also a product of it it was sort of one of the last great beardsian books in American history written in the early nineteen fifties that explained the end of reconstruction and the beginning of the industrialization of of the south from a beardsian perspective with the economic interests in. And again, that had been, you know, something that had not really been, you know, taken into to account before Bulwark wrote it, and now others have, you know, responded and written, and and in some cases revised Woodward’s Bulwark. So some of it has to do with history.
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I guess the other thing I would say about LaFibra in particular, you mentioned that the new empire, there’s a lot of of what he calls the intellectual preparation for American expansion in the late nineteenth century. By the way, I think in the late nineteenth century what he and Tom McCormick wrote about in his book the China market about the role that Americans attributed to you know, the ability to sell things to China in the late nineteenth century. The whole, you know, old saw about, you know, if yeah.
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I mean, to the shirt.
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One inch to the short tails of every Chinaman, you know, wearing a cotton shirt and the mills in America will be running, you know, forever. So look, that did have an impact. You know, on on people singing. Not the only thing. There were other factors as well, but it certainly was part of what drove, you know, the open door which became an important idea in in American diplomacy, not the only idea, however, that there were others as well.
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But but as you say in the new empire, Walt does talk about the intellectual preparation. Talks about Henry Adams, Brooks Adams. His lecture on Brooks Adams is, was a classic that, you know, everybody who took his course at Cornell And by the way, he taught on Saturday mornings to a full house, which I doubt could happen today. But but but he has one other point that he makes, which I’m still wrestling with. And which we, you know, have talked about on the show, which was what he identified as the Tokyo problem, which was how do American governments get the American public, which is basically not very interested in international affairs to support foreign policy.
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And Walter’s view was a lot of the things we in government do to do that. Kind of undermined American democracy. He had that view that you talked about. But the problem he identified is a real one. And, you know, and and I wrestled with that a lot during my professional career, and and you and I wrestled with it, you know, together in government.
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Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s still very much with us. No. I I absolutely take that point. I think there there’s actually another way in which there’s a contribution to to scholarship.
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It’s not just that people modify your thesis and then carry it forward, with new information. That that is probably the dominant way. But what sometimes happens is people rediscover older books and say, you know, well, it’s not complete, but actually, this is an angle that we’ve been underplaying recently. So one thing I I think about is, you know, I’ve dabbled in colonial history. And the there was an historian named Herbert Ozgood who most people have never heard of because he he was a rather dry writer.
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There’s another, I think, Charles and Bruce, where the and the the two of them first were very interested in what were the organizational administrative structures of the colonies. And Andrew’s, it was also particularly interested in the way in which, this is, you know, the the colonial story is really part of the British imperial story. And, you know, I’ve just how tightly connected the colonies were to to Great Britain. Well, that that stuff receded. But then it came back as now except now people call it Atlantic history.
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That is to say the idea that these are communities. Yeah. I think though I that that I’m just listening to you, and it and it is wonderful to hear you say that. I mean, you and I were very fortunate to go, to university at a time when there were a lot of great teachers. And and I think it it’s worth thinking a little bit about particularly in this day and age.
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Why that was the case? I mean, in my case, it was people like Samuel Huntington, who was not an inspired lecture, but was a magnificent teacher who who, you know, his personal example was so first, you’ve just a brilliant man. And, you know, I took, three things away from him. First, don’t write the same book twice. Sam, Sam wrote a whole bunch of very different books, which is very challenging.
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That’s not what most academics do. Secondly, he would always be willing to say, I never thought of that. And this is a guy who’s probably the most famous political scientist of his generation, and he was thirdly capable of saying, I’ve changed my mind. And but but there are others, you know, James q Will Saletan, fantastic, student of bureaucracy of American politics, Richard Pipes, Russian historian who was a superb lecturer. I’m just or Ernie May, Ernest May, another diplomatic historian to get a magnificent lecturer.
