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Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

A Hipbone Approach to Analysis

by Charles Cameron

I think it’s about time I laid out some of the basic thinking behind the style of analysis that I refer to as the “hipbone” approach.

Seen from one angle, it has to do with Sun Tzu’s double-whammy: “know your enemy, know yourself”.

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Let me be blunt about this: if you want to “know yourself” and “know your enemy” as Sun Tzu recommends you should, you’ll need to be able to keep two opposing minds in mind at the same time – and still retain the ability to function.

The hipbone approach uses very simple concept-mapping tools and some fairly subtle insights derived from a lifetime of introspection and the arts to facilitate and annotate that process, and to make the resulting understandings available to others.

But first, let’s get down to the kind of thinking that lies behind this approach.

1

One thing I want to know is: what are the most subtle and complex mini-structures that the human mind can take in, more or less at one swoop. Then I’d like to know what their moving parts are, how — to the extent that they have a “main thrust” — they handle parallelisms and reconcile oppositions to that thrust, and what they do with stuff that’s oblique or orthogonal to it, how they put constraints to use in service of expression, what use they make of decoration, how they handle ignorance, how they reconcile head and heart, certainty and doubt, and how they keep the surface mind occupied while affecting the deeper layers of our being… And I want to know that, viscerally — to feel it in my bones, if you like – because I’d like to be able to do more or less the same thing with regard to complex real-world problems, on a napkin, by myself, or with friends or enemies.

2

I want to know what those things are because (a) they’re the most nourishing things I can feed myself, and I need all the nourishment I can get, and (b) because it turns out that if I can come up with product that has the same formal properties, I’ll be able to explain things both to myself and other people that otherwise leave me stuttering platitudes.

Somewhere right about there, I run into a quotation like this one, from Cornelius Castoriadis in his World in fragments: writings on politics, society, psychoanalysis, and the imagination:

Remember that philosophers almost always start by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is a table. What does this table show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever started by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is my memory of my dream of last night. What does this show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever starts by saying “Let Mozart’s Requiem be a paradigm of being, let us start from that.” Why could we not start by positing a dream, a poem, a symphony as paradigmatic of the fullness of being and by seeing in the physical world a deficient mode of being, instead of looking at things the other way round, instead of seeing in the imaginary — that is, human — mode of existence, a deficient or secondary mode of being?

What I think I’m hearing here, half-hidden in the words, is that the Mozart Requiem is one of those high-density, subtle and complex mini-structures.

And I agree — in fact I find myself thinking of the arts that way, as the natural places to look for high-density, subtle and complex models of reality.

3

Of course, it would be absurdly neat if nobody else had ever noticed this, and I could take all the credit for myself – but no, the great anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson makes pretty much the same observation about poetry:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity.

Poems are precisely “high-density, subtle and complex mini-structures” – that’s how they manage the “mapping from complexity to complexity” – and so the question comes up, what’s the role of structure in the arts?

4

Let’s take a quick look at musical structure, and at polyphony and counterpoint in particular. Your enemy’s perspective and your own – or the many perspectives of the various stakeholders in a complex, perhaps “sticky” or “wicked” problem – can be compared with the different, often discordant melodies from which a Bach or Mozart or Beethoven weaves a fugue – melodic themes which are not infrequently “inverted” or in “contrary motion”.

So what can the musical structure of counterpoint teach us, who are faced with real-world situations comprised of different needs and ideals — often discordant, often in counterpoint or opposition to one another, often in “contrary motion”?

Here’s Edward Said, discussing the Israeli-Palestinian problem in terms (gasp!) of musical form:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

Like him or leave him, Said in this paragraph is clearly thinking along similar lines to the ones I’m proposing.

Or to move to yet another art, that of theater — what can we learn about the simulation and modeling of complex issues from Shakespeare? Keith Oatley’s Shakespeare’s invention of theatre as simulation that runs on minds is a serious exploration of that possibility.

5

I’m going to return to the arts, and lay out a theory of what an art is and how it works, in a later post in this series – but for now, let me just say that I’ve devised a cognitive mapping tool, or more precisely a family of games and mapping tools, that I call “HipBone Games and Analysis” because they’re all about the way one idea connects with another – just as “the hip-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone” in the song.

