policy review magazine redesign

The Fruity of class warfarewhy “us” versus “them” doesn’t sell

Bradley R Schiller

The Need for Missile DefenseDangerous states with big ambitions

Peter Brookes

How the Soviet System CrackedShifting Incentives, miscalculation at the top

Paul Gregory

Policy / Review October / November 08, No. 151, $6,00

Leviathan Then and NowThe letter-day Importanc of Hobbes’s masterpiece

Peter Berkowitz

A Publication of the Hoover Institution, Stanford Univer sit y

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Leviathan Then and NowThe letter-day Importanc of Hobbes’s masterpiecePeter Berkowitz

The Irish ProphetHenrik Bering on Edmund Burke: Volumes I and II by F.P. Lock

Fighting WordsCraig S. Lerner on A Time to fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America by Jim Webb

One Side onlyBenjamin Wittes on The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals America by Jane Mayer

007, DefangedLiam Julian on Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks

Ira, Round threeLiam Julian on Victor Davis Hanson on Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New “Greatest Generation” of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and disaster into Victory and Hope by Michael Yon and Tell me How this ends: General David Petraeus and the search for a way out of Iraq by Sebastian Faulks

The Fruity of class warfarewhy “us” versus “them” doesn’t sellBradley R Schiller

The Need for Missile DefenseDangerous states with big ambitions Peter Brookes

How the Soviet System CrackedShifting Incentives, miscalculation at the top Paul Gregory

Features

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A Publication of the Hoover Institution, Stanford Univer sit y

October / November 08, No. 151

3 October / November 08

The Need for Missile Defenseby Peter Brookes

Despite Iran’s runaway nuclear program, North Korea’s atomic assistance to Syria, and robust ballistic missile production and testing by Russia and China, a missile defense system for protecting the homeland and U.S. interests overseas remains a controversial idea in some corners. It should not be. The security challenge arising from the proliferation of ballistic missiles and the dangerous payloads they might carry, including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) like nuclear arms, is a threat that—in fact—may be growing.

While the Bush administration has taken significant steps to develop sea- and land-based missile defense systems, the next White House and Congress should continue supporting missile defense programs to enhance our national security. Indeed, just this summer, the Washington Post broke a story claiming the in-ternational nuclear smuggling ring once run by the prodigious Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan had also managed to acquire the blueprints for an “advanced nuclear weapon.”

Owned by three Swiss members of Khan’s international cabal, a laptop containing 1,000 gigabytes of data (roughly equivalent to the information contained in a local library) on designs and engineering for nuclear weapons was discovered by investigators. Regrettably, according to the story, the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believes the nuclear weapons designs found on the laptop could be mated—in theory—to the ballistic missiles used by “more than a dozen developing countries.”

In fact, the iaea, which reportedly verified the destruction of the data by Swiss authorities, cannot guarantee the nuclear war-head designs were not shared with others, according to a report by David Albright, a weapons expert who has been investigating the Khan network. While North Korea, Iran and Libya—the three states with which Khan had the most intimate contact—are the most likely recipients of the Pakistani’s atomic assistance, there may be others who received this nuclear know-how as well, al-

Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and a former deputy assistant secreatary of dense.


Peter Brookes

though some experts view the report as alarmist. (Not surpris-ingly, Khan, who has been under house arrest in Pakistan since 2004, denied that he was involved in any way in proliferating nuclear weapons designs. Of course, others in his nuclear net-work may have done so.)

With Israel’s strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site in September 2007 and news of nuclear power programs popping up across the Middle East (which may be hedging against Iran’s nuclear efforts), this sort of dire speculation about possible proliferation makes security experts increasingly nervous. Indeed, the ballistic missile and nuclear proliferation trend is not positive. Ten years ago, there were only six nuclear-weapons states. Today there are nine members of the once-exclusive nuclear-weapons club, with Iran perhaps knocking at the door. Twenty-five years ago, nine countries had ballistic missiles. Today there are 28 countries with ballistic missile arsenals of varying capability.

Iranian Intrigue Among present proliferation problems, Iran may be the most

troubling to American security analysts, especially considering its longstanding enmity toward the United States, sponsorship of terrorism, involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and regional great-power ambitions.

Tehran, naturally, insists its burgeoning nuclear program is for little more than peaceful power generation, designed to aug-ment Iran’s already significant oil and natural gas reserves. (Iran has the world’s third largest oil and second largest natural gas reserves.) But like a sledgehammer, new intelligence continues to blast away at Iran’s rock-like insistence that its nuclear pro-gram is purely peaceful and not a weapons effort as many in the region and beyond increasingly believe.

The most serious blow comes out of the United Nations’ nu-clear watchdog in Vienna, the iaea, which drafted and released a troubling nine-page report in late May casting serious doubt on Iran’s claims to a purported pacifist power program. In a dramatic change, based on new multi-source, multilateral intel-ligence received over time from a number of its member states, the iaea has shifted its position from being unable to prove Iran has a nuclear weapons program to being unable to prove Iran does not have one. (Indeed, in late June, iaea chief Mohamed El Baradei commented on Arab television that Iran could build a nuclear weapon in six months to a year if it decided to do so, considering its current centrifuge capacity and the quantity of


The Need for Missiles Defense

processed uranium it already has on hand.)Based on 18 hard-copy and electronic documents, the nuclear-

monitoring agency expressed concerns about the increasingly questionable nature of Iran’s nuclear program, especially its possible military dimensions, which would violate Iran’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt) commitments. (The npt allows signatories to pursue nuclear programs for scientific or power purposes, but not military ends, which include weapons production. All activities must be declared to the iaea. Of note, not all states have signed the npt, most notably India, Pakistan, and Israel; North Korea withdrew.)

