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General Ray Odierno, Chief of Staff of the US Army has a pretty good prospective professional reading list in the works with many titles of general interest to people in national security and foreign policy fields. He’s asking for feedback too.

Minus the Mustache of Understanding, whose inclusion seems to be required on lists of these kind, there are titles here that I would strongly recommend including McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom,  The Landmark Thucydides, Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire and the best of military historians and strategists like Paret, Keegan, van Creveld and Parker.

I would recommend adding Acheson’s memoir Present at the Creation, for an understanding of policy and national strategy and Alan Schom’s critical and monumental biography, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, for a comprehensive understanding of Napoleon’s campaigns in context with his psychology and political leadership.

But what seems to really be missing from the General’s list is a good book on intelligence history and tradecraft.

Since the list is intended for military officers, it would not have to be a technical critique along the lines of Roberta Wohlstetter’s Warning and Decision (though that would not hurt) but something that gave a good overview, spymaster biography or history, would help.

I can think of many, but I’d like to see what the readership would nominate in the comment section. Have at it!

Hat tip to Lucien.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Forum and The Tower by Mary Ann Glendon

“The relationship between politics and the academy has been marked by mutual fascination and wariness since the time of Plato.”

The first sentence on the flap of the dust jacket of this very good and informative small book. Professor Glendon, who is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law school, set out to write a book for her students that would answer ageless questions such as:

“Is politics such a dirty business, or are conditions so unfavorable, that couldn’t make a difference? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of getting and keeping a position from which one might be able to have influence on the course of events? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of achieving a higher political goal? When does prudent accommodation become pandering? When should one speak truth to power no matter what the risk, and when is it acceptable, as Burke put it, to speak the truth with measure that one may speak it longer? When does one reach the point at which one concludes, as Plato finally did, that circumstances are so unfavorable that only the reasonable course of action is to “keep quiet and offer up prayers for one’s own welfare and for that of one’s country”?”

Professor Glendon answers these questions and more through brief examinations of the lives and works of some of history’s most important figures:

Plato

Cicero

Justinian, Tribonian, and Irnerius

Machiavelli

Thomas Hobbs and Edward Coke

John Locke

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Edmund Burke

Tocqueville

Max Weber

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik

All in all, I believe Professor Glendon has provided a uniquely valuable book to help her students and other readers to answers those questions. In short but focused chapters of about 20 pages each, she provides mini-biographies of the subjects above and how they answered the some of the questions both in their lives and in their philosophy. Some of her subjects were thinkers lacking the abilities for the public square, Plato, for instance, but were enormously influential just the same. Rare were those like Cicero and Burke who were equally comfortable in the political arena or the academy.

My favorite chapters were on Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Burke—mostly because I’ve read a respectable amount of their work. That said, I have not read Plato’s The Laws—and Professor Glendon suggests it is much better than The Republic—which I have read and did not much enjoy. Not surprisingly, The Laws will be on my list for this winter.

The inclusion of Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik was something of a surprise, but Professor Glendon is weaving a sub-story through each chapter and illustrating how Roosevelt and Malik’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was something of culmination and extension of over 2,000 years of thinking and political action—not in the context of human progress towards a utopia of sorts, which she wisely rejects,  but rather a reflection the common threads of political thought throughout history.

While this is not criticism, I would have liked to have seen a chapter on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and a chapter on Karl Marx, whom she frequently mentions.

This is a book that is approachable and readable, and in our tumultuous domestic and global political climate, important.

She closes with this illuminating sentence:

“If one message emerges from the stories collected here, it is that just because one does not see the results of one’s best efforts in one’s own lifetime does not mean those efforts were in vain.”

Professor Glendon is to be commended for a job “well done!”

The book comes with my highest recommendation and may be the best book I’ve read this calendar year. Add this book to your must read list.

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Referenced works you may find of interest (some of these works are out of print and expensive—for simplicity I’ve used Amazon links): 

The Laws of Plato, translated by Thomas Pangle

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt

Cicero, A Portrait, by Elizabeth Rawson (Glendon praised this book.)

A Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems, John Henry Wigmore

The Life of Nicolo Machiavelli, Roberto Ridolfi

The Prince, translated by Harvy Mansfield

Machiavelli, by Quentin Skinner

The Lion and the Throne, Catherine Drinker Bowen

The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, by Thomas Pangle

Statesmanship and Party Government, by Harvy Mansfield

The Great Melody, A Thematic biography of Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O’Brien (I read this wonderful book in 1992 when it was released: highly recommended.)

