Tocqueville's Economic Mind - Samuel Gregg (Law and Liberty)

Tocqueville foi um dos primeiros americanistas, apenas que precedido por Hipólito José da Costa, que antes dele, nos anos 1898-99, disse mais ou menos as mesmas coisas sobre os americanos.

 

Tocqueville's Economic Mind

Samuel Gregg

Law and Liberty

November 11. 2024

https://lawliberty.org/tocquevilles-economic-mind/?mc_cid=29cdb97bbf&mc_eid=2256f9e707

 

For the Frenchman, mores were critical to explaining why ostensibly similar countries took economic paths that often varied widely.

 

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America between May 9, 1831, and February 20, 1832, he encountered a world that he believed might prefigure the political future for modern societies. He also found himself in the midst of an economy that had begun its rise to become the world’s biggest and most dynamic.

Today, Tocqueville is celebrated as a political thinker whose insights in Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution, and lesser-known texts like his 1848 critique of socialism resonate over 150 years after his death. But with some notable exceptions, less attention has been given to how Tocqueville approached economic subjects.

Economic topics were on Tocqueville’s mind from the moment he stepped ashore in America. For one thing, he immediately noticed how frantically Americans pursued wealth. In a May 28 letter to his brother Edouard, Tocqueville wrote, “The profound passion, the only one which profoundly stirs the human heart, the passion of all the days, is the acquisition of riches.” Americans, he added, were “a race of merchants.”

Tocqueville was initially repelled by what struck him as base materialism, but wider mixing with Americans quickly brought home to him that plenty of them had non-economic interests. However, Tocqueville was also driven beyond superficial impressions by his determination to study the facts closely to discover what was really going on beneath the surface of a society in which economic dynamism played such an oversized part. This would lead Tocqueville to arrive at intuitions about economic life as relevant today as in his own time.

Student of Say and Guizot

Although Tocqueville once expressed a desire in an 1834 letter to his cousin Louis de Kergorlay to author a book about political economy, Tocqueville never penned such a text. He was, however, extremely well-versed in economic thought. Tocqueville knew two of the most influential economic thinkers of his time—John Stuart Mill and Nassau William Senior—and regularly corresponded with them. But the economist who exerted the most influence on Tocqueville’s thought was his fellow Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Say.

Tocqueville read Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique pratique twice—the second time while enroute to America. Besides exposing Tocqueville to key ideas expressed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Say stressed a point that Tocqueville never forgot: that while the economy can be studied on its own terms, one should never forget that it is embedded in society.

This resonated with something that Tocqueville had absorbed from attending two years of lectures delivered by the historian François Guizot in Paris in the late 1820s. In these discourses, the future conservative liberal French prime minister underlined the importance of seeing all social phenomena as a connected whole. Herein we find the genesis of Tocqueville’s distinct approach to economic matters.

Certainly, Tocqueville believed that there are economic truths that we defy at our peril. In his 1852 address to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Tocqueville bluntly stated, “The government can no more make salaries go up when the demand for work is down, than one can prevent water from leaning to the side of glass in the direction it is tilted.” Tocqueville was also attentive to economics’ empirical side. Although the use of economic statistics was in its infancy, Tocqueville regularly drew upon them to provide a quantitative dimension to his writings.

Rather, however, than studying economic phenomena separately from everything else—a path that Mill and Senior urged Tocqueville to embrace—Tocqueville sought to identify the most salient empirical facts and connect them to other trends manifesting themselves in society. For Tocqueville, that meant trying to understand how the “institutions” (laws and constitutions) and, above all, the “moeurs” (mores, or habits of mind and heart)—of a given society impacted its economic character and prospects.

A Democratic Economy

Tocqueville’s analysis of entrepreneurship exemplifies his mode of economic inquiry. Upon arriving in America, Tocqueville instantly observed something distinctive about American economic life. “Almost all [Americans],” Tocqueville wrote in his notes, are “entrepreneurs.” Not only did Americans seem to work incessantly, they were constantly innovating, changing jobs, and moving to various parts of the country. As amazed as Tocqueville was by the huge size of some American enterprises, he was even more astonished by “the countless number of small firms” that seemed to spring up everywhere.

But whereas Adam Smith had emphasized how the multiplication of wants in commercial society accelerated the division of labor and magnified economic productivity, Tocqueville also attributed the sheer scale of entrepreneurship in America to something else: the fact that America was a thoroughly democratic society.