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But but, you know, as I step back and think about what was it that was so distinctive about that general nation. Well, one thing, obviously, they’d all been touched one way or another by the war. And I think that had which had effects that kind of grounded them, in a way that sometimes contemporary academics are not. They were people of a very broad intellectual culture. So even say somebody who who might disagree a lot, Stanley Hoffman, was just, scholar of international relations and, you know, politically, we were very, very far apart.
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You know, he he got along with me because I like French literature, and we could talk about ballsock. But then the third thing is, and I think this is really you know, the thing that I I I personally worry about most. They were great teachers, one way or another. And the and they were great teachers because they were committed to teaching. Not because they have particular techniques, although some of them did.
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But because they thought of that as being at the center of what academics do and what the academic life is all about. No. There are, you know, you don’t wanna overremandize it. There were plenty of exceptions back then. But what they were not from a period like today where the disciplines have become over professionalized way too narrow where you’re responding to those incentives where teaching is something that, you know, you do because you have to do, but you try to get out of it when you can.
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I mean, What’s your reward for being a great professor? Your reward for being a great professor is you go to the Dean and or the department chair and say, unless you cut my workload down to two courses a year, I’m gonna take an offer from somewhere else. Among other things, these people were, great academic citizens, you know, they they landed at Harvard. They figured, okay, I’m here for life. And I’m I’m part of the establishment here, and I’m committed to to serving it.
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They were institution lists. And so I I worry that we’ve lost a lot of that. I mean, I’ve You know, I know in my own teaching career, I really tried to follow the models of behavior that people like, Sam, and Jim, and others. Set, in terms of how we treated students, how hard I worked on them, the extent to which we’d invite them into our homes. But but I, you know, maybe it’s just we’re getting old, Eric.
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You know, we tend to think, well, when we were young, giants walked the earth, But, but still, I think there’s there’s there’s something to it, and I think it’s it’s absolutely appropriate to to pay tribute to, to those folks. We probably should talk about the world. Could we start with Ukraine? So I think there were, you know, there was this very there have been a couple of things that have dropped. There’s this very interesting paper by general solution There was an abbreviated version in the economist.
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There was an interview with him. The abbreviated if you go to the Economist online, if you get behind the paywall, you can actually access the full paper that he wrote, which is an extremely thoughtful, I think, analysis where or is. He’s pretty I I don’t think it’s a pessimistic piece. I think it’s a very realistic piece. Which he says, look, there’s not gonna be a dazzling big beautiful breakthrough.
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I think that’s the phrase he uses. He talks about what they still need, to do. But it caused quite a kerfuffle, and it it I think it’s pretty clear that president Zelensky was not happy about it. I have to say it’s not entirely clear to me why Zelensky dis as Elushnee decided to to publish it. It comes at a time when people are worried.
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I think about the war, stalemating. What do you make of all this? Both the substance of what Solution said, but also the political kerfuffle around it.
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So a couple of points I would, make. One is, you know, in addition to the Zaluzhny, interview and essay, There also was a time article by Simon Schuster about Zelensky, which among other things quoted, people are, you know, blindly unattributed, AIDS of Zelensky as saying, He’s sort of trapped. He’s deluded, you know, into thinking, you know, Ukraine can win even though it’s clear that this is a stalemate. And the combination of that story and the Zaluzni piece, which some people, I think, have misinterpreted as saying the war is a stalemate. I don’t think that’s what solution he meant, and I’ll come back to that in a second.
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But it’s led, you know, some people in good faith and some people in not so good faith, are using this to say, look, the, you know, the war is stalemated, ergo. There’s no point in throwing good money after bad. We don’t have to get, you know, as, you know, Josh Holly. We don’t need to give the Ukrainians the forty billion that the administration has asked for in in the supplemental funding bill that they have put forward. Others have said, oh, well, what this means is we need to press the Ukrainians to negotiate with the Russians as if there were some negotiation actually to be had there.
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And that was reported, as I think I said by NBC, I am told by fairly senior folks in the administration that, you know, from both the state department and the White House that this is, as one of them put it to me, total b s. And
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Will, could you expand on that?