In its first formal assessment of Iran’s nuclear efforts since February, the iaea states in the most “diplomatic” of terms: “The agency [iaea] is of the view that Iran may have additional infor-mation, in particular on high explosives testing and missile-relat-ed activities, which could shed more light on the nature of these alleged studies and which Iran should share with the agency.”

The iaea considers these unanswered questions on Iran’s nu-clear work “a matter of serious concern” because the existence of this sort of activity might indicate Tehran is secretly developing a nuclear weapon, contrary to Iran’s repeated public protesta-tions. Moreover, the report states, “Iran has not provided the agency with all the information, access to documents and access

to individuals necessary to supports Iran’s statements,” despite the new intelligence, which is “detailed in content, and appears to be generally consistent.”

The first charge is that Iran is suspected of conducting high-explosives testing. This includes work with exploding bridgewire (EBW) detonators and a detonator firing unit, which could be used for triggering a nuclear weapon; 500 ebw detonators were tested, according to the iaea.

In addition, a five-page document describes experiments for a “complex multipoint initiation system” to “detonate a substantial amount of high explosive in hemispherical geometry” that could be employed in an implosion-type nuclear device. Tehran is further accused of developing plans for underground explosives testing, which could be utilized for detonating a nuclear weapon similar to the testing done by North Korea in October 2006. The documents also include a technical diagram for a “400m deep shaft located 10km from a firing control point,” showing “the placement of various electronic systems such as a control unit

“Ten years ago, there were only six nuclearweapons states. Today there are nine, with Iran perhaps aiming to be the tenth.”


Peter Brookes

and a high-voltage power generator.” There is also a mysterious piece of information the iaea

report calls the “uranium metal document,” which is related to the “actual design or manufacture by Iran of nuclear material components of a nuclear weapon.” The document allegedly describes procedures for machining highly enriched uranium metal into a hemispherical shape, key to producing the rounded

“pits” used in modern implosion-type nuclear weapon warheads. Strikingly, the report notes that “Pakistan has confirmed, in

response to the Agency’s request, that an identical document exists in Pakistan” to the one found in Iran — possibly showing connections to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Another iaea concern is work on a new ballistic missile warhead, known as “Project 111,” for Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3, which can reach all of the Middle East as well as parts of southern Europe. According to six technical documents in the iaea’s possession, Iran appears to have been involved in the redesign of the payload chamber of the current “Shahab-3 missile re-entry vehicle to accommodate a nuclear warhead.”

The iaea report also questions the Iranian military’s apparent involvement in Tehran’s civilian nuclear efforts. It seems military-related institutions are involved in suspicious procurement activities for Iran’s ostensibly “peaceful” nuclear power program. There are also concerns, according to the report, about an unexplained letter published by the chairman of Iran’s high-ranking Expediency Council in September, which makes

“reference to possible acquisition of nuclear weapons.”If this is not unnerving enough, it gets worse. The report

notes that Iran continues uranium enrichment, the proverbial “long-pole in the tent” in producing a nuclear weapon — at

least in comparison with developing a delivery platform or warhead. As the American iaea representative, Ambassador Gregory Schulte, told the press in May: “At the same time that Iran is stonewalling its [IAEA] inspectors, it’s moving forward in developing its enrichment capability in violation of [un] Security Council resolutions.”

Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz is already using at least 3,500 centrifuges. Theoretically, if operating efficiently, this line could produce enough weapons-grade fissile material

“It seems military-related institutions are involved in procurement activities for Iran’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear power program.”



to build one bomb in the time indicated by El Baradei. (The uranium enrichment process can produce fuel for a nuclear power reactor or fissile material for a nuclear weapon. To date, Iran has publicly stated enrichment rates of over 4 percent, suitable for reactor fuel if produced in sufficient quantities; weapons-grade uranium is usually enriched to above 90 percent.)

Some experts think Iran could have as many as 6,000 centrifuges online, spinning at supersonic speed in the near future, turning uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) into some level of enriched uranium for reactors, weapons or both. Tehran has steadfastly insisted that it has the right to enrich uranium for nuclear reactor fuel as stipulated under the terms of the npt (ironically, Iran violated the npt by failing to declare its nuclear program to the iaea for some 20 years.)

Iran, with Russian assistance, is continuing construction of its first nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The new iaeareport also notes the previously undisclosed development of a new generation of centrifuge. The “IR-3” (for third generation Iranian) centrifuge improves upon previous models based on the less efficient Pakistani design, procured from Khan’s network. Moreover, agency inspectors raise concerns about the fact that “substantial parts of the centrifuge components were manufactured in the workshops of the [Iranian] Defense Industries Organization,” hoisting a red flag about the blurring of the lines between Tehran’s civilian and a possible military program.