In his 1964 essay “Alexis de Tocqueville et Karl Marx,” the liberal philosopher Raymond Aron points out that democracy for Tocqueville is less about political structures than what Aron calls a “social state.” The social state of the Americans was one that stressed liberty and a movement towards equality over and against the caste-like character of aristocratic orders and the fixed social and economic positions they entail.

According to Tocqueville, this democratic outlook weakened the power of pre-existing hierarchies, advanced equality before the law, and facilitated free-flowing relationships mediated through contracts. The result was new possibilities for people to become socially and economically mobile. Democratic conditions thus strengthened individuals’ confidence that they could change their lives from the bottom up. Such was democracy’s effects on Americans’ self-understanding and their perceptions of the opportunities available to them.

This focus on the role of what Tocqueville called “purely moral and intellectual qualities” in human affairs is crucial to understanding his approach to economic questions. In Democracy in America, for instance, Tocqueville showed that the reasons why Americans were far more successful at overseas trade than French merchants could not be attributed to significant differences in the economic costs of such trade. The average costs for Americans and Frenchmen, Tocqueville calculated, were essentially the same.

Like contemporary institutional economists, Tocqueville appreciated the importance of legal and constitutional arrangements for economic activity.

The decisive difference, he maintained, was that Americans were far more willing to venture across the world’s oceans than most of his compatriots. As a rule, Frenchmen were more cautious than Americans, less inclined to take the initiative, and more disposed to follow direction from above. By contrast, in the face of dangers like storms and pirates, American merchants threw caution to the wind. “There is something heroic,” Tocqueville wrote with awe, “about the way Americans do business.” The same courage and propensity to risk-taking, he indicated, did not characterize France’s commercial class.

Economic Habits

One conviction that Tocqueville took away from these inquiries was that mores are critical to explaining why ostensibly similar countries took economic paths that often varied widely. Here it is important to understand precisely what Tocqueville meant by mores.

On one level, mores for Tocqueville concerned “habits of mind.” These are the ideas and opinions generally held by people in a given society. Examples might be favorable views of commerce, or a universally held opinion that governments must pursue the equalization of economic outcomes. The other sense in which Tocqueville understood mores is as “habits of the heart.” By this, Tocqueville had in mind people’s moral beliefs and values: that, for instance, freedom is good, or that economic equality is the essence of justice.

There can be considerable overlap between habits of the mind and the heart. The belief that liberty from arbitrary government is good in itself and more important than greater economic equality is likely to incline people to view free enterprise favorably and highly interventionist governments with skepticism. The particular question that interested Tocqueville, however, was the relationship between these habits and a society’s institutions.

Like contemporary institutional economists, Tocqueville appreciated the importance of legal and constitutional arrangements for economic activity. One of his criticisms of attempts in 1848 to guarantee a right to employment in France’s constitution was that such a measure could not help but lead to the government assuming total mastery of economic life. That said, Tocqueville had little doubt that everything, including how institutions functioned, ultimately depended on mores. “It is a truth central to all my thinking,” he wrote in the first volume of Democracy in America, “and in the end all my ideas come back to it.”

Mores First, Then Institutions

If Tocqueville is right, the implications for economic life are profound. A government may, for example, reduce regulation, strengthen property rights, lower tariffs, and bolster constitutional protections for economic liberty. These policies will certainly shift economic incentives and accelerate economic growth. But what happens if most people in that society continue to believe that equal outcomes are more important than economic liberty, or view a state-dominated healthcare system as integral to the country’s very identity?

Tocqueville would answer that, absent a widespread and lasting change in mores, it will be a struggle to maintain such economic and legal reforms in place over the long term. Similar conclusions about the relative import of institutions and mores for economic life can be found in the work of some modern economists.

A prominent example is the 1993 Nobel economist, Douglass C. North. In his 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, North stated:

Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction. They are made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior, conventions, and self-imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics. Together they define the incentive structure of societies and specifically economies.

Here, North’s “formal constraints” approximate to Tocqueville’s conception of “institutions” while North’s “informal constraints” are analogous to Tocqueville’s understanding of “mores.”

As for which is more important for economic reform, North contended that “both institutions and belief systems must change for successful reform since it is the mental models of the actors that will shape choices.” He warned, however, that “developing norms of behavior that will support and legitimize new rules is a lengthy process and in the absence of such reinforcing mechanisms polities will tend to be unstable.”

