American Enterprise Institute

July 20, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

5:15 p.m.	Registration
5:30	Presenter:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
	Discussant:	William Kristol, The Weekly Standard
7:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

“The View from a Rogue State:

What Napoleon Can Tell Us about Dealing with Iran”

July 20, 2006

William Kristol:  To begin, I'm Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.  I'm moderating this large panel here, a very difficult job.  This panel consists actually of Frederick Kagan giving some remarks on Napoleon based on his book, which I'll say a word in about a second.  When I introduce him, I'll make some brief comments on not being a Napoleon expert and sort of carry [sounds like] possible implications of the book. 

Fred will comment on my comments and we will take comments and question for you all and be out of here within an hour-and-a-half, or maybe even more quickly.  Frederick Kagan is – let me get his title right – a resident scholar in Defense and Security Policy Studies here at the American Enterprise Institute.  More importantly, he is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard.  He was associate professor of military history at West Point for I think the last 10 years and has written widely in the field of military history, especially on Russia but also other areas about military history over the last two to three centuries, and also writes on issues of foreign and defense policy for The Weekly Standard and for a few other lesser publications, all other publications I should say. 

So Fred’s book, and let me just say a word about the book which is extremely … I have not read every word, I only got it four or five days ago and it is 600-plus pages - a very, first of all, beautiful book, unlike so many books today, very elegant and handsome book.  I think it was just 770 pages or so.  It is the first of a multi-volume study on Napoleon in Europe, and this first volume covers the years 1801-1805, the end of the Old Order. 

I would say having read chunks of it, it seeks to be and is an integrated study of Napoleon’s political diplomatic and military strategy, an educated history of the Napoleonic Era and educated diplomatic political and military history, which I think is very rare, and I would also say about the book - I was going to say this in my comment but I'll say as introduction – is that it is extremely readable, and I'm not an expert on Napoleon, or the 19th century, or military history.  It is clear and enjoyable and very interesting and a thought-provoking read. 

In any case, Fred will talk, for maybe 20 minutes or how long he wants, Napoleon and the end of the Old Order at the beginning of the 19th century, and talk a little bit about implications perhaps for today.  Then I'll make a few comments, and then we will hear your comments.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Bill, thank you very much.  I really appreciate your taking the time to come and participate in this discussion.  I thank you all for coming in on a hot July day to listen to some very old, dusty history, which I hope I will make a little bit less dusty if I cannot make it less old and try to make it interesting to you.  I think before I start talking about Napoleon, it is worthwhile asking the question, why should we study history at all, and why should I take your time this afternoon to present to you 200-year-old events? 

I think it is important to remember that history can provide us with a window into human nature, which is unchanging, and into the way that people, and especially statesmen, react to particular circumstances.  I do not really think that history can teach us clear lessons.  I do not think you can really mine history to find templates for behavior in parallel circumstances because circumstances are never fully parallel.  But I do think that the more you study how people have behaved in the past, the better you can understand how they behave today and how they will behave tomorrow, and the more likely you are to be able to come up with real intelligent prescriptions for your own actions that will actually have a desired effect. 

And so I think studying history is very valuable for current policy makers and even just for those who are interested in contemporary events.  It is also very important to understand that if you want to understand war, it is extremely important to study military history.  That is actually really the only way that you can do it.  It is the only laboratory that we have for seeing how different things have been tried and different things might have succeeded or failed, and it reflects the fact that there is really nothing new under the sun. 

The truth is there is nothing in war or in human affairs at all that is so novel that there is no historical parallel at all, that there is nothing that has ever happened in the past that could inform our understanding of it.  That is particularly true in something that is as large and complex and as rooted in very fundamental aspects of human nature as warriors.  And so if you want to understand the war that we are in today with all of its complexities, I think it is very important to go back and look at military history and particularly operational military history, the history of battles of campaigns, which has become rather unfashionable these days.  But I really do think that it is a key to our success in the future struggle in the war on terror, that we really do work to obtain a better and better understanding of these things by looking in the first instance at the past. 

Now having defended the study of history and military history in general, the question is why should we study this particular period?  And I think there are very good reasons why it is worth looking at the Napoleonic period in order to gain some insights into the problems that we have today.  This was a period also of fundamental change in the international system and in the world order.  The French Revolution broke out in 1789.  It destroyed the French monarchy and swept in the era of the … well, the first ever really sort of democratic state on the European continent other than Switzerland, and then plunged France first and then Europe into a period of extreme chaos and violence as the French Revolutionaries launched an aggressive war against Austria in 1792.  That war rapidly expanded to include Britain and Prussia and, ultimately, even Russia as it raged on for the next decade. 

When it finally ended in 1800 and 1801, the states of Europe were really tired of war and were extremely exhausted.  And yet even as it was ending in 1799, an upstart general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte in a military coup seized power in France, destroyed the last vestiges of the French Revolution, and embarked on a career that would have the effect of changing the face of Europe.  He posed a dramatic new threat to an order where people were already tired of conflict, were already tired of war, felt that some fundamental sea change was going on in the world because of the ideals that the French Revolution had brought and the threat that it had posed. 

[People] did not really know how to react to it, but wanted to conserve critical elements of their states and their societies and yet try to adapt.  And at this moment, this new threat suddenly emerged and people had to deal with it.  And I think there is a lot that a period like that can tell us that is [indiscernible] to the sorts of challenges that we face today in a world that we see also as changing, to which we have to adapt without losing sight of what we really are. 

The book itself picks up in 1801 with the signing of the peace treaties that ended the first period of revolutionary wars.  And it looks at the unraveling of those treaties over the course of the next four years and the renewal of war, first between France and Britain in 1803, and ultimately between France and a continent-spanning coalition that included Austria, Russia, Sweden and, ultimately, even Prussia, which broke out in 1805. 

It then narrates the course of military operations leading to the battle of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, and then the peace treaties that followed that actually fundamentally changed the nature of Europe.  It looks at this period from the perspective of all of the major players, and this is something that I think is terrifically important because most histories of this period tend to focus on Napoleon, what he was doing, what his attitudes were, and tend to explain events by reference simply to what he did.  But the truth of the matter is that it was at least as important in driving the events of the time, that actually it was the allies who started the war. 

The war begins when the coalition of Austria, Russia, and England attacked Napoleon, not when Napoleon attacks anybody else.  And that is because it actually was the alliance who was the driving force here.  The alliance also did not agree with each other about a lot of things.  Now, I'll talk about that more in a moment.  And so in the research of this book and in the writing of it, I have been very careful to try to present the different perspectives of each individual state and show how they came to conflict in various different ways to generate the complexity and the reality of what actually occurred. 

In addition, as Bill pointed out, the book focuses very heavily on showing the interrelationship between politics and war.  And this is another aspect in which I think it is terrifically important that we look at this history with an eye toward our own problems today.  Politics influences every aspect of war.  It cannot be divorced from any part of military operations at any time.  Politics and diplomacy determines when states go to war.  It determines who their allies will be.  It determines what their objectives will be. 

