Charles W. King

Today much of the Western public and many Western policy-makers and diplomats have a dangerous conception of world history. In this popular version history Western liberal democracy is the inevitable result of hundreds of years of unbroken prosperity and progress towards ever greater suffrage and markets, and the collapse of Eastern empires in Russia, China and the Middle East in the twentieth century was a death rattle of a disease that lasted just as long. This is a profound misunderstanding of history and leads to an erroneous perception of Eastern nations being not only behind, but centuries behind the West. Acting on this incorrect conception of history demonstrates massive hubris, and makes it difficult to understand foreign perspectives and formulate good strategies and foreign policy.

The free market is one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism. Some historians and pundits have drawn a direct line from modern free trade back five hundred years to rudimentary markets in European towns and villages. This connection demonstrates a failure to understand how different medieval market trade and modern capitalism are. The former was not unique to Europe and the latter is a much more recent and dramatic change than this version of events would indicate. Stock exchanges may have existed for more than a hundred years when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but Britain would remain a mercantilist empire for another hundred years.

The point at which Europe set foot on the path would lead to its dominance in the twentieth century is possibly the most controversial ongoing debate in academic history. The problematic connection of medieval markets to industrial capitalism represents a small set of historians and others who have gone looking to find that divergence as far back as possible. There is much more convincing evidence to suggest that the divergence between Europe, Asia and the Middle East happened much later than many people believe.

Another major milestone of Western liberalism is the commoditization of land. In feudal systems land was ruled by lords, held in common, and rights to use a given plot of land were not inheritable. Enclosure and the Doctrine of Improvement in English Common Law changed this. As a commodity land could be traded, as something owned privately investment in increased productivity was worthwhile. The commoditization of land in Western Europe was an essential innovation that provided the agricultural output needed to fuel empire, or so the story goes. Except commoditization of land was not unique to England at the time, or even unique to Europe. Ottoman tax records from Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia show that land was being traded as a commodity there too, independent of similar innovation in Europe. The failure of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century are frequently used as evidence of the empire’s status as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ but this ignores the fact that the Empire was implementing these reforms not decades after its European counterparts but in the same time frame and its efforts, while not as successful as either the UK or Germany, were more successful than Spanish or Austro-Hungarian reforms. Treating the Ottoman Empire and the states that descend from it as backwards is a serious error.

That Western empires and their resulting liberal democracies have had a dominant position on the world state recently is not arguable. But this has not always been the case, and it is important that historians and policy makers avoid conceptions of history that emphasize how, and for how long Europe has been dominant. It leads to erroneous conclusions and poses significant problems for policy-making and the conducting of diplomacy. It makes it difficult to apprehend and understand the perspective of nations in Asia and the Middle East, and it prevents good policy-making by treating liberal democracy deterministically.

Further Reading

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Charles W. King

The continuing prevalence of improvised explosive devices and suicide bombing attacks in the twenty-first century has prompted the public, pundits, and policy-makers to ask, ‘why?’. This is an important question, but it is so broad that it is problematic. When people ask about the ‘why?’ of terrorism, particularly suicide terrorism the answers typically focus on why an individual would commit an act of suicide terrorism, their psychology, and place in their society. Understanding who is vulnerable to recruiter’s messages can help to counter them. This is an incomplete answer to ‘why?’ Policy-makers need to ask not only why an individual commits an act of suicide terrorism, but why non-state actors continue to use these particularly heinous methods.

Suicide terrorism and IEDs have a strategic utility that is second only to the precision-guided munitions of the US Air Force and its NATO allies. Since their debut on the world stage in the first Gulf War in 1991 the US has relied upon precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles to be able to destroy specific targets without risk to American personnel and with minimal collateral damage. These weapons are not without controversy of their own, but they demonstrate the continued utility to air power. The deployment of long range precision-guided munitions from airplanes and ships remains one of the US’s preferred methods of intervention in the twenty-first century. Guided bombs and cruise missiles are dramatic, do not expose the US to significant risk of commitment, and are politically cheap.

IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs provide this kind of strategic utility to non-state actors. Gillio Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers makes the analogy precisely.  When confronted by a French journalist Ben M’Hidi of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale replies, “Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.” The ability to select targets, for the US Air Force or non-state actors, increases the political and strategic impact of the use of violence. Minimizing the risk of operations and maximizing their political impact is not a new principle, it is central to the theories of use of political violence espoused by Clausewitz and Machiavelli. Western policy-makers should not be surprised that non-state actors have internalized the importance of these principles and have found ways to achieve them without access to advanced technology and billions of defense spending.