Indeed, North’s belief in the power of what Tocqueville calls mores was such that he maintained that “informal constraints (norms, conventions and codes of conduct) favorable to growth can sometimes produce economic growth even with unstable or adverse political rules.” Tocqueville makes a similar point in his Old Regime when explaining England’s spectacular economic growth in the nineteenth century:

Nothing is more superficial than to attribute the greatness and power of a people to the mechanisms of its laws alone; for, in this matter, it is less the perfection of the instrument than the strength of the mores that determines the result. Look at England: how many of its laws today seem more complicated, more diverse, more irregular than ours! But is there, however, a single country in Europe where the public wealth is greater, individual property more extensive, more secure, more varied, the society richer or more solid? This does not come from the bounty of particular laws, but from the spirit that animates English legislation as a whole.

Identifying causality in economic affairs is never simple. Tocqueville was careful not to exaggerate what his understanding of the relationship between mores and institutions indicated about economic phenomena. Tocqueville’s method of economic reflection nevertheless reminds us of the knowledge to be gained from bringing economics together with sustained attention to norms and culture: not least because, as North once observed, so many of the interesting issues exist on the borders between them. Tocqueville, I suspect, could not have agreed more.

 

Samuel Gregg is the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research, and Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. The author of 17 books—including The Commercial Society (Rowman &Littlefield), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (Edward Elgar), Becoming Europe (Encounter), Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Regnery), and most recently, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World (Encounter), as well as over 700 essays, articles, reviews, and opinion-pieces—he writes regularly on political economy, finance, classical liberalism, American conservatism, Western civilization, and natural law theory. Two of his books have been listed for Conservative Book of the Year and one was short-listed for the 2023 Hayek Prize. He is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Bradley Prize by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This Prize honors scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect the Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism. He can be followed on Twitter: @drsamuelgregg.

 

50 anos da publicação do Arquipélago do Gulag, de Alexander Soljenitsyn - Daniel J. Mahoney (Law and Liberty)

 

Enduring Truths and Progressivist Illusions

daniel j. mahoney

Law and Liberty, December 29, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/forum/enduring-truths-and-progressivist-illusions/

Solzhenitsyn’s account of applied ideology at work in the totalitarian experiment that was the Soviet Union still remains relevant to readers today.

Many thanks to Spencer A. Klavan, David P. Deavel, and Jessica Hooten Wilson for their deeply thoughtful and suggestive responses to my forum essay on Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a piece occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the publication of that great work. Together, their essays highlight important themes of that work that will resonate as long as human beings remain open to the life of the soul and are confronted, as they inevitably will be, by pernicious ideological challenges to liberty and human dignity.

Among its other contributions, David Deavel’s essay provides an illuminating reflection on the sheer scale or magnitude of Solzhenitsyn’s account of applied ideology at work in the totalitarian experiment that was the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is indeed a massive if compellingly readable book. Deavel is exactly on the mark when he writes that the book’s “vast amount of detail is essential to the overall effect,” at once dramatic and palpable, that it has on the hearts and minds of its readers.

For example, Solzhenitsyn’s detailed accounts of a series of show trials during the Leninist and Stalinist periods of Soviet rule painstakingly showcase the utter degradation of law under Soviet rule. In doing so, they artfully illustrate the sheer “surreality” of what substitutes for law in an essentially lawless society. If Solzhenitsyn pointedly criticized the excessive legalism of the Western democracies in his 1978 Harvard Address, in The Gulag Archipelago he more fundamentally shows how lawlessness degrades the human soul and makes decent political life impossible. It is a far graver evil than small-minded legalism.

The very last lines of The Gulag Archipelago, completed in 1968 during the Brezhnev period of Soviet rule, read, “For a half century and more the enormous state has towered over us, girded with hoops of steel. The hoops are still there. There is no law.” Or as Solzhenitsyn says in an arresting chapter in the third volume of Gulag entitled “Why Did We Stand For It?”:

The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run; what about the beginning? What about the first step?

For all their limits from a “higher” point of view, rule of law and political freedom turn out to be invaluable prerequisites for allowing human beings the right to breathe freely and to live humanly tolerable lives.