Given those objectives, it places constraints on what the war plans can be and what sorts of forces can be used.  It then places constraints or encourages action about the use of those forces in maneuver, in battle.  Even on the battlefield, politics has its effect.  As the war comes to an end, politics determines how states react to battlefield victories and defeats, how they negotiate treaties, how they actually sign them, and what the nature of those peace treaties actually are.  There is no point in war at which you can remove the military operations from their political context.  It would seem to many of you to obviously say this, but the amazing thing is that in the study of the Napoleonic period this is not the way most books are written, and you will find a great many explanations which attempt to focus purely on the military operations and focus exclusively on the fighting to explain the outcome of combats and battles and wars, which in fact would determine much more heavily about political matters. 

My other role as a contemporary student of war, I have written about problems that I see developing in American defense transformation programs that also seemed to me to be driving a wedge between politics and more, which I think would be very dangerous.  So I think this is a very good period to look at, to understand, to refresh ourselves on the importance of that.  Now, in addition to those general points, there are two specific features of these wars that I think merit our attention today.  One is the understanding that coalition problems are not new. 

The war of 1805 is commonly called “The War of the Third Coalition.”  Depending on how you count, there were actually six or seven coalitions that fought in the French Revolution, and Napoleon, all of them unsuccessful except for the last.  Their lack of success in previous wars and their ultimate success highlights the enormous difficulty in bringing together coalitions of disparate states with disparate interests even to fight such an apparently overwhelming enemy as Napoleon.  The study of how those coalitions came together, the problems that they had, and how they ultimately overcame those problems I think offers us a lot of insight for how we should be thinking about forming our alliances today and managing those that we have. 

In addition - and now I'm going to get to the point that I'm going to focus on today - rogue states are not new either.  And I would like to spend awhile inviting you to consider Napoleonic France as a rogue state and see what lessons we can learn about that in general that might have some applicability to our current situation in dealing with the couple of rogue states that will come to mind.  In the first place, Napoleon had no plan of conquest. 

Napoleon never set out to conquer Europe.  He did not have in mind aping the successes of Alexander the Great, or Caesar, or anybody else.  The only clear objective Napoleon ever followed in his day was the destruction of Great Britain, either military or economically or both, and there simply is no evidence to support any other conclusion than that.  Nevertheless, he was terrifically subversive of the international order.  If he had not been stopped, he would have destroyed the world order of his time completely and replaced it with something else. 

Why is that?  Well, Britain was Napoleon’s principal enemy largely for historical reasons.  The French had been taught to hate the British since at least the 15th century. And if you watch French-British soccer matches you can see that this persists.  And also for practical reasons, the British were getting in his way.  Napoleon wanted to reestablish the French overseas empire that had been lost in the course of the 18th century.  The Royal Navy maybe was preventing that.  Napoleon wanted a larger share of world trade.  Britain was the dominant economic power in the world, and so both for historical and practical reasons, Britain was the main enemy. 

At that time, Britain was something of a super power.  The Royal Navy really was unchallenged and almost unchallengeable, and the British really could pretty much do whatever they wanted at sea, and that meant also outside of Europe, and therefore, the British undertook to define international law, especially economic law and the law of the sea, in a way that suited them very well.  It did not suit Napoleon well.  Napoleon, therefore, came to see basically the idea of international law of his day as being a ruse to support British imperialism.  He, therefore, disregarded it, and he took an approach in the world that really ignored international law and international norms, and he relied on the enormous military power of France to underwrite this policy. 

But it is important to understand that Napoleon was not simply cynical here.  It is not that he thought that he was behaving badly and he was doing it anyway because he thought he could get away with it, or because he thought there was no such thing as international norms and he simply did not care.  It is because he thought he was right; he thought his cause was just.  He thought that the British were being despotic and imperialistic and bad, and he thought that his opposition to them was virtuous. 

This is an extremely important feature of his character.  Among other things, it meant that he constantly expected that the other states of Europe would come to his aid because he believed that Britain’s despotic and unjust rule of the oceans must be as harmful and galling to them as it was to him, and therefore his opposition to Britain would surely rouse their support.  He was, therefore, in my view very much more dangerous than a rogue state that is simply opportunistic, or a rogue state that does not care about international norms, because his conviction of his justice and his belief that the international system will ultimately support him lent incredible support and enthusiasm to his aggressiveness and made it very difficult for anyone to show him they should not be doing what it was that he was actually doing. 

In addition, because he rejected international law and international norms of his day, it was impossible really for anyone to negotiate with him successfully because the negotiations… and between 1801 and 1805 all of the continental states and Britain continually engaged Napoleon in a series of negotiations.  The negotiations were aimed at bringing him into the international system, getting him to agree to be bound by international norms of a certain variety, but he rejected those very norms, and he rejected the validity of the demands they were being made on him. 

How can you negotiate with someone like that?  Well, the answer is you cannot.  And so, Napoleon would negotiate but was also continually using his military power to change the situation to his advantage, ultimately convincing his would-be coalition partners that he was not, in fact, negotiable.  In the end, Napoleon really could only be dealt with by force.  That was the only thing that was going to be effective with him.  As long as he continued to feel that he was able to do things that he wanted to, he was going to continue to do them, and talking with him was not going to resolve the problem. 

It is interesting to ask why was Napoleon wrong about the degree of support that he was going to have in the international systems since it was in fact somewhat unjust.  The British did do things rather arbitrarily and had created a system of international law that favored them and harmed others.  And Napoleon repeatedly commented on this.  At one point in 1804, he said, “I find everywhere an unfortunate tendency to interpret badly everything that emanates from me that I never find when it comes to England.  She oppresses everyone’s commerce and everyone is silent.  I occupy a village and everyone cries out.”  It is the cry of the rogue state.  Why are you doing this to me?  Why are you discriminating against me?  They are being bad, I'm being bad, and you are only yelling at me. 

Well, part of the answer was provided exclusively by a Prussian foreign minister in 1806, Karl August von Hardenberg, who declared, “The English monopoly is an evil without doubt.  But we must remember that English commerce gives birth through industry and favors culture, that it supports them rather than repressing them.  England resembles a great merchant in the midst of a large number of smaller ones, and of workers to whom it gives work.  Britain’s despotism of the sea should be checked, but the complete destruction of England would be cruelly felt by contemporaries and even by the generations immediately succeeding them if in its place the despotism of iron, destructive of all true culture and of the well-being of humanity, weighed upon the world.” 

It is a pretty enlightened attitude, but it was something that was pretty obvious to most of the other crowned heads of Europe at that time and many of their peoples.  The fact is that whatever the justice or injustice of the international order of the day, it suited the interests of states and their leaders rather well.  It generated relative prosperity.  It gave states the opportunity to compete economically on a reasonably level playing field.  It maintained a certain kind of peace, order, and stability that was necessary for trade to flourish. 

And so even if the British exercised their power and shaped the state in a way that suited them better than others, the overall net result was to benefit the international community as a whole.  Therefore, when Napoleon started focusing on the injustice of the system in the process of attempting to destroy it, the other states of Europe looked upon this hostile and tend to generally rally to the side of the British even while condemning policies that the British pursued that they did not like.  The allied powers were quite right to decide that they had to oppose Napoleon by force. 