And as I commented recently on Zenpundit:

What I’m aiming for is a way of presenting the conflicting human feelings and understandings present in a single individual, or regarding a given topic in a small group, in a conceptual map format, with few enough nodes that the human mind can fairly easily see the major parallelisms and disjunctions, as an alternative to the linear format, always driving to its conclusion, that the white paper represents. Not as big as a book, therefore, let alone as vast as an enormous database that requires complex software like Starlight to graphically represent it, and not solely quantitative… but something you could sketch out on a napkin, showing nodes and connections, in a way that would be easily grasped and get some of the human and contextual side of an issue across.

6.

To balance Sun Tzu’s “know your enemy, know yourself” with which I began, I’ll offer by way of counterpoint Christ’s “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you” (Luke 6.27). And now for two of my favorite words: more soon…

John Robb at Global Guerrillas:

JOURNAL: Moral Decay?

Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse.  The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is  a good example of moral decay at work.  

Why is this market failing?  It’s being gutted — from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level — because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one.  What shift?  Our previous moral system featured trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc.   While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions.  

Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace.  This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships.  All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract.  Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don’t get punished for it.  

In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft.  Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs.  

Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it’s not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire/civilization to collapse.

John is drawing on an intellectual tradition goes back to Gibbon, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Confucius and Mencius  but is mashing it up with modern concepts of social complexity, such as is found in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. This makes sense; when members of a ruling class start to behave in an unethical manner, there is a natural reaction by morally vigilant members of the ruling class to check future abuses of power by dividing administrative authority, increasing regulations, creating new watchdogs and erecting balancing countermeasures. This is an increase in complexity that decreases rather than improves efficiency. Society pays more for the same level of effective governance and the creep of corruption will soon require another “re-set” and yet another no-value added  increase in complexity as the elite multiplies and seeks their own aggrandizement.

When Robert Wright wrote of “ossifying” societies unable to stand the test of barbarians in the ancient and medieval worlds, in Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny, he was explicit that a moral critique often correlated with economic/darwinian fitness. Rome, for example, eschewed adaptive technological innovation due to it’s heavy reliance on inexpensive slave labor. Oligarchic societies fit the moral decay theory because oligarchies focus on the zero sum game of extracting existing wealth from the population instead of creating and accumulating it. The extraction process requires an expensive social architecture of control and this is subject to diminishing returns. At a certain point, any system reaches the tipping point on adding the next level of non-productive complexity and begins to unravel.

What if the historical ratchet could be reversed?

What if the excess complexity could be systemically pared back along with the opportunities for corruption and self-aggrandizement that required countermeasures?

Societies are occasionally capable of moral and political renovation, cases in point, the Glorious Revolution and the Meiji Restoration, both of which tied ancient ideals to new political forms while sweeping away a corrupt elite. The American Revolution period, through the adoption of the US Constitution would be another example of societal transformation. These successes, which involve constitutional reforms and a rejuvenated political economy are essentially of a social contractual nature and are rare. Failure is more common, as with Sulla’s bloody reforms that temporarily got rid of bad actors and rebooted the Roman Republic to an older, more virtuous model but failed to address the fact that the structural flaws of the Republic itself were the problem, not the ambition of Marius.

Things are not yet too far gone. There is much that is wrong with the United States but we have a more resilient and coherent foundation upon which to reconstruct than did the Romans of the 1st century BC. 

America has many Mariuses but a better Republic.

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

In a Time of Religious Arousal

by Charles Cameron

We live in times of considerable religious arousal – witness the Manhattan mosque and cultural center controversy, the on-again, off-again Florida Quran burning, last week’s Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial,Hindutva violence against Muslims in India, Muslim violence against Christians, the wars ongoing or drawing to an end in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threat of an Israeli or American attack on Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and peace process… In each of these instances, religious arousal has a role to play.

It would require considerable care, research, and craftsmanship to produce a nuanced and appropriately balanced view of human nature, the current state of the world, American, European and Islamic popular, polite and political opinions, the global admixture of peoples and approaches that characterize Islam, the history of violence, religious and otherwise, the braiding in different times and places of religion with politics, the roots of violence, the roots of peace and its meanings both as a state of cessation of conflict and as a state of contemplative calm…

Such a presentation would require at least a book-length treatment, and cannot be trotted out every time some new spark emerges from the ancient fires… but perhaps I can lay out some of my own considerations about the topic here, in somewhat condensed form.