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Yeah. I I they’re but the folks in administration saying we’re not we’re not telling the Ukrainians to negotiate because we don’t think there is a negotiation to be had. We don’t think Putin has any interest in it. In fact, our assessment is This ward’s gonna run through, you know, twenty twenty four. You know, it’s unlikely that either side is gonna be able to mount major offensive action.
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So we need to keep the Ukrainians in the fight. And we think that Putin’s end game is, you know, sometime early twenty twenty five after he knows whether he’s managed to get, you know, a second Trump administration, you know, to to play with. I think that’s how they’re thinking about this. And that brings me back to Zaluzhanie. I don’t I don’t think Zaluzhanie was saying the war is act at a stalemate.
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What he was saying is the war is trending towards a stalemate, and he’s very candid about the fact, and this is something you and I have talked about many times, that he anticipated that given the level of casualties, that the Ukrainians have inflicted on Russia that the Russians would have, the military would have, you know, either collapsed or insisted on ending this war. You know, in the last week as well, the UK MOD Intelligence folks have put out numbers that suggest you know, a hundred fifty thousand killed Russians, KIA’s, and and as many as perhaps two hundred fifty thousand wounded. And given the very poor state of battlefield medicine in Russia right now, one has to assume some high percentage of those two hundred fifty are gonna die, from their wounds, if not immediately, you know, pretty pretty soon. I mean, to put it in perspective, the hundred fifty thousand killed. That is more than ten times what the Russians lost in twenty years.
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In Afghanistan, which they, you know, when they quit the field. Right? And that’s in in basically you know, under two years of combat in Ukraine. Ukrainians have taken big losses too. I mean, but something on the order of seventy thousand killed but, you know, nothing like what the Russians have.
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Solution in any event, was saying, look, it turns out they can absorb more than we can. And, oh, by the way, they have more manpower resources than we do. Although, that I think can is can is mitigated by some factors. But therefore, we have to win with technology. And he was talking about what the Ukrainians need in this war and it’s air superiority.
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F sixteens are only now showing up. The French sixteens are now being shipped overland into Ukraine. Appropriate training and and a creation of a a Ukrainian reserve force is one of the other things he talks about. Counter battery fires, and the ability to fight more effectively in the electromagnetic spectrum, jamming spoofing, you know, misdirection electronically of of Russian systems, etcetera. An area where the Russians have invested a lot of money the past, and we have much less so.
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Although, we’ve begun to do that in the United States and the last few years and have have begun to look more seriously at the electromagnetic spectrum, if not as a domain of warfare, at least an important part of warfare. So Zuluz really was creating a wish list for the what he wants from the west in order to succeed in this fight, not throwing in the towel, saying it it’s a stalemate in in in my view. Then final point, and I’d be interested if you agree or disagree with that. On the manpower Advantage, yes, it is true. The Russians, you know, Grosso motto have, you know, a much larger population than Ukraine.
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However, there are political inhibitions against a total national mobilization. Which is why it hasn’t occurred. It’s why the Russians have been, you know, resorting to what Darren Masakote, who was at random is now at Carnegie has called stealth mobilizations, you know, emptying the jails, press ganging central Asian guest workers in Siberia into the military. But not actually having a, you know, a full national mobilization of Russians, and that’s because Putin’s afraid to do it because of the political repercussions. So there’s some mitigating factors that I think people who are kind of kind of full of doom and gloom ought to take into account.
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I agree with all that. The you know, so again, what one of the things that’s interesting about what the Russians are doing now is, they’ve decided to take the Wagner model and apply it across the board. So now if you get sentenced to prison, you are automatically enrolled as a potential conscript. So what what Wagner, under, a progression, you know, was here here’s the deal, you know, you’ve served for six months, you get out of jail free. The what they’re going to do is they’re just gonna draft their prison population.
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So and not only does that go to your point that, no, they don’t want to draft the kids from Moscow and, some landscaping places like that, But but there’s actually a, you know, a deeper point. If you take a military and have it largely composed of criminals, you are severely limiting what that army can do and what that army can become. You know, the these are people who are they’re violent. They are by nature, undisciplined. They have A lot of them have serious substance abuse problems.