Deavel is also particularly illuminating about what constitutes the “personal voice of Solzhenitsyn,” including his remarkable capacity in The Gulag Archipelago to take aim at his own personal flaws, failings, and misjudgments. As Deavel aptly puts it, “there is nothing of the moral braggart” in Solzhenitsyn’s self-presentation in the book. The Russian writer knows that he, too, could have succumbed to temptation and have become one of the dreaded bluecaps, or secret police “interrogators,” if an inner voice, the voice of conscience, had not pointed him in a very different direction. Solzhenitsyn’s eventual affirmation of the palpable reality of Divine Providence was rooted in such pitiless but humanizing self-examination. It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn’s fiercest critics, including the mendacious agents of the Soviet party-state and secret police, almost always used and abused such self-critical accounts provided by Solzhenitsyn himself in Gulag.

Let me add that Deavel’s article ends on an admirably high note. He reminds us that however valuable, even precious, they may be, “legal and political freedom” constitute “a trial of our free will just as much as bad circumstances,” such as the “gulag’s absurdities.” And Deavel helpfully recapitulates those “sparks of the spirit” I had referred to in my article: Moral judgment, humility, freedom, and free will guided by conscience that ultimately defers to the benign, if corrective, judgment of God. And I would add noble self-respect, genuine care for the health of one’s soul.

In his article, Spencer Klavan also eloquently reminds us of the peril of succumbing to false confidence in man as the measure of all things: As he notes, Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Lecture makes clear the deadly consequences for the individual soul and collective life of “forgetting God,” of succumbing to the false allure of “anthropocentricity” as Solzhenitsyn called it in the Harvard Address. When men confuse themselves for gods they become little more than beasts, as the twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, so vividly and chillingly illustrate. Klavan also convincingly demonstrates how the ideological Manicheanism of old persists in higher education and among demi-educated activists who now justify new slaughters and repression in the name of “decolonialization” and a fevered hatred for our rich patrimony that is Western civilization. The deepest lessons of the totalitarian episode remain unknown and unacknowledged. The age of ideology is far from over. We are not only at the risk of “forgetting” old crimes but of renewing the ideological Lie that was at their foundation.

Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism.

I thank Jessica Hooten Wilson for reminding us all of the humane presence and enduring contributions of the late Edward E. Ericson, Jr., who co-edited The Solzhenitsyn Reader with me, and who in cooperation with Solzhenitsyn gave us the great gift that is the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago. That judicious version of the work makes its key insights available to the reading public in a concise 500 pages.

I welcome Wilson’s reminder that Solzhenitsyn is not only a great Russian writer but someone who belongs to “world literature” in Goethe’s noble and elevated sense of that term. Solzhenitsyn speaks to the way of the cross born by his own people in the twentieth century even as he contributes to our “universal literary inheritance.” To which one can only say “Amen.”

I would add that Solzhenitsyn not only rebuked the illusions of Russian ultra-nationalists who confused authentic patriotism with expansive empire (a point made well by Wilson) but also the small-minded Ukrainian nationalists or ultra-nationalists who continue to blame the implacable crimes of communism on ”Muscovites” or “Russians” instead of the inhuman universalist ideology that warred on the legitimate national aspirations of both Russians and Ukrainians. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in Rebuilding Russia, Communism was the common enemy of both great peoples, one that brought a murderous ideology-induced famine to the Volga region of Russia in 1921–22 that cost five million lives and an even more murderous one to the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus in 1932–33.

To these crimes, one can add the fierce and cruel repression of religion, of free intellectual life, and the independent peasantry that characterized Communist totalitarianism. These were not Russian crimes per se, Solzhenitsyn rightly insisted, but a byproduct of an ideological mentality that warred unrelentingly on free initiative and the human spirit. “As common victims of the communist-imposed collectivization forced upon us by whip and bullet, have we not been bonded by this common bloody suffering?” Solzhenitsyn asked in Rebuilding Russia. Prescient words of wisdom as two once intertwined peoples sink into fratricidal strife that deeply pained the half-Ukrainian Solzhenitsyn (on his mother’s side).

And lastly, why lament, as Wilson seems to do, that many, even most, of Solzhenitsyn’s admirers today tend to be conservative-minded? For better or worse, conservatives are more sensitive to the dangers of “forgetting God,” the evils of what the late Roger Scruton called “the culture of repudiation,” and the sheer ugliness of any identification of Evil with a capital E with specific groups that are said to be intrinsically or ontologically evil (a false and deadly identification that connects the woke with older forms of totalitarianism). To their credit, conservatives have been more openly and consistently anti-totalitarian than those on the Left.