The British obviously made a decision first since they were in the front rank of states that were threatened by Napoleon.  And there was a period from 1801 to 1803 when Napoleon and the British tried to negotiate the details of the peace settlement that worked out.  Napoleon stuck carefully to the letter of the law, the treaty that he had signed, but he continued to violate their spirit.  The British for their part stuck to the letter in spirit as much as they could, but when they became convinced that Napoleon really did not intend actually to abide by the spirit, they broke the letter and they refused to evacuate the island of Malta which they had been obligated to do by a treaty.  When Napoleon made it clear that he was going to continue pushing on this issue, the British government declared war on him.  They started it, and the Royal Navy rather swiftly swept the French Navy from the seas and took back a bunch of colonies, and scored rather an impressive victory. 

Because the British had, from Napoleon’s perspective, so clearly put themselves in the wrong by violating the treaty and then declaring war on him, he expected that there would be considerable continental support behind him, and he looked particularly to Czar Alexander of Russia who had taken power in 1801 to come to his aid.  But Napoleon also reacted to the British declaration and attack by reoccupying territories in Italy and Germany that he had occupied prior to the signing of the treaty.  His argument in international was simple:  Well, I gave them up because we signed the treaty.  You just broke the treaty, therefore, I can take them back. 

The problem was that in the course of the collapse of the peace treaty, Alexander had also been noticing the same thing that the British had and had also been coming to the conclusion that Napoleon was a threat to the international order, and therefore he tended to view these reoccupations of territory as aggressions and indications of Napoleon’s ambition to occupy more territory.  He therefore turned against Napoleon and began to try to think about ways of checking Napoleon.  The problem was that although Britain and Russia were, in a certain sense, European super powers of the day, they did not have a border with France. 

The English Channel separates Britain from France.  And above all, since Britain does not have a large army than [indiscernible], there was not a lot they can do by themselves, and Russia is far away from France.  They needed to get either Austria or Prussia, states with proximate borders to France, to join them in order for anything actually to happen.  But it is one thing for a state far removed from a rogue state to decide that military opposition and the risk of war is necessary.  It is something very different for the neighbors of that rogue state to make that decision, because they have to worry about the possibility that they will receive the first blow from the rogue state when it realizes that it is going to be attacked, and then they have to worry about how long they will have to sustain the fight all on their own. 

Will the allies who promised them help actually send it?  Will it arrive in time?  Will it be sufficient?  If things go badly, will the distant allies stay the course, or will they abandon these hapless neighbors to their fate?  In addition, because of their geographical precision, both Austria and Prussia had to be almost as worried about the possibility of Russian hegemony as of French hegemony.  And they had to wonder, “If we help the Russians destroy France completely, will we not then be putting ourselves entirely in the hands of the Russians and at their mercy?” 

All of this tends to complicate their thinking and tended to make it harder for them to come to the decision to risk war.  They came to that decision because Napoleon continued to make a series of provocations that ended up persuading them that the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of action.  It is interesting to note that Napoleon had no such intention. 

Napoleon did not mean to fight a war on the continent in 1805.  In 1805, he was preparing an army to invade Britain, but he conducted operations in Italy and in Germany, which he regarded as his spheres of influence, attempting to rationalize them and to create them in an image that suited him.  He did not think about what the effect of these actions would be on Austria or Prussia because he did not think it concerned them.  That was his sphere of influence.  What he did not recognize was demonstrating that that was his sphere of influence and that they had nothing to say about what was going on immediately on their borders was actually a mortal threat to states that were already living in fear of Napoleon’s possible aggressions. 

And so, once again, Napoleon’s inability to understand the perspective of the states that he was dealing with led him to undertake actions without thinking about the consequences that actually drew him into a war that he did not mean to fight, although it is important to emphasize at all times that even though Napoleon did not mean to fight a war in the continent, he was perfectly willing to do so if the Austrians and Prussians, the Russians undertook steps that he regarded as unacceptable. 

As it became clear to the Austrians and the Prussians that Napoleon really was tilting the balance of power against them, they decided that they needed to join with the Russians in opposing him.  They did so late, they did so tentatively, and they did so with tremendous mistrust.  The result was an extremely weak coalition because it was very hard for anyone at that time to know just how big a military threat Napoleon actually was.  Remember, he had only been in power since 1799.  He was known to be a very talented general, but he had never put himself at the head of all of France’s armies and started a war and run it all by himself.  No one really knew what he would do. 

And it is important as we study the Napoleonic period not to read our own knowledge of Napoleon back into 1805.  Most of our understanding of him comes from after that period.  He was unknown.  They can be forgiven for not understanding just how vast was the threat he really posed and for believing that their own internal problems, their own concerns with each other, their own worries about what other members of the alliance might do or how they might take advantage of the situation were in a certain sense reasonable. 

But they did create very serious fractures within the coalition, which actually had ripple effects all the way down to the tactical level, and it gets down to the point where uncertain battles, the actions of a few thousand soldiers on one side or the other are actually determined in part by these inter-allied tensions and mistrust - one of the classic examples of how you cannot divorce politics even from the tactical level of war.  In part as a result of this, and in part as a result of Napoleon’s genius, the war goes very badly for the allies.  In the course of a few months, Napoleon destroys first Austria, and then a combined Austria-Russian army at Austerlitz. 

Now, as I argue, when you look at the situation after the battle of Austerlitz, the truth is that the allies were still in a pretty good spot.  They outnumbered Napoleon overall and there were hundreds and thousands of allied troops converging on bedraggled and exhausted French army even though it was victorious on the battlefield.  But the inter-allied mistrust was so great that instead of hanging on and trying to retrieve the situation, the allies allowed Napoleon to bully them into a series of separate pieces. 

Napoleon’s diplomacy is as worthy of study as his military operations, and it has not received enough attention.  In fact, he approached the problem in very similar ways.  As I argue in the book, the same sort of conceptual techniques he uses in war, he also transposes into diplomacy.  They are very effective techniques for forcing people to agree to treaties that he dictates.  The problem is that that is an international order that rests on the continued use of force, and because Napoleon did not understand the perspectives of the other states he was dealing with, the treaties that he continually imposed on them were unacceptable to them. 

This is why you have continued warfare after 1805.  It is not because of any Napoleonic plan for conquest.  It is not because he is dissatisfied with the part of Europe he has and wants more.  He always envisions every war that he is fighting as the last war and then he is done.  The problem is that the treaties he imposed are intolerable and require over the long run the other state to attempt to revise them, which they do.  And this, of course, in the end is why Napoleon loses since he has never been able to create a stable order that the rest of Europe finds tolerable.  They keep fighting until they learn how to defeat him. 

And as I will argue in the other three volumes of this series, which will be coming out in a few years, in fact it is this political lesson that they learn on how to be good coalition partners, about the need to subordinate all of their disagreements and other interests to the overwhelming requirement to face this overwhelming threat that actually leads to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat in 1814, and then again in 1815. 

Now, before I turn it over to Bill, there are a couple of points that I would like to make about the general lessons that we can draw for today about dealing with rogue states.  First of all, there are different kinds of rogue states and it is important to understand that.  There are rogue states that are simply opportunistic predators who do not generally believe that the international order is bad, but do believe that they can break the law for a while and get away with it, and then go back to being normal members of international community.  Those kinds of guys can be very dangerous, but it is also a lot more easy to deal with them, to bring them back into an international order that they do not reject. 