The bottom-line concern here, besides the fact that Iran did not declare this new equipment (and capability) to the iaea as required, is that the new, more efficient centrifuges will allow Iran to produce more enriched uranium — for reactors or bombs

— more quickly. Iran, with Russian assistance, is also continuing construction of its first nuclear reactor at Bushehr. A good deal of the reactor’s fuel is already in place, having been shipped in from Russia beginning last December. (Unfortunately, Russian support at the un Security Council for slowing Iran’s nuclear program through the imposition of economic sanctions is likely to diminish following this summer’s action in Georgia.) The iaea is also monitoring construction of an Iranian nuclear research reactor, which experts are concerned could be used for experimentation on reprocessing spent nuclear reactor fuel into fissile material (e.g., plutonium) for use in nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, in all of this Iran does not see an indictment of wrongdoing on its part. On the contrary, Tehran views the report as an exoneration of guilt. Iran’s iaea envoy, via the Iranian news service, called the report: “[a] vindication and reiteration of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities.” In addition, Tehran officially said the iaea documents “do not show any indication that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been working on a nuclear weapon,” adding that many of the documents had been “forged” or “fabricated,” especially since


Peter Brookes

they were in an electronic format. In some cases, Iran did not quibble with the information, instead insisting that “the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications,” such as the testing of detonators for use in the oil industry. While Iran has promised to address all concerns, many of these questions are likely to remain a mystery due to Iran’s regular refusal to allow the iaea access to procurement personnel and scientists or to open suspect sites to the agency’s atomic sleuths.

The iaea reports starkly call into question the intent of Iran’s nuclear efforts, leaving Tehran’s claims to a purely civilian nuclear power program increasingly in doubt. As a result, the iaea has called upon Tehran to increase transparency by signing an “Additional Protocol,” which would give agency inspectors access to any facility suspected of undeclared nuclear activity.

This is a fundamental requirement in a large country like Iran (four times the size of California), where sites are numerous and sometimes well-hidden — even below ground. Verification of compliance, even under the best of conditions, is likely to be difficult. But old habits die hard. Tehran will likely continue to obfuscate and dissemble, preventing the iaea from gaining a realistic assessment of the nature of Iran’s nuclear program — which unfortunately places time squarely on Tehran’s side.



Islamic ICBMIran’s interest and involvement in a nascent space program

is not comforting either. While enriching uranium is a key capability in developing nuclear weapons, Iran may also be working on another important aspect of a military program: a long-range delivery system; that is, a new ballistic missile. Like its “civilian” nuclear efforts that remained undeclared for two decades, long-range ballistic missiles are likely being developed under cover of another supposed nonmilitary effort: Iran’s space program. Indeed, Tehran’s budding space work could lead to the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching all of Europe and the United States with a wmd payload.

For example, on February 5, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led the countdown for the launch of a ballistic missile described as a “space launch vehicle,” or slv, from a new space center inaugurated the same day. While there is controversy about the success of that day’s test, Iran claims it was setting the stage for the future launch of the first Iranian-built satellite — the Omid (Hope) — which is expected to be ready for service by mid-2009. Undeterred, Iran conducted a second space-related missile launch this summer.

Of course, Iran has a lot of relatively benign reasons to want a space program. National pride in such an achievement might distract the restive populace from its social and economic suffering, helping to legitimize the increasingly unpopular regime. The program could also build prestige for the ambitious state: Iran would be the first Muslim state with a space-launch capability. Neighbors would be envious as Tehran propels itself toward leadership of the Middle East and the Islamic world.

It is also useful to be able to launch your own communications, intelligence or scientific satellites rather than relying on others to launch them for you. (Russia launched Iran’s only other satellite into orbit back in October 2005.) Iran would surely argue that it needs to be self-reliant for space launches, just as it (self-servingly) insists it needs to be self-sufficient in enriching uranium to produce fuel for Bushehr despite Russian assistance.Experts think a two-stage ballistic missile from Iran could reach all of Europe—and America’s East Coast.

There are other advantages. Satellites could enhance Iran’s military might, relaying secure communications, gathering intelligence, providing early warning and targeting opposition forces, such as U.S. naval and air forces in the Persian Gulf. In addition, a space program, especially a space-launch capacity, is critical to developing an icbm capability. Remember: Moscow’s launch of its first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 meant not only that the Russians had bested us scientifically, but that a Soviet icbm capability was not far behind. Theoretically, if you can launch a ballistic missile that can place a satellite into Earth orbit, you have the scientific wherewithal to hit a target anywhere on


Peter Brookes

Earth with a warhead, including a wmd.Similarly, Iran’s space efforts follow an unnerving

proliferation pattern. In the late 1990s, North Korea also used a “civilian” space program to clandestinely manufacture and test a Taepo Dong ballistic missile with intercontinental potential. Fortunately, the 1998 multi-stage missile launch landed in the Western Pacific after overflying Japan, while North Korea oddly insisted the launch had successfully put a small satellite into orbit, transmitting patriotic songs back to eager listeners on the ground in impoverished North Korea.

Also striking, Iran’s defense ministry plays a prominent role in the putative civilian space effort. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is close to Tehran’s political leadership, manages Iran’s Shahab medium-range ballistic missile program. Some experts believe the Shahab, which is based on the North Korean (medium-range) No Dong missile, could easily morph into an slv/icbm program. Indeed, the Taepo Dong is believed to be based on various No Dong rocketry configurations.