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A lot of them are probably have mental health issues and all sorts of kinds. So And they, what do you do with people like that? Well, you resort to the most brutal kind of discipline, which is traditional in the Russian army. That, that that model is not a great model for operating a modern military, particularly if You have lost as I think the Russians seem to have lost the ability for large scale operational maneuver and thinking. You know, we’ve You’ve seen them that, you know, both sides are doing these for localized defensives.
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Russians have taken fantastic casualties outside, and I think the Ukrainians are gonna play it that way. So I think there there are limits to how far the Russians can go. The other the other thing that I guess that strikes me is gonna solutioning is talking about this in a very realistic way. As positional warfare, which is not quite the same thing as a stalemate. You know, and and I think he’s right that this is not gonna be There isn’t gonna be a nineteen forty or nineteen thirty nine or nineteen forty one style big armored breakthrough.
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That was it was a mistake for us to even suggest that to them. And of course, behind this is our inexcusable failure to deliver a lot more technology, a lot faster. And and then, you know, there’s another dimension to this as well. And I think a lot of the hand wringing, including, you know, from some of Ukraine’s serious friends, It’s neglecting to observe that there are actually multiple campaigns going on. So, yes, the story on the this long, land front is not a good story.
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On the other hand, the Ukrainians have now successfully waged a campaign which makes it almost impossible for the Russians to operate from, naval forces from Crimea. That is a major success. I think it’s pretty clear that the Ukrainians who have a very good technological basis we’ve talked about are developing have developed the ability to strike into Russia without, using our technology. So for example, I am sure that the Russians are going to, you know, launch an awful attack on their electrical power, electrical system, power system, During the winter, I guess, is the Ukrainians, they won’t be able to do as much to the Russians as the Russians do to them. On the other hand, they have a bigger array of targets to hit you know, so I’m sure some of them will get paid back in mind.
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So it’s it is a and then there are other campaigns. There’s an influence campaign there’s a kind of technological innovation campaign and and so forth. What I don’t understand though, and I don’t know if you have view on this is why does illusionie publish this? I mean, this it has the feel of a document that should be for internal consumption only or if, you know, if you wanted to influence your counterparts in Western militaries, you might pass it to them, maybe without solution to his name on it as a non paper, as we used to say. In government.
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It certainly seems to have annoyed president Zelensky or at least the people around him. So How do you read that dimension of it?
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I don’t know. You know, I really I don’t know. As I said, I think there’s an element of wish list here, you know, and I think he knows there’s debate going on in the American Congress and it may be, you know, intended to influence that. I’m not sure how sophisticated his understanding is of our debate. I don’t know.
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But I will say that, you know, just in terms of the quality of the I mean, it’s in English too, the the paper. The quality of the paper was pretty impressive, I thought. Oh, absolutely. So and if that gives people some comfort that at least the people who are supporting have some sense of what their doing, you know, I think that’s important. It also, I think, speaks to, the question of learning an adaptation, you know, under fire.
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The the Ukrainians clearly have been doing this. From the beginning. And his paper, I think, is yet another really in-depth example of how their leadership is open ideas and taking it all on board. We heard a lot in the last couple of months about, well, the Russians are learning too, and they’re You know, they’re using the armor and infantry much better and this was at the beginning of the offensive around Afrika that you were hearing a lot of that. You know, this is a, you know, example of Russian learning.
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Now what you see in telegram channels and elsewhere is they’re back to so called meat attacks. And this is you know, essentially throwing cannon fodder, you know, as you said, they’re taking enormous losses both of equipment and people. Lots of evidence of at least minor mutinies going on in some of these, you know, military formations that the Russians have thrown together and also people being shot and killed or detained for not being willing to, you know, be thrown, you know, into the meat grinder.
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Yeah. As my, second favorite, podcast, Ukraine the latest pointed out, there is something reassuring too in knowing that the Ukrainian High Command is honest with itself. Yes. And honest with us. And, you know, that’s I wouldn’t accuse the Russian high command of being the same things.