And then there are sort of anarchist states, states that just do not believe in any international order at all.  Those states can be very problematic and very dangerous, but they also tend to be - there are not very many of them – cajoleable.  You are much more likely to be able to persuade a state like that that it really should come into the fold because it pays too high a price for being outside since it does not necessarily have an ideological opposition to the international order. 

The most dangerous states in my view are those that actually actively reject the current international order and argue that it is unjust and believe that it should be subverted and destroyed, because those states you cannot negotiate with them.  Efforts of negotiation are efforts at bringing them into a system they reject.  There is not even a basis for discussion when you are dealing with that kind of problem.  You can try to persuade if the system is unjust, but people do not really work that way. 

So in the end, those states really can only be dealt with by force, either its use or its threat.  Your only real prospect with those states is to convince them that they will lose if they pursue the course of action that they are in, that it is hopeless, that it will lead to their own destruction or serious defeat, and therefore that they better give it up.  But you are not going to get anywhere just trying to bring them into the fold. 

It is also important to understand that in an international order that is generally peaceful, most of the states in that order are going to see this as beneficial.  That means that they are not generally going to line up with the rogue.  The rogue states are probably not going to be able to crystallize a lot of support of the international community behind the destruction of the international order.  That does not mean that all of those states are going to flock to the cause of the hegemony that is actually leading, but it does mean that you are going to have a certain polarization in favor of the defense of the international order that is sort of a background. 

Why do the neighbors act badly sometimes when you want them to be firm against the rogue?  Because it is very dangerous to be the neighbor, because it is dangerous to be in the frontline, and we have to be very careful to respect the perspectives of states that are immediately threatened by rogue states that we want to control. 

And lastly, what happens when a rogue state wins as they sometimes do?  The answer is they tend to create an order in their region, which is violent, unstable, relies on the continued use of force, and also tends to generate a backlash.  And one of the astonishing things about European history is that over the past 300 or 400 years, a variety of attempts of destroying the international order and replacing it with something more despotic have all failed.  It has been a terrifically resilient order.  It still is in my view, and I think it is still important to understand that. 

And therefore, I think it is important for us to think about the last remaining question.  The rogue state is probably going to lose, but it can do an enormous amount of damage before it does, and this is another thing that you can see in the history of the past few hundred years.  If you let the rogue state develop the power to begin to dominate its region, the cost of actually defeating it becomes enormous.  And that is why I think one of the other lessons we get from the Napoleonic period is the importance of nipping these sorts of threats in the bud before they become dangerous enough to be very, very costly. 

And with that, I'll turn it over to Bill.

William Kristol:  Well, thanks for a very interesting talk and I simply recommend to people go out and buy the book.  If you are getting the normal intern salary here in Washington, you can get an installment plan for the … just be a couple of years early and I'm sure your credit will be good and your… [indiscernible] book store.  Now, it is really both a very nicely produced book as I said, and a very interesting book.  It is good. 

I like the idea that Napoleon and the events of 200 years ago are alive in the United States.  I would say reading the book, I was struck by how much… that is not a hard thing to believe, that one can learn useful lessons from reading this 200-year-old history and what was obviously a very different world.  I think the French understand that Napoleon is alive.  They in fact keep him alive so to speak.  Villepin, the current French Prime Minister who I think [indiscernible] foreign minister, wrote an [indiscernible] biography of Napoleon that I think discusses some of his poetry, which I cannot I personally read.  But I wonder maybe it was just an idiosyncrasy of Dominique de Villepin. 

But then I got an e-mail – this is true – this morning from a young man I have met once or twice.  He has spent several months at another think-tank as an intern here in Washington from Paris.  He came over here to do some work and as I say, I really do not know him much.  I met him once or twice, but he somehow heard of this panel.  He must have seen the fire from the AEI, which was entitled, “The View from a Rouge State:  What Napoleon Can Tell Us About Dealing with Iran,” and he was moved to send me an e-mail. 

“Dear Mr. Kristol, I send you a couple of pages of thoughts on Napoleon as I disagree with the subject of tonight’s conference.”  Without even hearing you, he is very upset by the “comparison with Iran and a rogue state with all its flaws that the Napoleonic Empire was the first to experiment of a regime devoted to the defense of universal freedom.  They can be argued in this respect that France was at that time the ancestor of the United States, a hope for oppressed peoples around the world. 

I thus think Napoleon is very much misunderstood in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially in the US, and it cannot be in any way compared at today’s rogue regime such as Iran.”  It is actually wonderful that young Frenchmen are sort of still inspired by… even a mere title of a panel discussion that has not happened yet provokes this very intelligent and thoughtful young man to send me a long … the attachment is actually quite an intelligent 2,000-word essay elaborating on this point. 

Fred had not known about it until I just mentioned it, but you took his advice by not mentioning Iran in any case, which is probably wise as people can draw their own conclusions about the comparisons and relevant comparisons and analogies.  I will make five points really quickly.  First, one thing that is very useful about this book and about Fred’s talk is that it is good to think about history that is not a 20th century history.  I do think in the current war since September 11, 2001, there have been an awful lot of people, me among them, who have compared the current moments to the early years of the Cold War, who have compared Bush to Truman.  I think that is a good comparison, who interpreted Truman in certain ways, who challenged the interpretations of Truman. 

We had a piece in The Weekly Standard, a regular piece by Noemie Emery just a week or two ago challenging this sort of liberal soft power, a counter-Truman, and reporting out that he was a pretty tough guy who dropped atomic weapons on Japan and committed us to a war of choice in Korea, one that did not go so well either.  But anyway, there have been plenty of disputes about how to think about the Cold War, what the relevant analogies are to the Cold War, plenty of invocations of the 30s, and whether we were appeasing the rogue state of Iran, for example, in ways somewhat analogous to the appeasement of the 30s.  But I think 95 percent of the history and a lot of these analogies have been useful and thought-provoking and interesting I think. 

And the debates about whether the analogies are apt and about the true understanding of the historical sequences and periods have been useful and interesting.  But it is good to go beyond just a few decades and to think more broadly, to use history more broadly to instruct us.  The 20th century is not only the model for how the world can be organized.  In some ways the Cold War in particular is an extremely unusual period: very stable alliances, a bi-polar world, nuclear confrontation with proxy states fighting, and it may be that we will end up in something like that in the early part of the 21st century. 

It could well be, and I would even say it will be more likely that we do not end up in a world that looks much like that, or maybe a war that looks much like the 20s and 30s.  There, that analogy has some maybe greater instinctive appeal, sort of a holiday from history followed by a belated awakening.  But it could be there were much more like the world of this turbulent time from 1789 to 1850 or 1801 to 1815, depending on how one thinks about it. 

So I would just say that it is useful to go back further as there are many other important historical periods and events which one can also compare the current moment to, and from which one could learn a lot, but good to break out of the sort of monopoly of the 20th century, and particularly the two big events of the 20th century - World War II and then the Cold War; I think the two biggest events of the 20th century perhaps only for us.  So I think the early 19th century in this case is very much worth looking at. 