Fortunately, without a Manhattan Project-like effort, an Iranian icbm is not just around the corner: Iran still needs a more energetic (i.e., multistage) missile to carry a nuclear-sized payload (1,000–2,000 pounds) to intercontinental ranges. Although Iran has not yet been totally successful in testing a multistage missile, experts estimate a two-stage ballistic missile from Iran could reach all of Europe — as well as America’s East Coast. A ballistic missile with three stages could range the whole of the United States.

The downside is that Iran could move forward with alacrity if it receives outside assistance on its space and/or missile program. The most likely candidates for that assistance are North Korea, Russia, or a Khan-like network of ballistic missile “guns for hire.”

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Iran could in the end just be working on a space program—not an icbm program. But considering Tehran’s record of nuclear denial and deception, it is hard to believe Iran’s space program is not just more of the same. Equally troubling, in the view of many analysts, is that absent a political decision by Tehran to stay non-nuclear, it will be almost impossible to prevent Iran from a nuclear breakout, meaning that at some point in the future an Iranian ICBM may be capable of being mated with an Iranian nuclear warhead.



Korean Conundrum From a threat perspective, unfortunately, there is not much

good news out of North Korea, either, regarding its nuclear or ballistic missile programs. While the situation is perhaps not as volatile as Iran’s, North Korea remains a cause of concern.

North Korea is already a confirmed nuclear weapons state, lighting off its first nuclear test in a subterranean event in October 2006—in another of its irascible “I will not be ignored” moments. Containing, much less rolling back, North Korea’s nuclear program (beginning in the early years of the Clinton administration) has been a tough, frustrating slog. At times, it looked as if the nuclear standoff could lead to another Korean conflict.

Even today, despite North Korea’s rhetoric and some actions to the contrary, there remains serious concern about Pyongyang’s ultimate willingness to fully denuclearize, since its nuclear arsenal is a strong bargaining chip—and a great equalizer against the strength of the U.S.–South Korean alliance. Complicating matters, North Korea is believed to have a clandestine, parallel uranium-based nuclear program in addition to its well-known plutonium-based program centered around its Russian-made nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

While the United States has accused North Korea directly of having a uranium-based nuclear program, Pyongyang has been evasive, even contradictory, about the existence of this second nuclear program since Washington first confronted North Korean officials about it in the fall of 2002 in Pyongyang. (A major news outlet reported that traces of highly enriched uranium were found on some of the 18,000 pages of North Korean documents provided to the United States in June as part of a nuclear declaration. Some observers, however, believe this story is apocryphal.)

The multilateral effort to address North Korea’s nuclear program has labored for several years under a Six-Party Talks process, which includes the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and North and South Korea, hosted by the Chinese in Beijing. The forum was unable to prevent North Korea from going nuclear, and has evolved from the six-member format into what are now essentially bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang, with frequent consultations with the other four players.

Though some progress has been made in capturing the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, an important site for producing fissile material for weapons, the next steps in addressing North Korea’s existing nuclear weapons capability and the uranium-based program remain an open question. (Of course, the issue of verification and compliance of any nuclear agreement with the ultrasecretive North Koreans has to weigh heavily on the mind of any Washington policymaker contemplating an effective, enduring settlement with Pyongyang.) North Korea is still developing a long-range missile capability to reach out and touch the United States.


Peter Brookes

Making the future of the nuclear weapons issue more than a matter of regional importance is North Korea’s ballistic missile prowess. In addition to the 1998 Taepo Dong launch, North Korea is still developing a long-range capability to reach out and touch the United States. In 2006, North Korea test-fired another Taepo Dong missile that malfunctioned approximately40 seconds after launch, landing a few hundred miles west in the Sea of Japan. Naturally, once again, Pyongyang claimed a test of an slv; once again, very few outside the Hermit Kingdom were swayed by the claim. While the exact capabilities of the Taepo Dong series of ballistic missile are unknown, mostly due to their largely-failed launches, it is believed the missile is capable of reaching well into the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii, and possibly the West Coast of the United States. (The deployment of American missile defenses at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Fort Greeley in Alaska, totaling 24–30 ground-based interceptors, is meant to provide a rudimentary defense against the North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile threat.)

North Korea poses a threat to U.S. forces stationed in-theater with its single-stage No Dong missile. The No Dong, which serves as the rocketry building block for the Taepo Dong, can reach American bases and forces in Japan, which might be called upon in a Korean Peninsula contingency. On the peninsula, the 25,000 or so American troops also face a North Korean ballistic missile threat, consisting of several hundred short-range scud b/c tactical ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in the South within minutes of launch. While there are still questions about the ability of Pyongyang to successfully mount a nuclear warhead capable of withstanding the great heat and pressure common to medium- and long-range missile flight, the North Koreans likely can mate chemical and biological weapons to scuds.

Adding to the anxiety about North Korea’s nuclear and bal-listic missile capabilities are recent reports about Pyongyang’s proliferation activities off the Korean Peninsula: North Korea may have been furtively assisting Syria with a nuclear program of its own. Last September, in a still-secretive raid, Israeli fighters lev-eled a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in the northern part of the country at al Kibar, which, as details dribbling out into the media have shown, may have been supported by North Korean tech-nology and technicians.