Precision-guided munitions are smart, but not as smart as human beings. ‘Smart’ weapons minimize risk to the force using them in exchange for a high financial cost, $1.87 million per Tomahawk cruise missile in 2017. Suicide bombs represent the opposite end of the precision-guided munitions spectrum, a minimum of financial cost and an acceptance of not only of risk but sacrifice. Describing the use of IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs as ‘barbaric’ or ‘irrational’ denies the strategic utility of these methods and fails to comprehend that the groups using them may be desperate but they are not irrational. They have political objectives and are using the most effective methods available to them. To describe them as anything less is a grave underestimation, and serious strategic failure.

Further Reading

Gillio Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, (Algeria/Italy: 1966).

Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, (New York, NY: Verso, 2007).

Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, (New York, NY: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006).

Charles W. King

The recent failure of the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the use of chemical weapons by the government of Bashar Al-Assad, let alone take action against it, raises the specter earlier UN inaction. The most gruesome example is the 1994 Rwandan Genocide where almost a million people were killed between April and July of that year. Despite many successes with long term peacekeeping operations throughout the world over its history the United Nations has repeatedly found itself unable to act in a rapid manner to prevent these kind of tragedies. The UN has received significant criticism for its inability to prevent such fast moving atrocities.

The United Nations was not designed to be able to take the swift and decisive action that would be required to intervene to prevent events like the Rwandan Genocide and the use of chemical weapons on civilian populations in civil wars. The post-World War Two institutions created by the Allied powers—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, European Coal and Steel Community, and International Court of Justice—were each created to preserve the post-war balance of power by accomplishing a specific purpose. The UN’s purpose is both broad and limiting. The United Nations exists to prevent World War Three.

Like the American Congress and Senate, the structure of the UN is designed to hamper, not facilitate, efficient passage of resolutions. The General Assembly of the United Nations is a forum for debate and discussion with little concrete power. The UN Security Council has more concrete powers to act, but has five permanent members, each of which possesses veto power. This is a recipe for deadlock, not action. The UN’s largest international action, to intervene in the Korean War, was only possible because at the time the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council due to the seat for China being held by the Republic of China on Taiwan. The return of the USSR to the Security Council and the accession of the People’s Republic of China to the Council in Taiwan’s place have prevented further decisive actions.

The United Nations inability to mount such a decisive action since the Korean War belies the fact that it has succeeded at its primary objective. There has not been a direct conflict between the world’s great powers since 1945. While there have been numerous proxy wars between client states, the great powers took great pains to make sure they did not engage directly. This is in part due to the specter of nuclear war, but that ignores the role that the UN plays as a forum. The United Nations played an important role in the peaceful resolution to multiple Cold War crises, including the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis. As an official forum for nations to address each other the UN served a key role in preventing any of these crises from escalating to a nuclear war.

The United Nations’ inability to take rapid decisive action to prevent atrocities is not a fatal flaw. It is a side effect of the organization’s specific objective, preventing crises from escalating into another World War, and how it was structured to accomplish that goal. It is increasingly effective in its other efforts to help refugees, promote human rights, and mitigate famine and preventable disease, but its primary purpose remains the same. The UN remains an important breakwater against escalating tensions in the 21st century.

Further Reading

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, (New York, NY: Vintage, 1996).

Charles W. King

All historical disciplines risk falling afoul of determinism, none more than environmental history. If the environment is the major factor in historical outcomes then there is no human agency, and it is possible to determine the course of future events based solely on the environmental circumstances. In academia this is a common criticism of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, regardless of the prizes it won. The propensity to flirt with the danger of determinism does not mean that environmental history is not important to both historians and policy-makers. Like a player being dealt cards at the beginning of a hand of poker, the environment does not determine the outcome of the game but places both constraints and freedoms upon historical actors.

After the initial colonization of the Caribbean until the 20th, century European powers found it almost impossible to take colonial possessions from each other. The British famously lost thousands of men in a number of attempts to take Spanish colonies, due to tropical diseases which the newly arrived expeditionary forces had no immunity to. Napoleon’s attempt to roll back the Haitian Revolution also failed due to massive casualties caused by yellow fever and malaria contracted even before the French troops made landfall. For centuries tropical diseases killed almost three quarters of Europeans arriving in the Caribbean. The freedom of action of existing colonial possessions and populations was protected from European forces by the disease rather than cannons. However, this protection was not a guarantee of successful revolution or independence. When the Panama Canal opened in 1914 vaccines and modern medical techniques had reduced the effect of tropical diseases enough to change the balance of power in the Caribbean, but many colonial possessions remained under the rule of their original colonial masters. During the centuries of European colonization that exacerbated the geopolitical import of tropical diseases historical events were shaped by the environment, but never to the elimination of human agency.