One lesson I do take from reading this history and one reason why it somewhat resonated for me in thinking about the current moment is the amazing - and Fred certainly touched on this talk - fluidity and volatility of those four years that you described in this book, but let's say the 25 years from 1790 to 1815.  I mean at no point, let's say the 30 years from 1785 to 1815, I would say at no point in those 30 years could any sensible, irrational person have predicted what the world would look like, what the international political situation would have been five years hence, or maybe even three years hence.  So we now take the French Revolution for granted.  It was not expected at that time once it happened.  Its implications were unexpected to say the least. 

Burke was really alone in 1790 in thinking that this was one of the most momentous events in world history.  But then people finally got a [indiscernible] at the French Revolution and did not expect it to collapse in a sense, or to be transformed by the Napoleonic takeover and establish a dictatorship.  And then as Fred just suggested even in these four years, they were shifting coalitions.  We tend to think, I do it in a very simple, not knowing too much about this history.  It is a simple way that they … it was Napoleon on the rampage and these sort of other regimes allied against them, but that was not the case.  The alliance has changed, and they change very quickly actually, and Napoleon’s fortunes waxed and waned, et cetera, so it is very good. 

And the Cold War, of course, is in a way the opposite.  It was a little more volatile than we now think, but even so it is basically correct to say that for 40 years the basic lines withdrawn, the character of the major puppet regimes of the major players did not change much.  So the Union was communist at the beginning and communist until it ended, and we were liberal democratic at the beginning and liberal democratic when it ended, and our allies were mostly the same nations from the beginning to the end, et cetera.  But that is one model for how the world could go for a few decades.  It is by no means the only one.  The extreme, as I say, fluidity, volatility, unpredictability of these 25 or 30 years may turn out to be a better “model,” if you want to use that word, more usefully thought-provoking in trying to think about the current situation we face. 

In particular, I'm struck by the extent to which we are confronting an enemy.  It may not turn out to be the enemy incidentally of the 21st century or even at the next 10 or 20 years, but for now it is a pretty interesting and serious enemy, Islamic Jihadism or radical Islamism or whoever wants to call it, that no one much thought would be a major enemy seven years ago, certainly not 15 years ago.  And just as the French Revolution was unexpected and Napoleon was unexpected, I think the number of people have thought that a French Emperor would be sort of barreling through Europe and into Russia and threatening to overturn the world order in 1785 was no one, basically.  And then, as I say, the course was itself unpredictable. 

So I think it is a useful reminder of the character of a volatile and unpredictable era and, in a sense, one volatile enough to get [indiscernible] that leads to another, that if you get into this kind of era it is not usually there is one big surprise, and then everything else sort of plays out in a normal way.  There is one big surprise, and then there are a whole bunch of subsequent surprises because the billiard balls get broken up and start to ricochet off each other and all kinds of things start to change. 

That seems to me to characterize the last five years.  And the pace of surprises and the pace of change do not necessarily slow down.  It could speed up, actually, and that may also be the moment we are living in.  So that is one just sort of possible lesson one can draw off from looking at this period that Fred writes about. 

A second possible lesson, the only other that I'll mention, I was struck in the very short introduction Fred has in setting the stage for the developments of 1801 to 1805, key points at how important to understand what happened then in the Napoleonic wars was the fact that Britain had established naval and maritime supremacy prior to this period.  I grew up, I spent a few years of my youth in Britain and I have some reason, as a very young kid, to read the biography of Lord Nelson and he was a great hero.  I want to believe that [indiscernible] was this fantastically important victory, but Fred says, in fact, that Great Britain or British maritime supremacy was pretty well-established before then and this just simply confirmed it.  Russia had a good couple of decades in the late 19th century under Catherine II and, of course, it was in a way the British and Russians’ strength that was established before Napoleon was emperor or came to power before even anyone knew about Napoleon, before even he was alive in some sense or in some case, and I guess to some degree, that it was these decisions by these other powers, and especially British maritime supremacy, that made it possible to defeat Napoleon. 

So the lesson I draw from that is you do not know what threats are coming, but if you are the guarantor of international order as Britain was to some degree, and if you are particularly with the guarantor on one area of naval supremacy, and if you think it is important to maintain the ability to beat that threat, you do not know what the threats are going to be.  But it turned out to be extremely useful for Britain and for others as well that Britain has established this maritime supremacy to sort of guard against any possible rising threat. 

Those who spent the 90’s arguing, as Fred did in the book that Bob Kagan and I edited, “Present Dangers in 2000,” that we were wasting a decade when we could really build up a more formidable supremacy militarily that will deter enemies.  I think there is a lesson there and still a lesson, but one still does not know, in fact, the idea that we know all the threats, or that the one rogue state we might be most focused on today is going to be the rogue state of 10 years from now, is just not the case.  So that is the other lesson I take from my… of some quick… just giving a couple of minutes thought to this period. 

We will just make two final comments.  The first is actually a caution against drawing lessons too simple-mindedly for many periods.  You know analogies are analogies, and historical lessons are historical lessons, and most periods have many possible lessons.  Some analogies are helpful and some are misleading, and these things can be taken in many, many different ways.  [indiscernible] were talking about this panel just an hour or two ago, and just talking about Napoleon a little bit and sharing all of our very limited knowledge of this topic, and someone suggested that I'll make a big case since Fred has written many articles for us, and we have editorialized many times.  We do not have enough troops in Iraq and that we were too scared of having sort of a light footprint, that we did not suppress the insurgency. 

I can make the point that Napoleon was not a light footprint kind of guy, and he would have sent enough troops into Iraq.  And then someone else pointed out there that on the other hand, maybe that would invite comparisons in all the troops he sent to Russia and I should not embrace a Napoleonic model here, [indiscernible] Napoleon as the rogue state, not the defender of the law and order in this analogy so it has to be careful.  But I mean the point is analogies are analogies and they are limited.  I mean, it is very important [indiscernible] history and think about the lessons of history, but it is obviously most important to also focus on the actual situation we are confronted and not be at all mechanistic or silly about applying these conclusions. 

And there has been a fair amount of that, I would say, in the last few years because Reagan ran the Cold War without firing a shot, we can win whether the war we are in without firing a shot, or because, to take the opposite argument, because appeasement was terrible.  These are actions [sounds like] in the 30s and never made sense to take the can down the road and use diplomacy in dealing with aggressive states.  So, one just has to be careful with drawing any kind of easy or ironclad lessons from studying history. 

But having said that, I think the study of history is very interesting and thought-provoking as I said earlier.  I think in particular, going outside the Cold War paradigm, outside the experience with the 30s and having a broader range of history to draw from, and a broader range of international events to think about is one of the great contributions that this book can make to us Americans whom, unlike the French, are not living everyday with Napoleon or early 19th century European history. 

I would also say the same … I'll just say parenthetically, I taught a course at Harvard as [indiscernible] on the history of American foreign policy.  There are many more lessons in American foreign policy that people realized, from the 19th century and even from the founding period, I would say.  This notion that we were an isolationist power and that everything that happened before 1898 has no relevance to America as a great power is just wrong, I think. 