The teachings of Jesus appear to have been directed towards an audience that included regular folk: fishermen, members of an occupying military force, radical zealots, a tax-collector, a physician, a prostitute, religious scholars… a fair cross-section of human kind…

Every religion of any real “size” will have followers who are intellectuals, fearful followers, angry and reactive followers, contemplative followers – followers who are skilled in the various businesses of crime prevention, defense, contemplation, literature, the sex trade, theft, medicine, art, bargaining, diplomacy, music, architecture, investigativejournalism, yellow journalism, inspirational writing, poetry…

It will of necessity address, and over time retain traces, of all their concerns.

Every religion of any real “size” will also have begun in a particular time, place and cultural setting, and will carry considerable parts of that setting with it, although it may also contain elements of a more profound or elevated spirit…

Every religion and scripture will, I suggest, promise a garden / paradise / city which is both attainable “outside” life, in a “there” which is hard to put into words, and “within” us, a similarly difficult concept to verbalize, in the moment, here.  It will also contain what I call “landmines in the garden” – verses or narratives that offer sanction to what we today might regard as abhorrent violence against the innocent “other”.

Thus in Numbers 25 in the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Bible, the Lord offers to Phineas / Pinchas a “covenant of priesthood”, because he recognized that his Lord did not appreciate an Israelite and a woman of the Midianitescopulating, and skewered the pair of them in flagrante through their conjoined parts with his spear — without first seeking the approval of the High Priest. 

This story gave rise to the notion of the “Phineas Priest” action, in which a “lone wolf” kills on behalf of [a version of the Christian] God.

One of the most radical Christian Identity theorists is Richard Kelly Hoskins, who in 1990 invented the notion of the “Phineas Priest,” built around the concept of the biblical Phinehas, who used a spear to slay an Israelite and a Midianite who had lain together. Phineas Priests believe themselves modern day Phinehases, with a self-appointed mission to strike out in the most violent and ruthless way against race mixers, abortionists, homosexuals, Jews, and other perceived enemies.

Hoskins expounded the idea in his 1990 book, Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood, citing both Robin Hood (!) and John Wilkes Booth as examples…

It seems highly probable that Byron de la Beckwith, killer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, considered himself a Phineas Priest, see Reed Massengill, Portrait of a Racist: The Man who Killed Medgar Evers, pp 303-305.  Similarly, it appears that Rev. Paul Hill, convicted of abortion clinic murders, was considered by his friends, and may have considered himself, a Phineas Priest. Likewise Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzak Rabin, seems to have had the Phineas story in mind when deciding, without rabbinic support, to go ahead and kill the Israeli PM.

For an example of a recent meeting of rabbis — in Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel– to promote the permissibility under halachic law of the killing of goyim / gentiles, see this article by Max Blumenthal and the accompanying video:

Individuals, small sects or powerful movements will on occasion seize on these “landmine” texts within a religious tradition, and use them to justify acts of violence, large and small. 

The Crusades, for instance, did this on behalf of Christianity and against Islam, notwithstanding which St Francis was able to approach Saladdin’s nephew, the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, across the battle lines, coming in peace, discussing matters of devotion, and departing in peace.  The Islam of al-Andalus was for centuries, in comparison to the Christendom of its time, a model of scholarship and tolerance – though not without aspects of the pre-eminence of Islam, dhimmi status for People of the Book, the jizya, etc. 

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God and currently our finest analyst of religious terrorism, recently co-edited a book on Buddhist Warfare (obligatory, cautionary note: Juergensmeyer and I are both contributors to Michael W Wilson and Natalie Zimmerman’s book, A Kingdom at Any Cost: Right-wing Visions of Apocalypse in America). The world of Zen has been rattled by controversy regarding the support of leading roshis for the Japanese imperial war effort — and there are apocalyptic references to a future war between Buddhists and the mleccha (presumably Islam) in the text ofwhat the Dalai Lama has termed an “initiation for world peace” — the Kalachakra tantra.

Alexander Berzin, who has translated for the Dalai Lama on numerous occasions when this teaching was given, comments:

A careful examination of the Buddhist texts, however, particularlyThe Kalachakra Tantraliterature, reveals both external and internal levels of battle that could easily be called “holy wars.” An unbiased study of Islam reveals the same. In both religions, leaders may exploit the external dimensions of holy war for political, economic, or personal gain, by using it to rouse their troops to battle. Historical examples regarding Islam are well known; but one must not be rosy-eyed about Buddhism and think that it has been immune to this phenomenon. Nevertheless, in both religions, the main emphasis is on the internal spiritual battle against one’s own ignorance and destructive ways.