While this sort of negative exposure is not good for Pyongyang’s public image on the world stage, the destitute North Koreans are likely willing to work with any number of state actors on nuclear and ballistic missile matters if the price is right.



China Challenge While not an avowed adversary of the United States, China

is—without question—involved in an intense competition with America for power and influence in the Asia-Pacific region and, with little doubt, globally. Chinese great power ambitions are buttressed by a robust military modernization effort, which has been growing at a double-digit rate for over a decade now. In-deed, China now has the world’s third largest defense budget, according to the Pentagon, growing at an average of 18 percent for the last two years alone. Moreover, according to some secu-rity analysts, China has the most active ballistic missile program in the world, most likely a reflection of the unresolved situation surrounding the longstanding political stand-off with China’s cross-Strait rival, Taiwan.

Since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the prc has considered Taiwan to be a province of the People’s Republic. While progress on any form of political reconciliation has been lacking, China has not renounced the use of force in resolving Taiwan’s political future. And while the United States does not have a legal obligation to defend Taiwan, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, aggression against the island would be consid-ered a serious threat to American interests as well as a violation of longstanding U.S. policy of promoting a peaceful, mutually agreeable resolution of the issue. Consequently, if the prc were to move against Taiwan with force, it is widely believed in Washington policy circles that the United States would militar-ily oppose such a move, bringing U.S. and Chinese forces into direct military contact in the Western Pacific.

To deter Taiwanese movement toward independence or other acts China considers “hostile,” the prc has deployed vast num-bers of DF-11/15 (CSS-6/7) short-range ballistic missiles along the coast opposite Taiwan; Pentagon estimates run in the range of 1,000 to 1,100. Moreover, China is believed to be deploying roughly 100 new, highly accurate ballistic missiles a year to aug-ment an already overwhelming force opposite Taiwan. Some have asserted that the number of new missiles may be pushed to 200 per year.

These missiles not only provide strong Chinese deterrent to unwanted Taiwanese political or military actions, but also could be used to great effect in a “bolt from the blue” scenario to decapitate Taiwan’s political leadership or strike critical mili-tary targets such as ports, airfields, and air defenses. Apropos of what it considers outside interference in an internal matter, China does maintain limited medium-range, intermediate-range and icbm forces for deterring, delaying or denying the threat of foreign military involvement in a Taiwan contingency, such as by the United States and Japan, as well as other potential mili-tary contingencies with the likes of Russia or India.

China has modernized its land-based strategic nuclear deter-rent too, adding road-mobile, solid-fueled icbms to its arsenal,


Peter Brookes

Treaty Trouble The russian federation, like China, is not an enemy of the

United States, but it desires to play a leading role on the world stage, balancing other centers of power such as the European Union and nato with its political, economic, and military. Russia has readjusted its foreign policy orientation from one that was Western-looking to one that is increasingly independent in recent years—even anti-West, depened by the war in Georgia this summer over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. As many have asserted, Russia is confident, prideful, wealthy, and interested in reasserting Russia as a great power.

Indeed, some would argue that Russia’s chief global foreign policy objective is nothing less than recreating its superpower status. While Russia isn’t necessarily looking to become the Soviet Union again, it would like to exert decisive leverage on the international system, as the Kremlin did during the Cold War. To achieve these ends, Russia today maintains its position as the world’s second mightiest nuclear weapons state, with over 600 strategic offensive weapons, buttressed by a significant military modernization program to revitalize the once-proud Russian military.

Its ballistic missile force is part of that effort. Russia has one of the world’s most active ballistic missile testing programs, planning to test-launch nine ballistic missiles in 2008, according to a senior military commander in May. Russia is putting an average of three mobile and three to four of their newest silo-based Topol-m (SS-27) icbms into operation every year. Moscow may double its test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles after 2009, based on Russian military claims. According to some sources, Russia is already working on a follow-up to the SS-27, based on reports of testing in May. The new version is expected to be equipped with multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (mirvs). Moscow is also testing a new submarine-

increasing its deterrent effect and survivability. A new concern is China’s plans to put its nuclear deterrent to sea, equipping its Jin-class (Type 094) nuclear submarines with the new JL-2 mis-sile with intercontinental range; a JL-2 was tested in late May. Of equal concern, beyond the growing capacity of China’s bal-listic missile force, is the continuing potential for witting—or un-witting—proliferation of wmd and ballistic missile technology or materials. While China’s proliferation record has improved, concerns still exist about ties with North Korea and Iran.



Resurgent Russia Shortcomings in the 1970 NPT and the Missile Technology Con-

trol Regime (MTCR), moreover, provide further reason to look to missile defenses to help insulate the United States from bal-listic missiles and nuclear weapons proliferation. The npt, which is well-intentioned and may have dissuaded some states from pursuing nuclear weapons, is in dire need of an overhaul. It is rife with loopholes, such as allowing a wide range of nuclear activities closely related to nuclear weapons work. The accord also lacks the requisite teeth to ensure enforcement. North Korea threatened to leave it and then did so with its requisite 90-day notice before its 2006 nuclear test; Tehran ignored its tenets for 20 years before its nuclear activities were disclosed, not by the npt ’s Praetorian Guard, the iaea, but by an Iranian dissident group.