Of course, it is a mistake to politicize Solzhenitsyn in any narrow partisan sense. He certainly has much to say to rebuke the kind of faux “conservative” who has undue confidence in modern “Progress” or the promise of an unlimited materialist cornucopia. Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism. But he did not hesitate to take aim at “progressives” who felt a “kinship” with Communism, whatever its murderous pretensions and deeds. They have shown themselves to be appallingly slow to learn the most elementary truths. As Solzhenitsyn wrote about them near the end of The Gulag Archipelago:

All you freedom-loving ”left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.

One must ask: Has all that much changed in these last fifty years regarding “progressivist” illusions regarding the totalitarian temptation?

Daniel J. Mahoney is Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Senior Writer at Law and Liberty, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written extensively on Solzhenitsyn, including The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, which has been available in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press since 2020. He is presently completing a book entitled The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, to be published by Encounter Books.

DEC 20, 2023

Judgment and Humility, Providence and Free Will

david p. deavel

DEC 13, 2023

Our Universal Literary Inheritance

jessica hooten wilson

DEC 6, 2023

“Never Forget”

spencer a. klavan

The Limits of American Power - Leonidas Zelmanovitz (Law and Liberty)

The Limits of American Power

by leonidas zelmanovitz

Law and Liberty, December 14, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/the-limits-of-american-power/

If an American-backed world order is to continue to do good in the world, it will require the recognition of other powers' legitimate spheres of influence.

It is well accepted among foreign relations specialists that at the time of the Cold War (1945–89) we lived in a “bipolar” world, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing for global hegemony. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we lived in a “unipolar” world, with the United States as the sole superpower from 1989 to 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession. Finally, we entered the “multipolar” world that we live in today, with three global superpowers: the United States, China, and Russia, and a number of regional powers, such as India and Iran.

To understand how global order might be maintained and a war of annihilation averted, we might recur to a neglected concept that emerged as the last multipolar era was ending: respect for great power spheres of influence.

Cold War Spheres of Influence

Many of the arrangements that brought us through the bipolar era unscathed were shaped— if not implemented—during the Second World War, out of a process of negotiation between great powers.

The composition of the Security Council of the United Nations, for instance, reflected the leading allies in WWII: the US, UK, France, the USSR, and China. The monetary arrangements agreed to at the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944, though centered on the US dollar, were made with due consideration of the concerns of the other powers. (So much so that years later, the system crumbled because it became too onerous for the US to honor its commitments to redeem its currency in gold when asked by the central banks of other members.)

One important aspect of the international order that was shaped during WWII and helped prevent another war in Europe was the delineation of spheres of influence between the leading powers. Exhibit A is the “percentage agreement” reached between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow concerning their two countries’ respective influence in the Balkans. The partition of Germany and the acknowledgment of the Baltic States and Poland as part of the Soviet sphere of influence were also part of that, of course.

So it wasn’t simply a balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States that prevented a nuclear war: it was also an acknowledgment that each one of them was more or less free to act in its own sphere of influence without the interference of the others. The free hand the Soviets had in Eastern Europe and the many American interventions in Latin America during the Cold War attest to this reality.

The stationing of nuclear missiles in Turkey and the consequent Cuban crisis in 1962 was solved under the spheres-of-influence paradigm, even if the great powers were testing the limits of how much they could encroach upon the other’s sphere.

One of the failures of the current international arrangements is that they were designed to operate by consensus, with respect on the part of the superpowers for their respective spheres of influence. But that was not to be. The consensual approach followed during WWII was not followed by the superpowers in the following years. Nor were their respective spheres of influence as well defined around the globe as they were in Europe.

For instance, the British and French could not solve the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 on their own terms—the US would not let them do that.

The Chinese found it intolerable that after repelling the North Korean invasion, South Korea and its allies invaded the north, and came closer to the Chinese border. It was fine for North Korea to erase South Korea, but the risk of having American troops so close to Beijing was unacceptable.

Many other regional conflicts took place on the borders of ill-defined spheres of influence—the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Arab wars being two examples.

The Soviets used all the tricks in the book to check American hegemony around the world: Marxist, socialist, anti-colonial, and anti-Zionist ideologies, support for terrorism, narcotics, industrial espionage, you name it. Sure, the global communism of the Third International and its affiliates and offshoots like Forum de São Paulo are expansionist ideologies, and so it is possible that they would not succumb to realpolitik considerations and limit themselves, even if better-delineated spheres of influence were designed and the consensual arrangements among the permanent members of the UN Security Council were taken to the letter.