Indeed, Michael Lauren and other persons who combine history and political history and military history has a book coming out on history of US policy in the Middle East, which is full of interesting analogies, thought-provoking comparisons to the current moment.  And that brings me to my final point, which is something Fred has said that I just want to echo.  It is really important to integrate as much understanding as we can have of military affairs with politics, with economics, with diplomacy, and it is really a shame that the academy has sort of relegated military history to a backburner, but it has actually kicked it off the stove altogether and there are no burners. 

I think this is literally true at Harvard.  I mean I do not recall there being military history courses.  The closest is something like Steve Rosen in political science who teaches history of war, which is a very good course actually, but in a way it has buckled in under the guise of political science.  And there is something crazy, if you think about it for a minute, that you can understand world history, American history, and European history without understanding the actual battles and wars that helped shape that history, without integrating the study of politics, economics, and war.  And if the academy is not going to do this, then people who are outside the academy, the think tanks, should do this. 

Really, one of the great virtues of this book … and there are really rather a few books like this, I do think Michael Lauren would be another example.  The great virtue is it gives one a sense of how to think about the complicated interrelationship of politics, diplomacy, economics, and actual war.  We all need to become better.  I'm afraid the 21st century will not be a century which history will have ended.  It will not be a century of universal peace and brotherhood.  That seems like a safe bet. 

I can hazard one.  Maybe ultimately it will be, but not in the next few years and, therefore, war will not go away and learning about war for me is a very important task for all of us, I think. [indiscernible, audio skips]

Frederick W. Kagan:  No, no.  I agree fully especially with the last point, which I'm glad Bill drove home as I forgot to, the extreme importance of studying operational military history.  I'm going to make a gesture of brotherly love in just a minute.  But first, I'm going to tell you there are few copies of this book for sale outside and you can get it readily at Amazon.com.  We will give you a pretty nice discount on it.  But if you are interested in the history of American foreign policy and argument along the lines that Bill laid out, my brother has a book called “The Dangerous Nation,” which will be coming out in October, and he owes me a lot for this ad. 

Let's go directly to your questions and thoughts rather than my rambling on some more.

 Male Voice:  Fred, there is a community that studies military history widely and in-depth, and that is the professional officers in the military.  Do you believe, with your background teaching at West Point, that those lessons that the professional military officers should have been learning since 1986 … or before 1986 being the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the requirement for all officers to have professional military education before they got promoted to five rank.  Do you think that we really missed an opportunity there, or did officers not take into account that reading of history when we went in to Iraq, and did not, at least in my estimation, adapt to the counter insurgency needs of that particular operation? 

The second question is: Do you think that Napoleon in Spain is probably a better analogy to look at than, say, Templar in Malaya?

 Frederick W. Kagan:  Let me handle the second part of that question. In general terms, yes.  Napoleon in Spain is a very interesting case, but we can have a long conversation about the limitations of the Malaya example.  In general terms, one of the principal lessons to take away from there is anytime you can fight a counter-insurgency, either on an island or on a peninsula where you have maritime supremacy, it is a good idea to do that.  When you cannot do that it is going to be a lot harder. 

In Spain, you can look at a lot of interesting examples of bad counter-insurgency practice, but Napoleon was not paying a whole lot of attention to Spain and there was a lot that was dysfunctional in the way that he was doing that.  So you did not even really see Napoleon’s best effort there in many respects.  It is an interesting case, and I’m certainly going to explore it.  But I’m not sure what that is going to tell us in particular about what we should do in Iraq. 

The first part of the question is very important and very dear to my heart.  I think that good things have happened in professional military education over the past 20 years, but not enough has happened from the standpoint of the study of military history.  In general, I think that reflects a tendency in professional military education to value the engineering mind-set over humanistic studies.  And this bleeds over, in my view, into the way war is studied in the professional military education system as well.  There is still a tendency to look at principles of war, which is a very mechanistic way of trying to devise general rules that if you follow them they will always hold true. 

There is a tendency in a military, which is very worried about civilian control not to study the interconnections between politics and military operations in war.  It was a continual frustration of mine, and [indiscernible] topic History of Military Art Course at West Point, that we tended to give little or no political background, let alone a discussion of political operations or political activities, during wars.  And we tended to focus exclusively on military operations. 

I think that sort of exclusive focus on military operations divorced from their political context probably has contributed to failures of imagination in thinking about the current war and the difficulties that the military has had thinking properly about how to deal with political complexities even during military operations.  We should know the military is very much thinking about politics now in Iraq.  And it is very much thinking about how Iraqi politics interacts with what it is doing.  But I would suggest that, for most officers, this is a fairly new way of thinking.  They would have been better prepared for this conflict if they had been wrestling with the complexities that emerged from this all along, rather than having to confront it as a new problem when the stakes were very high and the situation was already very complicated. 

I think it would be worth re-looking the way we teach military history in particular and history in general in our professional military education program.  As Bill pointed out, there is a tremendous virtue in studying non-American history because we have vested interest in our US history.  There is no part of American history that you can teach cadets where one or more of them do not have a powerful opinion about how it came out, and not only a powerful opinion, but a powerful emotional commitment to it. 

If you ever want to see this, just start talking about the Battle of Shiloh with a bunch of cadets, or name your civil war battle.  I think there is enormous value in finding examples that we do not have anything invested in, where we can look at more objectively. 

William Kristol:  Let me just add a word as layman who has spoken a few times at the War Colleges and has friends who have taught at the service academy in the War Colleges.  I’m very impressed by how tough the military is on itself, on its failures of education and alleged failures, to some degree, of performance that might be due to not having thought through some of these tasks, and how tough, in a way, civilians who have been involved in military education are on themselves and on how eager they are to improve the military education that is offered both to cadets and also officers, obviously, at the War Colleges and elsewhere.  But I would just say this as someone who has watched [indiscernible] and has friends who have been involved in this. 

The military is more serious about teaching its responsible officials military history than almost any other part of our government is about teaching their responsible officials political history.  The truth is you can have a more sophisticated discussion of the kind you just mentioned using analogies: “Is it like Spain?” “Is it like Malaysia?”  You pick up the journals, and this is endlessly and very quickly discussed.  You look at Parameters in 2004 and they were already worried about are we understanding your [indiscernible] correctly and have we learned the lessons of the British, et cetera. 

Without white-washing or sugar-coating the limitations and failures, perhaps, of military education - I defer to others who would know much more about that than I, I wish there was as much seriousness in our civilian leaders’ attempts to understand the history of international politics and American politics, and what might work and what does not work.  The military get, perhaps, blamed a little more than they should by comparison with others who do not even think it is worth making the effort.  I think in that respect military education will be improved if there is a real understanding of its importance, which I wish there was more of in our general public culture, but also among civilian leaders for that matter, and elsewhere. 

William Kristol:  Next question.  Yes sir.

Alex Peterson:  Thanks.  Alex Peterson, CSS.  I’m speaking about the relationship between politics and military operations. It seems to me that in talking about that you have to bring up Karl Von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”  We have been talking about the importance of military history and education, but I wonder what you think about military theory in education, and particularly about Clausewitz’s ideas and their applicability to today’s kind of warfare.

