Advice to War Presidents: More Wars and Less Peace

Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft. Angelo M. Codevilla. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

As a professor, former U.S. Naval Officer, Foreign Service Officer, and senior staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence between 1977 and 1985, Angelo M. Codevilla certainly has a lot to offer in terms of advice to wartime Presidents.“This book” writes Codevilla, “outlines the essentials of international affairs — diplomacy, alliances, war, economic statecraft, intelligence, and prestige (nowadays called “soft power”) — by contrasting them with the too convenient constructs in American discourse.” (p.xi)

Specifically, Codevilla aims to show the reader how various ideological schools of thought in American foreign policy have abstracted from the reality of international affairs by taking for granted, and hence as fact, a Wilsonian inspired progressive view of history, dating back to World War One. According to Codevilla, such a view has led to disastrous consequences for America both at home and abroad as American Presidents in the twentieth century have had a tendency to engage in wars at the expense of maintaining American security and peace. As a result, crafting an American foreign policy reflective of America’s actual interests will require moving beyond such ideological pretentions by returning to sound (tried, tested, and true) principles of statecraft as practiced by Presidents in the past.

Chapter One, appropriately titled “Use the Dictionary,” stresses the danger in having adopted language reflective of a post-World War One Wilsonian imagination, which, according to Codevilla, has “falsified international life.” (p.6) For Codevilla, contemporary wisdom on war expressed through the usage of terms reflective of a Wilsonian inspired longing for world peace, including terms such as “peacekeeping,” “peacemaking,” and “humanitarian intervention,” have taken away from the reality of what such “armed missions” actually imply. This has had the effect of leaving soldiers, “who [have] suffered and died” in various humanitarian interventions, wondering “why what they were doing felt so much like war.” (p.21) Alas, just as the contemporary term “disarmament” has in effect, disarmed those who believe in it “to the advantage of those who insist on arming,” so too has the term peacekeeping pacified “those who want peace more than advantage,” to the advantage of those who are willing to “take advantage [of] peacekeepers” in order “to make war.” (p.24)

In Chapters Two and Three, titled “Watch Your Axioms” and “Ideas Have Consequences,” Codevilla separates the dreams of progressive thinking among American foreign policy makers from the realities that have and always will factor into the behavior of nations. According to Codevilla, realities including the intangible and immeasurable forces of love, hate, fear, and honor, “attraction and repulsion,” which inevitably factor into the behavior of human beings, are seldom taken into account by the three main schools of thought in American foreign policy. For Codevilla, Liberal Internationalists, Neoconservatives, and Realists alike focus instead on “what is important to themselves, not to others,” rendering each school’s theoretical framework an exercise in “self-admiration” and hence largely devoid of “moral, political, or intellectual content.” (p.51)

Take, for example, America’s Liberal Internationalist school. “For Liberal Internationalists, mankind struggles to free itself from traditional society’s ills — underdevelopment and prejudice — and to access the blessings of modernity.” Hence, their “deepest wish seems to be integrating America with the world.” (p.51) According to Codevilla, however, the America they project, which consists of “a mixture of self-absorbed celebrities, academic bureaucrats, and seminaked figures gyrating to loud music,” gives the impression that “the Americans’ god is in their bellies and loins: a fat, cowardly god, repulsive in his pretentiousness, shallowness, and impotence.” (p.57)

Such projections not only reveal an otherwise narcissistic mentality among American foreign policy makers, but in part explain why “ignorance of religion” qualifies as “the defining cultural characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment;” for “only small peculiar groups,” including American statesmen, “take no religion seriously and hence are baffled by all.” (p.58) This is why the contemporary problem of Islamism is often understood, or explained away in terms of either socioeconomic inequality (Liberal Internationalists), a lack of democracy (Neoconservatives), or a lack of order in the region (Realists). None of these explanations touch “either Islamism’s religious substance or the vital fact of contempt” — hate for modernity and the West — and “since all would increase the Muslim world’s Westernization, they amount to prescriptions of booze for a hangover.” (p.67)