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But it is, by the way, I think, a sign of weakness on Putin’s part that he is not and willing to replace either Shoigu or Gresimov, both of whom, you know, have have not performed particularly well
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Both of whom are loathed in lower levels of the Russian military.
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Well, I guess the other big thing, of course, continues to be the, Israel Gaza war. The Israelis have, now apparently isolated northern Gaza. They’ve been able to get from their border to the sea. That’s not a particularly long distance. I know seven, ten miles, something like that.
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Although I’m sure in very difficult circumstances, Maybe we can talk about a bit about that. The the thing that strikes me about that so far is first, we don’t know exactly what’s going on. I mean, I think the Israelis have kept pretty good operational security. The one thing which I I may have said in an earlier, podcast But I’ll say it again. You know, when when militaries interact with each other, you act they actually learn a lot more about each other.
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And, I think probably what’s happening is, you know, with the Israelis now being on the ground, they’re bringing to bear many other kinds of sensors, and, you know, plus what you get when you capture people, when you capture material, computers stuff like that. So as however good the picture was that they had before, it’s probably better. The other thing I I just wanted to mention was I don’t know if you saw that Financial Times had a terrific profile of Yaciasidmore.
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Yes. I was gonna go there. So go ahead.
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Yeah. Well, it’s it’s fascinating and horrific. I mean, the horrific part is that this is a guy who, when one of his followers got out of line. The punishment was this guy had to kill his own brother by bearing him alive with the, you know, the final parts being done with
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the spirit. Very sadom like
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So it varies Sedom like, and, you know, the the picture that’s portrayed is a real date malignant sociopath of the first ordered. But the thing that I found in a, in a kind of a cold blooded way is, just a student of these things. You know, he had been a prisoner of the Israelis. The Israelis went to school on him. They thought they knew him and understood him.
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But, of course, at the same time, he was going to school on the Israelis. I mean, he wouldn’t speak fluent Hebrew and read all kinds of books by Israeli political leaders, both left wing and right wing historical as well as contemporary. And he was able to fool them. And there is a larger story, I think, that will have to be told here, which is the story of the surprise of October seventh. And I I don’t I think that that’s a story, which like the, Kipper War, like nine eleven, like Pearl Harbor, will have a lot of relevance for us going forward as well because the idea that you can never escape, strategic surprise is, is is wrong.
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There’s one thing it sent me back to was the Ford by Thomas shelling to Roberta Wallstedder’s famous book on on Pearl Harbor. Was it warring in decision, I think it is. Yeah. Which is oh, no. Actually, a lot of the the storyography has actually turned a bit of against, Roberta Wallsteady’s interpretation, but still a very important book in the history of the, you know, the debates around what what exactly happened.
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But shelling has just a the forward is just brilliant in talking about all the different ways that simply because human beings are human beings, they’re gonna encounter a strategic surprise. And it’s, it’s a very sobering thought.
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Yeah. I I think the Israelis At least their minimal objective is gonna be to kill sinwar and Muhammad Dayef, who appears to have been the chief planner. And, oh, by the way, according to the FT profile, was Senoir’s, neighbor in con unit in the south of Gaza where I think they both, originated from. I guess the question I have Elliot is how long the Israelis will have to do this. You know, I I think it’s fair to say that since, Hamas over Gaza in two thousand, seven, well, two thousand six, really, because of the election in two thousand six and then the coup in two thousand seven.
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But, you know, Israel has fought a war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and then a a couple of military engagements operation cast led when we were getting ready. Leave government in two thousand eight. And then, you know, operate up to operation protective edge. And then two years ago, another go round with Hamas And all of them have gone on until sort of, you know, the international community said, you know, it’s basta. You know, enough.
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Stop. In Lebanon, it was like thirty six days. Here, you know, we’re now kind of on week kind of three. And, you know, my sense is that Israel has been given, you know, a relatively long leash by the international community longer than I would have thought. But how long will that go on?