Any and all religions can be used to justify internal struggle, external violence, external peace-making and inner peace: the question is how these various threads are interwoven in individual cultures and histories, and in our own times.

That is, I’d suggest, a matter for legitimate dispute – but not one with an easy one sentence or even single paragraph answer.

In my view, the most powerful response to the current global “jihadist” movement will come not from advocates of democracy (whether backed up or not by military force or threat of force) who will naturally appear to be interfering in affairs between the soul and its God that do not concern them – but from people within the jihadists’ own  religious tradition.

Noman Benotman, one-time leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and colleague of bin Laden and Zawahiri, wrote an open letter to bin Laden dated 10 September 2010 / 1 Shawwal 1431 AH, which the Quilliam Foundation just released under the title “Al-Qaeda: Your Armed Struggle is Over“.

Benotman’s letter opens with an invocationfrom Qur’an57:16:

Is it not time for believers to humble their hearts to the remembrance of God and the Truth that has been revealed.

The text of Benotman’s message is only four pages long, and I recommend reading the whole of it – but have selected this single passage as representative of his critique:

What has the 11th September brought to the world except mass killings, occupations, destruction, hatred of Muslims, humiliation of Islam, and a tighter grip on the lives of ordinary Muslims by the authoritarian regimes that control Arab and Muslim states? I warned you then, in summer 2000, of how your actions would bring US forces into the Middle East and into Afghanistan, leading to mass unrest and loss of life. You believed I was wrong. Time has proved me right

Benotman closes:

In urging you to halt your violence and re-consider your aims and strategy, I believe I am merely expressing the views of the vast majority of Muslims who wish to see their religion regain the respect it has lost and who long to carry the name of “Muslim” with pride.

For those who are concerned at the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki on English-speaking youth, there’s a detailed 130-page critique of his approach to global jihad from a strict Salafist perspective available on the web:

On the topic of suicide bombing / martyrdom operations viewed from an Islamic perspective, I’d suggest reading the Ihsanic Intelligence “Hijacked Caravan“:

And for a glimpse of the wider possibilities offered within the Islamic world, Bassam Tibi’s brief summary in his book, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder is worth considering:

To me religious belief in Islam is, as Sufi Muslims put it, “love of God,” not a political ideology of hatred. … In my heart, therefore, I am a Sufi, but in my mind I subscribe to ‘aql/”reason”, and in this I follow the Islamic rationalism of Ibn Rushd/Averroes. Moreover, I read Islamic scripture, as any other, in the light of history, a practice I learned from the work of the great Islamic philosopher of history IbnKhaldun. The Islamic source most pertinent to the intellectual framework of this book is the ideal of al-madina al-fadila/”the perfect state”, as outlined in the great thought of the Islamic political philosopher al-Farabi.

Irani and Funk’s “Rituals of Reconciliation: Arab-Islamic Perspectives” indicates something of what an Islamic approach to truth and reconciliation might look like:

No doubt there’s a great deal more that onemight say, but that must suffice for now.

Charles Cameron.

Left of center Blogfriend Cheryl Rofer cross-posts at conservative-libertarian Chicago Boyz to debate Lexington Green:

Others’ Shoes

Lexington Green is politically conservative, but he and others at Chicago Boyz have been willing to put up with me; I respect them, too, because they think out what they’re about. I think they actually listen to me, too, even as we disagree.

So when Green’s post was endorsed by Glenn Beck, I realized that this might be a way to get into his admirers’ minds. Green begins with a John Boyd hierarchy that I haven’t spent much time with; this is another of my departures from my friends at Chicago Boyz. But I suspect that that part can be skipped with little loss. He’s saying that Beck is taking a broad view, going up a couple of levels.

But I don’t feel like I get the rest of it. I can do a sentence-by-sentence exegesis, but that wouldn’t be quite right. I’m trying to get into Green’s and Beck’s heads, not dispute them. But there are barriers. Since I wrote that, Green has added another update, which makes some things clearer. I’ll get to the update later.

One is that so much of what Beck offers is factually flawed. Green is an intelligent person; how can he miss that? Perhaps because the bigger things he talks about in the post are more important to him. But those factual flaws are a barrier to me. A lack of fact is a poor foundation for anything to come after.

What Green likes is Beck’s creation of a large narrative.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom…

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them.

This sort of narrative is indeed attractive; I have wished for a vision that can unite Americans, that would provide a solidarity that we can rest on, a positive vision.