Codevilla advises against such prescriptions, offering instead a sobering prescription of his own: matching means to desired ends. In Chapter Four, titled “Diplomacy: Medium, Not Message,” Codevilla argues that successful diplomacy requires an honest assessment of desired ends and available means, calculated in the context of specific circumstances. For example, Thucydides’ Brasidas, a Spartan general during the Peloponnesian War, was able to balance ends, means, and circumstances by tailoring arguments, attitudes, and demands to fit a particular audience in a particular situation. His diplomacy, writes Codevilla, consisted of “shifting the balance of fear in his favor” by crafting proposals whereby the cost of refusing would always outweigh the benefit of accepting. In short, his diplomacy consisted of making offers his adversaries could not, in their right mind, refuse. (p.81)

Likewise, economic tools of statecraft must “be part of a complex of measures,” a complex of means, “that fit a particular objective,” a particular end. (p.143) In Chapter Five, titled “Power Makes Money,” Codevilla presents Pericles’ “Megarian decree” (economic sanctions intended to punish the city of Megara for having turned against Athens during the Peloponnesian War), as a perfect of example of means “reasonably proportionate to the ends that Pericles reasonably sought in his situation.” The implementation of this decree and “Megara’s subsequent impoverishment told Athens’ allies that they could not transgress their commitments” while it told Sparta that “Athens did not hold it responsible and wished to remain at peace.”(p.141)

Finally, In Chapters Six through Eight, titled “Wars Are for Winning,” “Use Intelligence, Not Intelligence,” and “Security for Our Side,” Codevilla discusses matching means to desired ends in terms of waging war for the desired end of peace. For Codevilla, war and peace must be understood as “two sides of the same human coin.” (p.147) This is because, as Thucydides put it, “war gives peace its security.” Hence war must be viewed as a means to the end of peace, and waging it must only be done so as to ensure the end of American peace; for “only in that light,” writes Codevilla, “does killing make sense” (p.147)

But because American statesmen in the twentieth-century have avoided using the term “war” opting instead for terms such as “peacekeeping” or “humanitarian intervention,” and have tended to view American peace as synonymous with that of the world, America has in effect fought in more wars and has achieved less peace than in any other period during its history. Peace, says Codevilla, is “the result of dealing with enemies successfully, and it concentrates the mind on what is needed to do so — including war.” (p.267) What is needed for American peace, then, is an honest assessment of friends and enemies, stakes and causes, both determined and dealt with by pursuing desired ends with available means.

For this reason, Codevilla ends Advice to War Presidents by advising his audience, his war President, to “keep it simple.” Or, as Theodore Roosevelt once put it, to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” It will require moving beyond Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism, and Realism, all of which are variations of an ideology “that assumes America’s objectives and powers are limitless,” and moreover, that “what happens in other countries is chiefly related, respectively, to human progress, to democratic progress, or to progress in the orderly adjustment of interests.” (p.264)

Crafting a foreign policy reflective of America’s actual interests, will instead require a calculating approach to statecraft, devoid of various ideological pretentions, that focuses on reconciling desired ends with various available means; one that takes its cues from history; takes into account the complexity of human nature — the intangible forces of love, hate, fear, and honor; and one that recognizes diplomacy, economic statecraft, and war in terms of means to be used for the sole purpose of achieving American ends. Simply put, “the real choice for America is between continuing to bluster and pander halfheartedly in pursuit of universal dreams, or to get back to the basics of national, rational statecraft.” (p.268)

Of course, for all of his advice to war Presidents, worth remembering is that, in addition to being an expert on international affairs, Codevilla is an avid reader and translator of Machiavelli. Needless to say, while reading Advice to War Presidents one cannot help but be reminded of Machiavelli’s advice to princes, especially concerning advisors: “good counsel, from wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince from good counsel.”(The Prince, Ch. 23) So it follows that good counsel must also arise from the prudence of the President, and not the prudence of the President from Professor Codevilla.

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