While even hazardous environments like the Caribbean or Arabian Desert can conceal hidden assets, some environments are more obviously advantageous. One of the major factors why Europe, and Western Europe and England in particular, experienced the Industrial Revolution first, and went on to dominate the rest of the globe, is environmental. Some countries like Germany possessed plentiful and easily extractable supplies of lumber, coal, and iron. Others like Portugal and the Netherlands had population sizes and geographies that facilitated sea trade and demanded capital intensive economies. England possessed both ample resources, and a geography and population that encouraged the English to turn to trade. These assets did not dictate that England, the Low Countries, and the princes of the Holy Roman Empire would become the United Kingdom, Netherland, and Germany of today, they gave freedom of action. Scotland possessed the same advantages as England, and is credited with many of the innovations that provide the foundation for the modern world. Scotland has not been an independent country since 1707. The advantages of geography and environment must be seized by political actors and are no guarantee of success.

Environmental circumstances can provide considerable advantages, such as the plentiful access to lumber, coal, and iron in Western Europe, or disadvantages, like regular drought cycles throughout the tropics. In both cases it takes political action to make use of these advantages or turn these disadvantages into disasters. For historians the environment is an important factor in historical events, always as a part of a human narrative. Policy-makers cannot afford to ignore environmental circumstances, both historical and current, in making policy. Environmental circumstances shape societies, and awareness of the drives and perspectives of foreign powers facilitates good diplomacy and policy making. Environmental circumstances frequently shape national policy; aggressive acquisition of scarce resources, policies to compensate for changing circumstances, and the displacement of people. An accurate assessment of the current environment is essential to effective policy responses. Presuming that environment dictates history is dangerous, but ignoring the environment’s impact upon history is foolish and results in poor policy-making.

Further Reading

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, (New York, NY: Verso: 2002).

J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Charles W. King

If the failures of nation building projects in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan must serve as a warning to policy-makers what should they look to for an example of success? The Balkan nations that NATO intervened in the 1990s are a possibility; they are in the process of accession to the European Union and negotiating their own regional free trade agreement as the EU focuses on Brexit and refugee policy. But these nations are not yet finished building the institutions that will carry them forward, as demonstrated by the ongoing corruption probes in a number of Balkan states. The Republic of Korea and the Republic of Taiwan provide better examples of successful nation building projects. When they were founded in the late 1940’s they did not have the institutional foundations that facilitated the reconstruction of West Germany and Japan. Decades later South Korea and Taiwan have joined Germany and Japan on the world stage as major allies of the United States, and significant players in the global economy. They have transitioned from ‘developmental autocracy’, to borrow a phrase from Gregg Brazinsky of George Washington University, to democratic governments.

Two of the key factors in these successes were the development of state institutions and export economies. At their founding neither South Korea nor Taiwan possessed an industrial economy or plentiful natural resources that could fill national coffers and provide an easy road to prosperity. Forced to develop economies from scratch they elected to develop for export rather than to protect against foreign imports. Successful industrial export economies require an educated workforce for the research and development, and the high quality manufacturing that sustains them. It also requires independent courts and rule of law to limit corruption and provide stability and predictability to foreign investors and partners. This strong economic development at a precursor to democratization is a common historical development, not unique to South Korea and Taiwan.

South Korea and Taiwan have also each faced a single existential threat since their founding; North Korea and the People’s Republic of China respectively. This has substantially distorted the shape of their national institutions. Where the leaders of other ‘developmental autocracies’ have used Western liberalism as a post-colonial boogeyman, and made internal dissent the primary focus of their security forces, South Korea and Taiwan could afford to do neither. Confronted with these existential threats, their militaries developed as important and respected institutions of the state rather than as oppressors of the people.

Decades of economic and institution building under ‘developmental autocracy’ provided the foundations that South Korea and Taiwan needed to become prosperous democracies. They also represent two the longest and most expensive and expansive nation building commitments the United States engaged in during the Cold War. They are not the only ‘development autocracies’ the United States supported, but they are the most successful. Policy-makers should take a number of lessons from their examples; the nature of the economic development is important, and integrating the military and other state institutions as a part of the society is essential. Subsiding dictators in exchange for policy or resources will not lead to economic development or democratization but is sometimes necessary. By having a clear conception of their strategic objectives and an understanding of the differences between the successes in South Korea, Taiwan, West Germany, and Japan and failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan policy-makers can better determine what policies to implement and how much support they can commit to.

Further Reading

Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press: 2008)

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).