Thinking in Time by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May

Picked up this classic work on metacognition, history and strategic decision making for the astronomical price of…..$ 4. Including shipping.

The diminuition of the teaching of history in elite universities after the 1960’s, when the old undergraduate canon was chucked in deference to demands by student and faculty radicals for an a la carte system (to replace the old core with politicized race-gender-crit rubbish), has contributed to the decline in American strategic thinking.

Lexington Green sent this extended profile/interview with Charles Hill by Emily Esfahani Smith. The tone of the article is somewhat hagiographic because Hill is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and….well…. this is in Hoover’s journal 😉  If you can get past that, it is a worthwhile read about a deep thinker and scholar of grand strategy.

Profile in Strategy: Charles Hill

….In diplomacy, literature is relied upon because, as he writes in “Grand Strategies,” “The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” That is why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him on his conquests, and why Queen Elizabeth studied Cicero in the evenings. It is why Abraham Lincoln read, and was profoundly influenced by, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and why Paul Nitze paged through Shakespeare on his flights to Moscow as America’s chief arms negotiator.

Hill, for his part, has always kept the “History of the Peloponnesian War” in his mind as the “manual of statecraft.”

Why Thucydides? He explains: “When you read the Peloponnesian War, you realize that Thucydides is moving from one set of problems to another, and you have to deal with them all-rhetorical problems, material problems, and moral problems. That’s the closest literary work related to statecraft that I can imagine.”

To understand world order-and those who manipulate it for their own aims-requires a literary education, the kind students were once able to find at such places as Yale, where Hill now teaches the humanities to freshman undergraduates.

This is a departure from his days at the State Department, where he helped orchestrate monumental events in the grand strategy of the Cold War. One of his first memories as a diplomat was of being seated behind Adlai Stevenson at the UN during the Cuban missile crisis, characteristically scribbling notes-in grand strategy, no detail can be lost. Later, Hill was a “China watcher” during that country’s Cultural Revolution. And when the Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down the Reagan administration, Hill’s meticulous notes played an influential role in the Congressional investigations by shedding light on the chronology of then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s knowledge of the arms sale. Over the years, Hill has also served as confidante to Secretaries of State. For Henry Kissinger, Hill was speechwriter and policy analyst. For Shultz, Hill was an executive aide and trusted ally.

These days, Hill embodies grand strategy in a different way. After a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, Hill is now a heralded figure in academia. Beyond his appointment as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he is the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, and a Senior Lecturer in International Studies at Yale. Alongside historians John Gaddis and John Kennedy [ sic] , he teaches one of Yale’s most legendary courses to a select group of elite students-future statesmen-the Grand Strategies course.

And yet, Hill tells me stoically, “There is no grand strategy in our time.” Turning his attention to the turmoil in the Middle East, Hill provides an example. “America’s lack of strategic outlook responding to the Arab Spring is really distressing.”

Hill retains the diplomat’s gift for understatement.

Read the rest here.

ADDENDUM:

Book Review: Grand Strategies by Charles Hill 

Trial of a Thousand Years, by Charles Hill-a review

Turning the pages of a few books. Here’s what I am reading right now:

The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts by Peter Coleman

An intriguing book about the nature of intractable conflicts (ex. Israeli-Palestinians), including the mathematical patterns and complexity behind the attractors and how to break the deadly cycle. A courtesy review copy from the publisher, I am about 1/3 finished and will review soon, perhaps this week.

A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey

Earlier this year, I read Architect of Global Jihad, the bio of Syrian Islamist theorist and terrorist, Abu Musab al-Suri. Here Jim Lacey interprets a digest taken from al-Suri’s monumental 1600 page magnum opus, Islamic Call for Global Jihad. The dry, autodidactic, tone of al-Suri comes through in Lacey’s text.

Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba (Columbia/Hurst) by  Stephen Tankel

A courtesy review copy from the author, I finished this book about the Pakistani infamous Ahl-e-Hadith terrorist group and ISI proxy, Lashkar-e-Taiba recently. I would have reviewed here already except that my review is being published in an overseas magazine and it has not yet been released. An informative book by Carnegie scholar Stephen Tankel that traces the evolution of the group that gained worldwide attention by their horrific attack on Mumbai.

Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare by Colin S. Gray

I am 3/4 finished with this work by eminent strategist Colin Gray who is making a case for the eternal continuity of war, if not the tactical iterations of warfare. Valuable for Gray’s Clausewitzian take on all the avant garde schools of strategy, warfare and futurism that abound. I set it aside for a while because I was burning out on a steady diet of war and strategy books, PDFs, articles and internet threads 🙂