Alas, we will never know, since the superpowers and their clients early in the game decided simply to “contain” each other instead of finding ways to better define their respective spheres of influence.

Like all other counterfactuals, this one would be impossible to prove, but it is interesting and illuminating to speculate about what the Soviets would have bargained for in exchange for ending their support of leftist and narco guerrillas in Latin America, Palestinian terrorists, revisionist powers in the Middle East, and the enemies of the open society inside the Western intelligentsia. Would that not have been worth, say, the Dardanelles or shared control of the Persian Gulf?

Despite many setbacks, the United States “won” the Cold War, and by 1989, achieved global hegemony. Only to squander it in little more than a decade. There are many dimensions to the relative decline of American power after the Cold War, a decline which has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of American exceptionalism.

America’s Changing Position

At the end of WWII, the US was responsible for 25% of the world’s GDP and was the sole nuclear power. Its political institutions had survived the carnage and economic destruction of the last 30 years (1914–45), and there were no profound ideological differences among the people. Americans’ worldview was predominantly centrist and homogeneous.

True, the national debt held by the public had grown to more than 100% of GDP, but it gradually receded in the coming decades. It is excusable that at the peak of its power, the United States did not have much incentive to accommodate the aspirations of rising powers like China and Russia, much less anyone else.

Similarly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the US saw an opportunity to expand NATO and to integrate former satellites of the Soviet Union as part of the Western sphere of influence. The Russians did not like that, but there was little they could do since they were dealing with the fragmentation of their empire.

Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable supposition that the 1993 Budapest Memorandum, through which Ukraine gave its nuclear weapons and the Black Sea fleet up to Russia in exchange for toothless security assurances from Western allies, was an acknowledgment that Ukraine was part of the now-significantly diminished Russian sphere of influence, and that in case of war between Russia and Ukraine, the Western powers would support Ukraine with blankets and medical supplies, but nothing else. And that was what happened when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

By that time, however, the world was already the multipolar one we live in today. Also, in the early 2010s, fiscal considerations forced the United States to abandon the “Two war construct,” the doctrine by which the United States would define the size of its military as sufficient to wage two major wars simultaneously. It was already difficult for the United States to pursue its strategic interests in a world in which it was by far the strongest superpower, but it has become much harder now that there is at least one other superpower. If that was not bad enough, it seems that the framework of respecting the spheres of influence of the other superpowers had been thrown out of the window. This was a mistake.

As we can see from the examples mentioned above, it is much easier for the United States to pursue its national interests within its own sphere of influence when its foreign policy recognizes the spheres of the other powers. That was true when the United States was much more powerful than what it is now, and it is even more true today.

For much of the post-war period, it was convenient for the United States to maintain a military strong enough to engage in any corner of the globe unimpeded. It was much easier to protect something like freedom of navigation, for instance, by unilaterally enforcing it than by relying on the mutual interests of other powers in keeping the sea lanes open in their backyards.

The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionists ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future.

Still, the other superpowers (Russia, China, India, and the Europeans) do have a shared interest in the global order. That is not to say, of course, that the superpowers, including the United States, never have interests in conflict with the global order. It may well be the case that under certain circumstances, the downsides of the global order may outweigh the benefits for a given country. In those circumstances, we may expect that it will become a revisionist power, acting against the global order and not as a supporter of that order.

On the whole, however, it has been a great diplomatic blunder over the last several decades that the United States has actively pushed world powers into a revisionist position, rather than trying to reassure them that their interests can best be attained within the American-led global order.

It is possible, of course, that there is nothing the US can do to accommodate China and Russia, and the alternatives are between containment or surrender. Possible, but not likely.

It is difficult for me to believe that the Chinese government would consider it to be in their interest to confront the West if the West allowed China to control the South China Sea and to incorporate Taiwan. It is similarly difficult for me to believe that the Russian government would prefer to continue as a pariah if the West negotiated with them a new sphere of influence which included Moldova and Ukraine.

It is also difficult for me to believe that a reformed UN Security Council—in which the permanent members (perhaps expanded to include India) decide their differences by consensus—would not be preferable to bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war as more and more regional conflicts may grow out of control.

What the Future Holds

The American naval build-up in the Mediterranean immediately following the October 7 attack on Israel, has been sufficient to prevent the conflict from broadening, as much as unsavory characters from Tehran to Ankara would be tempted to do otherwise. But can we say that this deterrence power would be respected if China and Russia had decided to challenge it?