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And how long do you think the Israelis need to accomplish what they’re trying to do, which is to cripple Hamas’s ability to rule Gaza and, it’s, you know, command and control apparatus and all the military infrastructure they’ve built underground and elsewhere.
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So, I’ll, imitate your, good example, follow your good example and say, I don’t know. But but that that’s not entirely satisfactory. How to think about this? The I think the first thing is from the Israeli point of view, but also to some extent, from the point of view of opinion where it matters, this is different. This is a different war than protective edge or, protective edge or cast lead or any of these things.
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And that’s because in a in a very fundamental way, the existential question feels like it’s on the table again that if the Israelis feel if they don’t, you know, annihilator come close to annihilating Hamas, that they’ll come after them again and something even bigger and more horrible than October seventh. That it will encourage Hezbollah and Iran to think, well, maybe we should try our luck and see what we can do. But also it’s the, you know, the sheer scale and barbarity October seventh. Just I think we’ve completely transformed the Israeli mindset. So, this is not I think everybody has to start with the assumption of the Israel.
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Israel you’re dealing with now is very different from the Israeli you dealt with before. The other thing that strikes me about this in terms of, you know, how much running room they have. The, yes, you see these demonstrations and terrible things in college campuses and attacks and, Jews in, number of different countries. Actually, though, the governments, I think, all say, let’s give them running room. And and I think that they’re they’re those are for very good strategic reasons.
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And I mean, I think for Biden, there’s some more or less sentimental ones, but I think, you know, the British in this way, the French in this way. And perhaps most interestingly, I think Saudi Arabia and Egypt have said the or Jordan have said they’ve said the bare minimum of things that they have to say, and and nothing else. And I think it’s, you know, for those regimes, Hamas and what Hamas grew out of, namely the brotherhood, is they are as much threatened by these people as, as as the Israelis are. So I think from a governmental point of view, there’s more running room. I also think there’s, again, the economist had a has just had a online piece on this.
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It was pretty good. You know, you gotta discount a little bit for what you see on social media and even for what a demonstration looks like. If you look at where Most people’s opinion is about this. It’s on the whole. It’s pretty pro Israeli.
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And I think that’s in part because of the scale of October seventh. It won’t last forever. But between those two things, I mean, this Israeli sense of the existential stakes and and public opinion being different than what what it was, and governmental opinion being different than what it was. I think they’ve got more time. How much time do they need god only knows?
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I think the main thing is it, it will pause at some point. But but what’s gonna happen, I suspect, It’ll be very different than it was before. You know, in, in recent last year or two, a couple years, the you know, the Netanyahu government encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas. They opened Gaza, you know, the gates so that we’re I think nineteen thousand workers. They kept the water flowing.
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They kept the electricity going. And, you know, they’d retaliate for individual things, particularly, you know, rockets fired by the Palestinian Islamic jihad, the pitch. But but, it wasn’t a state of constant war. I think from here on out, This is constant war to obliterate Hamas. They will kill them overseas if they can get to them.
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I think any of those people who shows their face on the street. If the Israelis can locate them, they will kill them, and it won’t make a difference how many civilians are around them. If they try to train if th think about it. If they try to train in the open, which they did, and which the Israelis apparently monitored, they will kill them. If they try to have a public ceremony or whether it’s a funeral or a parade or something like that, If the Israelis can detect it, they’ll kill them.
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And, that’ll be a very different kind of world in which they’re operating than that the world that they’ve been operating in. Last thing I’ll say is as far as I can tell, the weight of effort that the Israeli’s been putting into this, is like three or four times previous, fighting. I think the Israel and I don’t think the Israelis are simply bombing targets at random. I I actually have pretty good reason to think that what they’re doing is they’ve got very sophisticated target generation process, which, by the way, includes a lot of artificial intelligence. And, so I think the tempo is pretty intense.
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I think the the Israelis are not gonna talk too much about the damage that they’ve done to Hamas and I, for sure, Hamas is not gonna talk about it. A very, very final thing I’ll say. Really interesting that when, Nisrella, the head of His Balla gave his speech. He was very, very careful to say, this was one hundred percent, and I do mean one hundred percent a Palestinian operation In other words, my my fingerprints are not on this. Leave me alone.