The proliferation of ballistic missiles is not prohibited by any international treaty. The mtcr is a volunteer organization, which has been weakened over time by states that have flouted its prin-ciples when advantageous for hard currency, military assistance, or strategic influence. As a result, in recent years, the United States decided that leaving itself deliberately vulnerable to any weapon system or state—as it did during the Cold War—was foolish. Deliberate vulnerability can lead to perceptions of weak-ness, inviting provocation or aggression. In addition, it can lead a potential adversary to use threats, intimidation, blackmail, or coercion to achieve its objectives. In a day of seemingly unstop-pable proliferation, the chance that horrific weapons will be used against peaceful nations is a troubling possibility.

Every state has an undeniable right to self-defense. It only makes sense that all reasonable, necessary steps are taken to pro-tect and advance one’s national security, especially if the techno-logical capability is emerging to do so, as evidenced by tens of successful missile defense tests. Hitting a bullet with a bullet in the atmosphere, or even space, is now possible. Developing and

launched icbm.Adding to security concerns, Russia is threatening to pull out

of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (inf) treaty, which eliminated that class of ballistic missiles in a 1987 arms control treaty with the United States. Moscow is uncomfortable with the increase in the number of states around its periphery that now have intermediate range ballistic missiles that did not have them when the treaty was signed over 20 years ago, such as India, Pakistan, Iran, China, and North Korea. This could lead to a bump-up in Russia’s missile arsenal.


Peter Brookes

deploying missile defenses is not about the missile or wmd threat from a single country or even several countries. Missile defense is about protection from these weapons no matter where the threat comes from now—or in the future.

And despite the range of concerns about missile defense, it should be emphasized that it is a defensive—not offensive —weapon. Indeed, the missile defense interceptor warhead does not even contain an explosive charge; traveling at 15,000 miles per hour, it destroys the missile warhead by the sheer force of the collision. Missile defense is like an umbrella; it is needed only if it rains. It threatens no one. It only undermines the capability of one country to threaten or attack another country with its bal-listic missiles or wmd. The idea that the deployment of missile defense will provoke an attack is a canard meant to encourage passivity.

The United States has made it clear to concerned states that missile defense does not threaten their security, emphasizing that it is part of an expanding effort to counter the growing ballistic missile threat—wherever it comes from. Of course, no country should expect to have a veto over America’s security. Indeed, those states that oppose missile defense would do better to turn their protests toward Tehran and Pyongyang and other capitals that are driving the need for it with their growing of-fensive ballistic missile capability, their own missile production, or their proliferation practices. Moreover, some security analysts speculate cautiously that the successful deployment of an effec-tive missile defense may one day convince countries that their pursuit of missiles and wmd should be abandoned as futile en-deavors, supporting widely accepted nonproliferation goals.

Cold War-like mutually assured destruction or massive retali-ation should not be the only options for policymakers. In the end, it is clear: Missile defense will improve America’s security against the growing challenge of ballistic missiles and their un-conventional payloads.


How the Soviet System Crackedby Paul R. Gregory

The soviet flag was lowered from atop the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. It is doubtful this event will ever be memorialized in Russia, whose current prime minister characterizes it as the “greatest political disaster of the twentieth century.” The political end of the ussr was the final step in the destruction of the Soviet system. The nail in the coffin of its primary pillar dates three years earlier, to September 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev disbanded the industrial-branch departments of the central Committee, the last vestiges of central control. Fall 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Soviet administrative-command system. As the most significant experiment of the twentieth century, it is appropriate to perform a post mortem on it, armed with memoirs, interviews, and open archives.

The collapse of the Soviet system was a rare event in human history. Regimes, administrations, and governments come and go regularly, but there are no precedents for a comprehensive socio-political-economic system to disappear quickly and with little warning after 50 years of existence. Economic systems change throughout their history, but they usually evolve gradually through hundreds of thousands of Hayekian human actions. Only in rare cases, where human design dominates, are changes visible to the human eye (such as the creation of the European Union or peace settlements after wars). The Soviet system was created by human design, and its collapse was also engineered by human design. This explains the speed of collapse and why we are more likely to make sense of it despite its recent vintage.

In this essay, I attempt to explain why the Soviet system collapsed, and its timing. I use a simple model that synthesizes a number of models:1 It assumes that an elite of “system electors” (the Soviet nomenklatura, the Central Committee, or some other authoritative grouping) periodically decides whether to continue the status quo (the administrative command system) or

Paul R. Gregory is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Cullen Professor of Economics at the University of Houston.

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Paul Gregory

October / November 08

“defect” to an “outside option” (replacement of the administrative command system with another system). The choices may be represented by different leaders, such as a choice between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin or Mikhail Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachev for the party leadership, or between organized groups, such as the military-industrial complex versus agricultural interests. Elite “electors” use cost-benefit analysis to assess whether they are better off with the status quo or the outside option. If there is sufficient support for the outside option, system change will occur.