The fact that they are supporting their clients in the region, such as Iran and Syria, and trying to create as many problems as they can for the United States and its allies should not distract from the fact that they are not risking direct confrontation to keep the terrorists of Hamas in the field. Their restraint may be, in part, that Israel likely has its own nuclear weapons, and it is unclear what they would contemplate doing if their existence were to be put at risk.

What China and Russia would do if the United States decided to wage war on Iran is a different matter.

The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionist ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future. Despite widespread rhetorical bluster to the contrary, Russia and China are rational actors. Iran, however, may not be. If the United States must one day contain Iran militarily, which is not unlikely, an agreement with Russia, China, and India, would be required.

I don’t know what the price of that would be—it may well be too expensive. But if it is not realistically tried, we will never know.

I recently attended a lecture by Prof. John Mearsheimer. It is difficult not to appreciate his realism. Yet, cynical as I am, I am not prepared to be as cynical as he is in some of his assessments. They remind me of people who say that “judges are just politicians in robes” or that “taxes are theft.” I disagree with that. I believe that there is something we call justice and that it is something more than the residue of politics. I believe that there is a distinction between a legitimate state and a gang of stationary robbers, although both live off others. A set of moral values is what gives legitimacy to the state in its use of force, its imposition of taxes, and so forth. It is precisely that moral foundation that a group of terrorists like Hamas or a gang of common criminals like the drug dealers controlling large swaths of territory in Latin America lack.

In the same way, I understand the American-led global order as a force for good in this world. It is not perfect—nothing is perfect—but it is better than all the alternatives. Think about someone living in the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century. Would you side with Byzantium or with the invading Arabs?

However, for Byzantium to survive (another eight centuries, in fact) it was forced to regroup in Asia Minor, and retreat from Syria and the rest of the Levant, leaving behind Egypt, the most important of all Roman provinces.

The US can still do good in this world, but if it is to do so, it needs to recognize its limits, bring together its allies like Europe and India, and by maintaining imperfect but manageable spheres of influence, reach a détente with Russia and China.

Leonidas Zelmanovitz, a fellow with the Liberty Fund, holds a law degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an economics doctorate from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain.

Na Ucrânia, faltou logística às forças russas; os ucranianos exploraram muito bem esse lado - Paul Schwennesen (Law and Liberty)

Putin calculou um breve passeio militar para invadir e ocupar toda a Ucrânia. Os soldados ficaram entregues a si mesmos. Esta a principal razão do fracasso. 

Ukraine's Saratoga?

Paul Schwennesen

Law and Liberty, October 4. 2022

https://lawliberty.org/ukraines-saratoga/?utm_source=LAL+Updates&utm_campaign=bbc3d1ea40-LAL+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_53ee3e1605-bbc3d1ea40-72437129

“An Army,” it is famously said, “marches on its stomach.” In the streets and trenches of Lyman, east of Kharkiv, the Russian army was reminded of this timeless maxim. Ukrainian forces (some of whom I know personally) “tightened the noose” around the village, controlling its supply lines, on the way to another major victory in the north. It might even have been Ukraine’s Saratoga moment—the logistical vanquishing of an overstretched invader which ultimately turns the tide of war. Unfortunately, while the moral victory is indisputable, occuring in the midst of Putin’s farcical annexation of eastern territories, an opportunity was lost for a more thumping defeat. 

Lyman, a dusty little village along the Donets River, had become something of a bastion—first for Russia’s advance and then its retreat—which makes its recapture a touchstone for northern operations and for Ukraine’s theater-wide strategy as a whole. I bought carrots from a farmer there as I left Kharkiv last time, and was stunned when it fell to the Russian advance. I’m therefore thrilled to hear of its recapture. Personal attachments aside, the Lyman operation illustrates a larger strategy of “Logistic Leapfrogging” (flanking, then cutting the supply umbilical—leaving enclaves of Russian forces isolated, demoralized, and no option but surrender). It is an investment strategy I had loudly pleaded for as I stood on the frontlines of the battle of Kyiv—a missed strategic opportunity when tens of thousands of Russian troops might have been cut off in their retreat north to Belarus. 