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And that I think is indicative of something.
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Yes. Although the Wall Street journal had an interesting story about the, yeah, inter I think it was the Wall Street Journal, but the interrogation of some of the Hamas prisoners that indicates that the timing of this changed and it, and the Iranians did have their hands all over this. And that the timing was originally, you know, supposed to be, set back for around Passover, but apparently it was delayed. Not clear why, although plausibly could be connected to the negotiations with the Biden administration over the hostage release, which postponed it. Yeah.
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So that’s, you know, I think one thing. To to your point about this is a very different Israel that we’re not gonna see mowing the lawn anymore. Very interesting, op ed in the, in the journal. This I’m sure was in the journal by, Yossi Klein, Oliver, about how much October seventh changed changed Israel and he’s a relatively liberal figure, you know, in the in the in the spectrum.
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He’s really one of the people to follow, by the way. He writes, you can see a lot of him in, times of Israel. He’s a very, very perceptive. That’s critical. Writer.
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And you’re right. That that piece in the it was in the, I think, in the review section. So it’s a long it’s a long form piece. It’s a good point.
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Yeah. So, final point, I’ll make, and then I wanna just briefly turn to domestic politics before we kinda wrap wrap up, which is you mentioned that, you know, Hamas has its roots in the brotherhood. Of course, so does Fata. And, you know, there’s obviously been competition between Kamas and and Fata, but they share a common you know, ideological origin. And, you know, that ideological origin takes you back to the mufte of, you know, Jerusalem, Hajimin al Hassan, who was related to yasserar fought.
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I mean, the family member and also was essentially the spiritual father, you know, of, hamas and of Said Khutub and and San Albana and all these other folks. And, you know, this is a direct pipeline of you know, racist, you know, nazi anti Semitism that has been poured into the veins you know, of the Palestinian public. And I don’t, you know, I think that story is being lost sight of a little bit here.
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There’s there’s a very good book by, Jeffrey Hurf, h e r f, who is a, who’s at the University of Sarah Longwell. He’s emeritus now, but It’s a very, very, it’s a fascinating, book. He’s mainly a German historian, but it’s book about German broadcasts into the Arab world, under the Nazis. And and and then sort of tracing how, you know, a lot of the motifs then worked their way into propaganda. And I think that’s, you know, this is the Middle East.
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So you’re dealing with layers and layers and layers of history. Alright. Well, let’s talk about more cheerful things, like, although not hugely more cheerful things, like American politics.
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Not usually tearful at all. I mean, I am kind of flabbergasted at the weight of polling, which just shows that Biden is in serious trouble for reelection. Now, and I know it’s a year out and I know that polls are skewed, but, I mean, the polls are you know, they they seem to be showing a trend, you know, and the the trend is not good for Biden. So, like, you know, how alarm should I be? You know, how much, you know, should I, you know, there’s very little hair on on my head anymore, but like how much should it be of it should be on fire?
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Well, my, you know, my basic assumption, Eric, for the last I don’t know. Seven or eight years is you know, you and I should always be in the state of barely suppressed hysteria, which is pretty much where we’ve been. I I who knows? I mean, I, I know even less about American domestic politics. I here’s First, I think, a lot of this is people thinking that Biden is old.
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I think another piece of it is, and I think the Democrats consistently underestimate this that even when inflation seem to abate The inflation that average Americans fell day to day, like paying for food, was had gone up a lot. And so it it’s, you know, it really hurt. Thirdly, I think that, you know, I’ve always thought that the key to the Trump, phenomenon was cultural politics. I don’t think that’s abated, and I think Biden made it has made big mistakes by appeasing. By appeasing some of the people on the left, including, to some extent, his own his own vice president.
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But I also think that a lot of the support for for Trump is kind of a protest vote, and I think there is some data to suggest that some of it may be soft. That is if he ends up in jail, or or even if, you know, and maybe this is just my fantasizing. No. Nikki Haley comes roaring in from the outside. They’d go with Nikki Haley.