Frederick W. Kagan:  That is a great question.  I am glad that you gave me the opportunity to say that in addition to teaching operational military history, it is tremendously important to teach military theory.  Clausewitz is a fascinating figure, of course. I find him particularly fascinating because he drew much of his inspiration and thoughts about war from the wars that I am studying.  He was not a terrifically good historian of those wars, actually.  If you look at his accounts of a lot of these campaigns, they are badly flawed.  But he was a brilliant theorist, and he has a lot to offer not just those who are interested in war but those who are interested in thinking about human affairs, because it is important to understand that the technical and technological aspects of war are in many respects infinitely less important than the enduring human qualities of it. 

You understand war a lot better if you understand how people at all levels behave and operate in war, than if you understand the technical specifications of weapon systems.  And that is why military theory is informative for war, generally.  It is why what Clausewitz writes is still relevant, as opposed to what military theorists of the time who focused on technology wrote. 

There was a famous fortress designer named Vaubin who lived in the 17th century, wrote a lot, had a huge impact on warfare.  No one reads Vaubin anymore because the problem is not protecting fortifications from round shot artillery shells anymore.  It is not helpful.  But we do still read Clausewitz and we read him because his insights are not based on technicalities at all.  They are based on the way people are, and it is really, really important to have that insight.  I do think it would enrich the discussion enormously if we could have some sophisticated studies of Clausewitz work their way back into America’s colleges and universities.  It is very important when you are approaching Clausewitz, again, to approach it in a humanistic, complex way. 

I almost had a heart attack once when I went up to a professional military educational institution and I saw a poster on the wall that said, “Clausewitz in A Nutshell,” and then listed sort of 10 principles.  I thought he is spinning in his grave.  It is just that the whole notion of Clausewitz destroyed that way thinking.  And that is what I think is so important about Clausewitz - he requires you to embrace war in its complexity.  That was sort of a starting point for my project, trying to write a history worthy of Clausewitz’s understanding of these things.  I hope that I have succeeded.

Marc Plattner:  I’m Marc Plattner, Journal of Democracy.  I wonder if you could clarify somewhat the concept of a rogue state, perhaps by giving some examples.  Can a state that begins as a rogue state mellow and accept the international order?  How you would characterize the Soviet Union over its 70-year history?  What you would say about Communist China in that regard.  Are they rogue states?  Did they start out that way and cease to be?

Frederick W. Kagan:  It is easier to answer the first part of your question than the second part.  A rogue state by my definition is one that puts itself outside the accepted international order.  That is why Napoleonic France is a rogue state, North Korea and Iran are purely rogue state and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a rogue state.  They rejected the international order and sought to destroy it in critical ways. 

The Soviet Union is a very complicated example.  By rhetoric and principle the Soviet Union was a rogue state.  Communist ideology says that the international order is inherently evil and must be destroyed, and that is the aim.  There were times in their history when the Soviets behaved in accord with that ideology and did act like a rogue state.  But the characteristic of the Soviet leadership for most of the history of the Soviet Union was incredibly cautious and conservative.  As a result, it acted much more like an opportunistic predator within an international system than one that was actually determined to destroy the international system. 

Frankly, I’m not going to speak to China because I’m not a Chinese expert and I do not know enough about it to characterize what their behavior has been but I think probably in the case of the Soviet Union, you had a rouge state that masqueraded for a while into something that was not a rogue state and behaved in a rather funny way.  Can a rogue state stop being one?  Offhand, I cannot think of an example that did not involve a regime change.  The Soviet Union stopped being a rouge state when the Soviet Union fell. 

Napoleonic France stopped being a rouge state when Napoleon was deposed.  So far there is no indication that North Korea or Iran can be brought into the fold without changes of regime in those countries.  We will see.  I do not know.  I’m not sure if there is a hard and fast principle here but I think that history would suggest that it probably requires a fundamental change in the nature of the regime.

William Kristol:  A footnote that it occurs to me is that obviously they are rogue states.  The rogue state category [indiscernible] category itself, but also in the history of rogue states, or quasi-rogue states, they presumably are more or less roguish sort of people – there are periods of quiet, that is, a peaceful, happy, third marriage, and then they go back to roguishness after the divorce. 

I was struck by this because someone just alluded in the column to… well, we [sounds like] even contain Stalin’s Russia.  But the truth is, the international order with Stalin’s Russia was different from the international order with Khrushchev’s Russia, and was different from Brezhnev’s Soviet Union… I should say Soviet Union, probably, rather than Russia in this case.  There was no regime change exactly in those cases, but there was a change of leadership. You could always argue a quasi-regime change in some of those cases. 

Certainly one of those changes from Khrushchev to Brezhnev was in part at least precipitated by internal worry in the Soviet Union that Khrushchev’s roguishness or belligerency or recklessness had almost cost a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis 1962, when there was a sense that this was not the way they wanted to go.  It also suggests that standing up to a rogue state can either precipitate conflict, obviously, if the state is really aggressive and reckless - 1939 with Nazi Germany - or can lead to reconsiderations within the regime to make them less reckless and, maybe, ultimately lead to regime change.

In some ways, I would argue that Gorbachev’s own calculations after 1985 had something to do with US policy in the early mid-80’s under Reagan, and, therefore a sense of the futility of pursuing the path they were going, et cetera.  So I think actually the notion of - this is actually an interesting notion – a rogue state that disrupts the international order is a useful one, but also it is worth thinking about ways in which states can change internally, both through real regime change and also by reconsideration within the basic regime structure.

Pedro Mendez:  Hi good afternoon.  My name is Pedro Mendez.  I am an intern at the Organization of American States.  Do you think Venezuela could be in the short term or is it in this moment a rouge state?

Frederick W. Kagan:  I do not know.  I’m going to flip this to Bill in a second and ask for his view on that.  I think he has already laid out the key principle.  This is not a rigorous category and so we can talk about to what extent Chavez is trying to disrupt the international system.  Right now he mostly looks to me like he is trying to oppose American leadership in a certain way and you can argue that is an attack on the international system but I do not really think so.  But again, as I refused to comment on things that I do not really know about and this falls in that category, I think I’ll leave it at that.

William Kristol:  [Tape glitch, inaudible.  I refuse to comment on things that I do not really know about.  [Indiscernible] an academic historian and an editor of a journal.  I mean, I would make the obvious point.  You could be a regional rouge actor, and not be a threat to the international system.  But you know he does seem to have desires to change the current order in Latin America and is acting to do so.  He is meddling in other nation’s election, in other nation’s guerilla insurgencies.  So in that respect I think he is not a force for the status quo.  He fits pretty well with Fred’s definition - he does not accept the legitimacy of the current order and many of the current regimes, I would even say, in his surrounding countries.  He is a sort of regional actor.  Maybe his ambitions are not international because he is not big enough, but he has discovered other rogue states to be in alliance with.

I am struck, looking around the world, how much regional troublemakers find other regional troublemakers and decide they have a common interest, at least in helping each other.  Since they do tend to not have access to certain things like weapons from more responsible international players you get an Iran - North Korea exchange of missiles and nuclear technology.  Even though they do not have much in common as regimes or as nations, you get the Venezuela-Iranian cooperation. 