Freshly abandoned lines near Zurivka, east of Kharkiv in April. Flimsy shelter materials and low-quality personal gear exemplify the logistical weakness of Russian operations (Courtesy of author)

The Leapfrog strategy leverages the advantages of Ukrainian internal supply lines and is infinitely better than playing to Russian advantages in a grinding, incremental, frontal assault to recapture territory. The opportunity, I was heartened to see, presented itself again in Lyman, as Russia seems incapable or unwilling to learn from its past. The Leapfrog strategy may become an enduring theme of the entire war—for, as Napoleon adjured, “One must never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Ukraine, for its part, isn’t immune to mistakes either. It was dismaying to see Russian forces able to retreat through the supposed “encirclement” of Lyman—the crowning chance to capture possibly thousands of Russian fighters was squandered in what seems an uncoordinated rush to “take back” the city. Why could they not have waited, reinforcing supposedly “closed” escape routes with infantry? To be fair, Ukrainians cannot afford to lose manpower or materiel: it is fighting a Goliath ten times its size and feels losses disproportionately. The strain is already starting to show after months of sustained combat—soon it may quickly devolve into a crumbling capacity to resist Russian mass, regardless of how clumsily it is wielded. Just yesterday I was informed that five of my colleagues were ambushed in a building-clearing operation in newly liberated territory. In the maelstrom of machine gun fire and grenade shrapnel, all of them were wounded, two critically. The only thing that saved their lives was incoming Russian artillery “support” which caused the ambushers to scurry back to their retreating line. A lucky break at the tactical level, but this can’t go on indefinitely—Ukraine cannot long afford to put its fighting capacity into hospital bunks. 

That is why it is all the more important to continue to Leapfrog: cutting supply lines and enveloping swathes of Russians is the only way to equalize this inherently unequal campaign. Cautious flexibility, of course, is the name of the game: now that Russia’s top logistical officer, General Bulgakov, has been relieved of his post and replaced by 60-year-old Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, there is a good possibility that this strategy will require extra finesse. Mizintsev, known amongst Ukrainians as the “Butcher of Mariupol,” is likely to want to alter Bulgakov’s approach, if only to save his own neck. There is hope, however: while he is surely aware of his logistical disadvantages, if Mariupol is any indication he is unlikely to break from the basic paradigm of brute force backed by massive artillery support. Luckily, this kind of support requires thick conduits of ammunition transport which are increasingly vulnerable as Ukrainian resistance perfects techniques of light, rapid, flanking maneuvers and logistics interdiction. What’s more, Russian ammunition is not infinite. If abandoned ammunition is any indication, Russia is scraping deep into its stores of firepower:

1980’s vintage ammunition, May 2022 (Courtesy of author)

Could Ukraine’s “Saratoga moment”—cutting off an overstretched invading force from its supply lines—translate into a theater-wide strategy? Yes, and solid indications suggest that this is precisely the idea. With the success in Lyman, it is natural to suppose it will be repeated elsewhere. Crimea, for example, is a Yorktown waiting to happen: a bottled-up army, cut off from supplies of its “beans and bullets” cannot long endure. 

All of this is simply a reminder that this war has become, or more accurately has always been, a logistical one. As such, it is a race against depletion: every loss the Ukrainians incur must be offset by extracting ten times the cost to the Russian war machine. This is a desperately difficult challenge. Western support can fill the deficit to an extent, but it is not reasonable to expect it to fill the imbalance completely. The only real hope is in Ukrainian maneuverability (and patience!)—the capacity to isolate, invest, and pare off elements of the invading force that lie far ahead of its supply lines, leapfrogging and enveloping them in a trap of the Russian’s own making.

Lyman has focused international attention in much the way that Saratoga did for America’s Continental Army in 1777. In addition to a brilliant political blow to Putin’s supporters, the success helps highlight French and German reticence, goading them (for good or ill) into more meaningful involvement. Whether such involvement escalates the conflict into a low-grade nuclear slugfest, or perhaps pushes the more reluctant republics of the Russian Federation to finally make their break remains to be seen, but the fact remains: Lyman, like Saratoga, will be remembered historically as the moment the war turned.

Paul Schwennesen is completing a PhD dissertation on environmental history and Spanish conquest in the Arizona/New Mexico borderlands. He holds a Master’s degree in Government from Harvard University and degrees in History and Science from the United States Air Force Academy. He is a regular contributor to the Property and Environment Research Center and his writing has appeared at The New York Times, American Spectator, Claremont Review, and in textbooks on environmental ethics (Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill). He is the father, most importantly, of three delightful children.