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And, you know, that’s that’s the, you know, that is the consummation devoutly to be wished that, because she’s basically a normal Republican. With her issues, I get it. But but, you know, you’d be back in normal range as opposed to dealing, you know, with a something that’s seriously wacko. So I’m not panicking And
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dangerous, not just wacky, but really, really dangerous. I mean, the the the Washington the Washington Post article about plans for the second term, really, really, you know, were under that headlines really under, you know, played it. Know, this is Trump’s plans for retribution. This is Trump’s plan for establishing a personal dictatorship in the United States.
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Yeah. I look, I I I agree with you. I just, maybe it’s just for the sake of my own sanity. I don’t wanna, you know, completely give way. Just yet.
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I’m just, you know, Maybe I’m like mister McCabber hoping that something will turn up. Can I can I maybe since we’re coming to the end, can I wrap up with a, something I mentioned at the very beginning, and that’s the World War two Museum? Please. So I’m really I’ve enjoyed enormously being associated with that institution. It’s in New Orleans.
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It grew out of, the work of Stephen Ambrose, well known historian.
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Also, PhD from University, Wisconsin, by the way. Under under Wood Castle time.
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Well, that’s right. He actually sported out sort of on the left, and then he moved a bit. But he would be working on a biography of Eisenhower Howard Eisenhower said, well, have you ever met Andrew Higgins? Knowing that Ambrose was in New Orleans? He said, no.
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Who’s he? And Eisenhower said, you gotta meet him. He’s the most He he’s the guy who won the war for us. Amber’s what? What?
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Well, Higgins, Andrew Higgins was the guy who invented the Higgins boat. Which is the basic model for the landing craft that were used at Normandy days of infantry landing craft. And his factories built fifteen thousand of those things. Interestingly enough, this is New Orleans during world war two. One of the things he was noted for was paying blacks and women the same as white men for doing the same job.
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So if you were foreman, didn’t make a difference for your black or white, male or female, you got the same salary. And, that’s the the interestingly, the Bulwark community in New Orleans remembers this, because he he lifted a lot of people into the middle class. Well, what began as a d day museum to celebrate Higgins has really become a a sprawling World War II Museum. I I absolutely urge people to, visit it. I think particularly if you have teenage kids because, you know, so much of what kept us going to cold war was our memory of World War II.
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The final pavilion, which they dedicated, they they built a series of seven buildings. Is about liberation and what does the war mean? And the, the, you know, the pieces that I fought for, and I’m I’m glad I was glad to see them theirs. First, they really emphasized the four freedoms. From Roosevelt’s speech in January nineteen forty one, he says, look, what we’re engaged in is the struggle about freedom from one, freedom from of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from fear.
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And, you know, it’s very That is a very simple list. It was very powerful at the time. I think it remains so. But the other thing, and this I think is the most important thing that, that the your visit to the museum, which can easily go on for two days. It has all the high-tech, but also fantastic artifacts.
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Is not intended to end simply with a celebration, but to end with a challenge. You know, there’s that wonderful line from John f Kennedy’s inaugural, but the torch has passed with new generation. And that’s actually on the on the four freedoms medal, positioned at the end of the war, there’s a torch. And I I think that’s, it’s a very powerful message, particularly now that the memory of The direct memory of World War II is almost gone. And even people like us, you know, and parents who had been in the war, you know, we’re gonna Yeah.
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We’re we’re reaching out. Yep.
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We’re aging we’re aging out. And, I think it’s just very, very powerful to get teenagers thinking about, okay, that generation faced enormous challenge as the world was getting very dark. Well, you may face a a different kind of challenge, but but in many ways, a similar one. So, go to New Orleans, eat lots of beignet, and, go visit the, National World War two Museum.
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Well, Elliot, you met the challenge because we started with something uplifting and then against all odds, you managed to end us on an uplifting note. So thank you for that. That’s terrific, and that will have to do for this episode of Shilda Republic, and we’ll be back next week.