In this respect I always thought the President was more right than people give him credit for in his instinct that there are axes of evil, or axes of rouge states and terror supporters around the world who find each other to help each other.  You could look at them and ask why a Sunni regime would help a Shia regime, why an Islamic regime would help a communist or a secular regime, or why a Latin-American nation would care about what is going on in the Middle East.  So I think in that respect it is a useful way to begin to organize the world. 

The other point I would make is that we also seek some change in the world order in the direction of liberal democracy.  Even though we do not try terribly aggressively, I think just our very existence is a force for disrupting stable regimes elsewhere in a liberal democratic direction.  I do not think Fred means to imply that the world order is necessarily always correct or un-improvable.  One should not take the position that status quo states are good and rogue states are bad.  One can say that there are states that have ambitions to improve either their region or the world order, and now that is disrupted, it might be risky to do so. 

One would understand why other nations would oppose it.  But it is not a question of, as I say, simply praising status quo powers and condemning all powers that seek some change, either in the current international order of relations among states or the character of neighboring, or not-so-neighboring, regimes.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Yes, I think that is right.  And I think the issue is the image of the world that is preferred by the state that wants to make the change.  The thing that made Napoleon dangerous and that makes a lot of the rogues that we are worried about today dangerous is that the image of the world that he really was, de facto, working for was an image that rests on the continual use of force to oppress people.  I do not think he had a master plan.  I do not think that this is what he was trying to do but when it came down to it every time when the choice was yielding on some point in order to have a peaceful, stable situation or going to war, he chose war.  And he kept choosing war until ultimately he lost and more. 

That is one of the characteristics of a state that we are going to define as a rouge state because it is willing and eager to impose not just to impose by force a particular view of the world but continue to use force to maintain that view of the world.  In other words, it is really a despotic state or despotic in its desires and that was really characteristic of Napoleon and is one of the things that is worrisome I think about some of the other enemies that we face today which are despotic internally and give indications that they prefer the continued use of force to sustaining their policies rather than modifying their policies to make them more suitable when they encounter resistance. 

Rok Vir:  Rok Vir, [phonetic] India, Global [sounds like] Asia Today.  It is quite an interesting book, a good history book.  We have quite few rouge states.  How do you compare rogue states who are concerned with military dictators and terrorists?  Terrorists have no states but somebody is sponsoring them, financing them and harboring them. They live in many countries.  How do you compare those rouge states and terrorists and also military dictators?

Frederick W. Kagan:  There are lots of elements in the world that seek to disrupt the international order in a variety of ways, and terrorists organizations seek to do that in their own way.  I think it is very important to understand that we continue to live in a world of states, and states continue to be the best way to mobilize the resources of an area to pursue particular policies.  That is why they continue to persist, and that is why it is much more worrisome when a state decides that it is going to set itself on the course of destroying the international order and supplanting it with a despotic order, than when a terrorist organization does so. 

The resources available to a state are far greater and its ability to do damage is far greater.  And so I think it is worth retaining as a category “rogue state,” rather than “rouge actor.”  Yes, there are lots of rogues out there and we need to worry about all of them, but we need to worry about states most of all.

William Kristol:  I would argue generally, yes, terrorist groups could be dangerous.  They can kill a lot of people, obviously, but at the end of the day if they do not have state sponsorships, state safe harbor, even to some degree, certainly state financing, state arming, they are just less likely to be a fundamental threat.  They [sounds like] can minimize the damage done in the Madrid bombing or Mumbai bombing, though even there I would argue that it is not so clear that they could have done that damage without there being states elsewhere who are willing to some degree sponsor the terrorist groups of which these [indiscernible] at least spin-offs or at the least inspired by.  I very much agree that the nation state remains a fundamental actor in the system and therefore it makes a certain amount of sense. 

Obviously, we have to deal with terrorists, but in focusing on other nation states behind them.  I would also make the same argument from the other side - if that is the right way to put it - which is that ideological movements are very important.  There are lots of very interesting analyses today of Islam.  What is there about Islam that has led to this crisis in the Islamic world?  That is all-important and interesting.  And yet as a practical matter, ideological movements become dangerous when they seize control of a state.  There was much dissatisfaction with liberal democracy in the early part of the 20th century, but if communism had not seized Russia and made it into the Soviet Union, they would not have been the kind of danger that we have been faced with especially in the latter part of the 20th century. 

Obviously, the same would be true of fascism and of national socialism, and the same would be true of Islamism.  You could have a lot of problems of religion, culture and society, but if they were not in a Republic of Iran that actually was an Islamic Republic committed to certain goals and willing to use terror and intimidation to pursue those goals, I think the problem would look quite different.  In my view, there has been an excessive, tendency among political scientists and other commentators to want to get beyond the old-fashioned nation state as the key unit of analysis.  I really think, practically speaking, whatever deeper things might be going on in whole regions, whole religions, whole cultures, that the nation state remains awfully important.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Let me just jump in with one other point there.  I think there is a reason why we have moved to more general studies.  There is an imbalance in the way we think about things that I think needs to be redressed.  Individuals are terrifically important in driving history in particular directions, and the decisions of individual decision makers are critical.  That is the basis of the work that I have done and it is the basis of the work that I will continue to do. 

I believe that it is tremendously important to remember this, and I think it is important to say this because we are living in an era that values much more sociological approaches to things and that tends to prefer the study of people in masses, where we think that they behave more predictably.  Some people would argue that it is more democratic.  After all, I talked about a handful of people in an era, a tiny fraction of the population.  Is it not terrible to ignore all of the individuals who were involved in all these battles and back home and so forth?  There is certainly room for the study of the masses of humanity and the people who are involved more or less directly at the lower levels. 

But at the end of the day, the course of history and the lives of those individual people were shaped directly by the decisions that were made by these particular decision makers.  If we lose sight of that, we really risk losing our moorings and ceasing to understand how the world works around us, even under the guise of applying a more rigorous and scientific sociological view to it. 

William Kristol:  One more question perhaps and then Fred will stay and sign books and autographs, pictures, anything people like, photos. 

Cynthia Grenier:  Cynthia Grenier.  This is really a footnote and might be of interest for collateral reading before your next two volumes come out.  The French have discovered it last year and it became a bestseller, Alexander Dumas’ last novel of the 672 novels, in which Napoleon plays a very key role in the thousand-page novel.  It is in the process of being translated and it is a fairly complicated and interesting view of Napoleon that could have good material to blend in with your series of works.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I thank you very much for your suggestion and I will certainly look into that.  Napoleon has been a fascinating figure for lots of writers and there are wonderful interpretations in a lot of places.  And I would definitely look at this one.

Cynthia Grenier:  This is Napoleon.  This is not his sister.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I said Napoleon.

Cynthia Granier:  Yes but you used a she.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I certainly did not mean to. 

William Kristol:  Fred’s research has led him to discover some things about Napoleon that are not widely known but he is saving that for the next volume.

Frederick W. Kagan:  But he has certainly been a very prominent figure in literature, and it is very interesting to look at the different representations of him.  Tolstoy’s War and Peace is another wonderful thing to look at in this regard, for its images of a lot of the other characters who are involved.  I commend that also to those of you who are not satisfied with my 700-and-something-page book.  You can read that 1500-page book and get still another take, but I thank you very much for the suggestion.