In defining my task, I must be careful to state what I am trying to explain. The collapse of the economic system differs in substance and in timing from the collapse of the ussr, the Soviet bloc, or the “leading role” of the communist party. The Soviet administrative-command system ended when its three pillars —administrative resource allocation by industrial ministries, property rights vested in the Soviet state, and direction of economic activity by a monopoly party—collapsed. The ministerial resource allocation began to crumble with the anti-bureaucracy campaign of May 1986 and culminated with the implementation of the enterprise law of June 1987. The communist party’s direction of economic activity ended in September 1988 with the abolition of the sectoral departments of the Central Committee. The de facto transfer of property rights from the Soviet state was more gradual. The November 1986 law on individual labor activity and the March 1988 law on cooperatives lifted restrictions on earnings, and the March 1989 law on leasing promoted the transfer of state assets to individuals.2

My task, therefore, is to explain why the administrative-command system was destroyed and why it was destroyed when it was. Notice that I have not yet defined the “outside option.” The outside-option choices ranged from an economic system designed to maximize rent-seeking and corruption, to a Chinese-like market socialism, to an economic system of transparency, secure property rights, and a rule of law. The outside option selected was, unfortunately, much closer to the first than the third.

“The Soviet system was created by human design, and its collapse was also engineered by human design. ”

1) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et. al, The Logic of Political Survival (mit Press, 2005);

Valery Lazarev, “Economics of One-Party Support:

Promotion Incentives and Support for the Soviet

Regime,” Comparative Economic Studies

47:2 (June 2005);

Lazarev, “Political Labor Market, Government Policy

and Stability of a Non-Democratic Regime,” Journal

of Comparative Economics

35:3 (September 2007);

Daron Acemoglu and JamesRobinson, Economic

Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

(Cambridge University Press, 2005).

2) Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich,

The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An

Insiders’ History (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), xxi–xxiv.

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How the Soviet System Cracked


3) Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry”,

in E.A. Rees, ed., Decision Making in the Stalinist

Command Economy, 1932–37

(MacMillan, 1997), 109–11.

4) Quoted in Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded

and Democracy Failed

(Peterson Institute for International Affairs, 2007), 85.

The Durability of the Administrative-Command System

Presumably, soviet leaders could have selected the “outside option” earlier. The power struggle of the 1920s could have ended with a nep-like mixed economy. At the end of World War II, Stalin could have opted not to restore the party to power. Stalin’s successors could have decided in favor of deep economic reforms shortly after his death. Nikita Khrushchev, with all his harebrained schemes, could have tried more radical reform.

Although the administrative-command system was assembled in great haste and by trial and error, it proved notably resistant to change. From 1930 to 1985, Soviet “system electors” chose the status quo, while periodically flirting with cosmetic reforms. Reform by reshuffling of the administrative structure began in 1930; a succession of reshufflings, from the breaking up of the “super industrial ministry” into an ever larger number of ministries in the 1930s to the creation of a “super agricultural ministry” by Gorbachev early in his tenure, failed to yield improvements. Attempts to make the planning system more

“scientific” also failed from the early 1930s onwards. The most “radical” reform—to allow enterprises to make more of their own decisions—had already been proposed in 1931 by the influential minister of heavy industry.3 These very same ideas resurfaced in 1961 as the Liberman reforms, to be tried in part and then rejected in the Kosygin reform of 1965. These same reform principles formed the core of Gorbachev’s initial perestroika proposals after 1985.

The distinction between “reform” and “transition” should be emphasized to avoid unnecessary confusion. “Reforms” are changes designed to improve the existing system without sacrificing its fundamental features. “Transition” is the movement from the administrative-command system to an outside option, such as a market economy. Throughout the history of the Soviet reform movement, no one other than fringe academics advocated transition. Gorbachev resisted the concept of transition to the very end, declaring even after the failed August 1991 coup: “I am convinced that socialism is correct.”4 It was his rival Boris Yeltsin who first advocated transition to a market economy and then proceeded to vacillate on this decision throughout his term. From Stalin through Chernenko, the status quo was protected to such an extent that attempts at more than cosmetic reform were resisted with ferocity.

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According to my model, the administrative-command system remains resistant to change as long as the “elector” constituency favors the status quo. The fact that the administrative-command system remained remarkably unchanged from 1930 to 1985 tells us that the “outside option” constituency was weak. During the Stalin era, the status quo was by definition infallible; failures were due to human error or deliberate sabotage under Stalin’s “cadres decide all” motto. It would have been fatal to argue otherwise.

The status quo and outside option constituencies remained basically the same from 1931 on, although it should be emphasized that the latter advocated reform, not transition. The Soviet elite appointed to state and party positions through nomenklatura appointments (hence: the nomenklatura) were basically divided between “planners” who issued instructions and intervened in the production process and “producers” held responsible for carrying out the orders and interventions of the first group.5

“Planners” included national and regional party leaders, council of ministers members, and planning and finance officials. “Producers” included enterprise managers and regional officials in charge of local enterprises. Industrial ministries stood at the intersection of producers and planners, with both held responsible for results and issuing instructions to enterprise managers.