But there is a double-mindedness to Green’s analysis that is another barrier to me. I agree that we need unifying themes for us as Americans. Period. Unfortunately, it’s easy to unify around an enemy, and, while talking about solidarity and unity, Green develops an enemy, “the Overlords”, and a sense of aggrievedness. Since “the Overlords” are Americans too, that sense cannot be the basis for unity. But that duality is in Beck’s words too: he condemns President Obama for a cult of victimization, and then tells his followers how victimized they’ve been. And for him and for Palin, there are very definitely an “us” and a “them.” Apparently I am one of “them.”

Read the rest here or here.

After I wrote the post Grand Strategy and Morality, blogfriend T. Greer had a serious objection:

Grand Strategy, I submit, does not provide us with a moral purpose. Rather, grand strategy is the means we use to satisfy the demands of this purpose. You cannot have grand strategy without the purpose – but they are not one and the same. Purpose transcends individual statesmen. It is the work of peoples, not politicians. As I state later in the piece:

Greer cites his erudite essay on the subject, Dreaming Grand Strategy for the full explanatory argument ( here is Greer’s excerpt but you should read the whole thing):

In  Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History Frederick Merk states that the defining feature of the American polity has been its “sense of mission.” Americans, says he, have always been invested in the idea that their Republic served a great purpose. They could never delegate their destiny to the realpoliticking of the upper echelons of power. In times of crisis it is this sense of of purpose that has sustained the Republic, and in achieving national goals it is this sense of purpose that has acted as the unconscious guide of American statesmen and citizens alike. Strip away America’s mission, and you have stripped away America. And in doing so you have stripped away our grand strategy as well.

You will be hard pressed to find a strategy articulated and pursued by American statesmen that was not embedded in a larger sense of American purpose. The isolationism of the early 1800s was rooted in the conviction that America was creating “an Empire of Liberty”, untouched by the despotism of the old world. 50 years later the nation fulfilled its “Manifest Destiny” to “Extend the Area of Freedom” by expanding to the Pacific coast. Before Roosevelt could put “Germany First”, he needed to declare that his country was “The Arsenal of Democracy”.  Kennan’s policy of containment was reliant on the assurance that America was the true and only “Leader of the Free World.”

Phrases like “Manifest Destiny” and “Arsenal of Democracy” were not merely the rhetorical flourish used by canny politicians to justify the exercise of power. They were the reason power was exercised in the first place. These phrases were, in essence, bit-sized distillations of the mission and purpose Americans claimed for their nation. Containment only worked because the American populace believed that it was America’s mission to act as the Leader of the Free World. Cold War grand strategy was an outgrowth of this mission – a means to maintaining the mission’s end.

Purpose provides America with a vision. It prioritizes our interests, informs us of our enemies, and tells us what position we seek to hold on the international scene. A nation without a purpose is a nation without a grand strategy to achieve it.

I’m very sympathetic to much of what is in this post at Scholar’s Stage because we are grasping toward the same point: the relationship between grand strategy and moral purpose. Having reflected on T.Greer’s argument and my own prior post, here is my response:

• While moral purpose is a constant variable in grand strategy generally, in specific historical cases it’s importance will vary significantly.
• At times, Greer is right that grand strategy is embedded in a prexisting moral purpose. I certainly agree that that civilizational values and mores govern the nature of the grand strategies that societies will construct.
• Greer’s essay, albeit persuasive, is too American-centric. The US among a handful of nations ( France, the former USSR, Imperial Japan, etc.) that requires a more explicit and rhetorically robust moral-ideological justification for a grand strategy than is typical. Some states only need a grand strategy that does not flagrantly contradict national moral principles, while other states require a grand strategy that champions them. Americans want America to be the “Citty on a hill”; others just want their country to survive with honor.
• At other times, when realpolitik reigns, a successful grand strategy can ignite or act as a catalyst for a resurgence of moral purpose rather than be driven by it. Bismarck’s successful articulation of grand strategy went against prevailing elite opinion in the German states that was weighted heavily against Prussian domination of a united Germany, the military arguments of von Moltke’s grossgeneralstab and the preferences of Bismarck’s own monarch, King Wilhelm of Prussia. Bismarck’s wars of choice against Denmark, Austria-Hungary and France made Wilhem Kaiser and unleashed a ferocious dynamism of German nationalism whose consequences were to shake the world. 

My preference would be for strategic theory to be neat and clean, but history is a messy business.