Responsibility for final results defined the difference between producers and planners. Producers complained that superiors gave orders but bore no responsibility. Minister of Heavy Industry G.K. Ordzhonikidze (in an outburst in a Politburo meeting of August 1931): “You want to play the role of bureaucrat, but when my factories fall apart, it is I who must answer not those of you who engage in such ‘serious discussions’ here.”6 The deputy chairman of a military industrial plant echoed these sentiments some 50 years later: “They [the defense branch department of the central committee] would inquire why the plan isn’t being fulfilled, they acted like they were another Council of Ministers. But they had more authority and none of the responsibilities.”7

From 1931 on, “producers” argued for increased freedom and reduced “petty tutelage.” “Planners” argued that producers must be kept under control by coercive means because they otherwise produced too little, demanded too much, charged too high prices, and skimped on quality. Producers were held responsible, plagued by ill-conceived plans and by moving targets. The producers’ lament remained the same. Ordzhonikidze (1931): “From the decrees that are being received I guess the impression is that we are idiots. They give us every day decree upon decree, each successive one is stronger than the previous and without

Constituency for Change

5)Paul Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism

(Cambridge, 2004), Chapter 4.

6)O.V. Khlevnyuk, R. Davies, L.P. Kosheleva, E.A. Ris, L.A. Rogovaia, Stalin

i Kaganovich. Perepiski. 1931–1936 gg.

(Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 55.

7)Ellman and Kontorovich, Destruction of the

Soviet Economic System, 46.

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Michael ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, in their exhaustive study of the events leading up to the collapse, conclude that the Soviet nomenklatura was not a reform constituency: “We find no evidence that the Soviet system was toppled by the party and state officials in order to turn their power into private wealth.12 ”Rather, they attribute the post-reform success of the nomenklatura to “individual survival skills rather than some grand design.” If Ellman and Kontorovich are to be believed, those who were to benefit from the toppling of the system played no role in its collapse. Instead they were simply handed new opportunities on a silver platter without any effort on their part.

The conclusion that those who were to benefit from the system’s end did not coalesce to further its collapse requires a conspicuous lack of foresight. It seems safer to assume that the nomenklatura would have used rational expectations to fathom that they could prosper under the outside option—a conclusion

The Perestroika Coalition

foundation.”8 A chief defense contractor (speaking more than 50 years later) echoed Ordzhonikidze: “They would stick their heads into every single issue. They would say: ‘This must be so.’ We told them they were wrong, but they would demand that things be done they way they said it should be done.”9

Both sides had valid arguments. Producers, if left to their own devices, would under-produce and over-demand resources, as the planners said. For their part, producers could point to stupid, contradictory, and changing orders and excessive meddling that prevented them from running their enterprises efficiently.

The stalemate persisted for more than a half century, for good reason. A state-owned enterprise left to its own devices would operate like a vehicle without a steering wheel. It would be owned “by everyone and hence by no one.” There were no markets in which to buy inputs and sell outputs. There were no scarcity prices to indicate what was cheap and what was expensive. In fact, theory suggests that an administrative-command system would collapse upon itself if administrative coercion were removed.10

The Soviet Union, in fact, had a preview of the effect of reduced administrative coercion. When planning targets were deliberately moderated in 1976 to encourage managers to use their resources more efficiently, output growth contracted but the efficiency of resource use did not improve.11

8) Quoted in O.V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Koflikty v Politburo v 30-e Gody (Moscow: Izdatel’ski tsentr Rossia

molodaia, 1993), 32.

9) Statement of deputy chairman of military industrial complex about the interference by the central committee, in Ellman

and Kontorovich, Destruction of the Soviet Economic

System, 47.

10) Mark Harrison, “Coercion, Compliance and the Collapse of the Soviet Command Economy,” Economic History Review 55 (2002).

11) Gertrude Schroder, “The Slowdown in Soviet Industry, 1976–1982,” Soviet Economy, 1:1 (January – March “smallcaps”>1985<).

13) Lazarev, “Economics of One-Party Support.”

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that would mobilize them into a potent constituency for the outside option. Indeed, the collapse of the administrative-command system created substantial wealth for the winners, who were drawn primarily from nomenklatura appointees. “After the end of mass privatization, former nomenklatura appointees accounted for about two thirds of the top positions in Russian business and government.”

Valery Lazarev has used the behavior of party members in the period leading up to the collapse as a barometer of confidence in the status quo. He notes that under the administrative-command system membership in and advancement in the party offered opportunities to earn economic rents in the form of higher salaries and perks. Young people entered the party as candidate-members and had to put in years of service before a portion of them advanced to rent-seeking positions. The decision to join the party was, therefore, based on long-run considerations, such as the probability of advancement and the size of the economic rent to be earned upon advancement. Young activists compared these expected lifetime rents with their outside options, such as employment outside the party.

According to Lazarev’s logic, the number of young persons joining the party as “candidates” provides a measure of expectations of the value of a party career. In the post-Stalin period, the number of candidates was characterized by stable low numbers and a declining trend. But in the years immediately preceding the end of the Soviet regime, the number of new candidates approached zero. Although expected rents from party positions did not fall (as measured relative to average earnings), they were paltry compared to the rents being earned by the emerging class of new Russians after 1987. In this one notable area where we can see people voting with their feet for the future of the Soviet system we encounter a resounding vote of no confidence.

The Rent-Generating Machine

We have so far not defined the “outside option.” Constituencies could form for various types of outside options—a rules-based market economy with limited government intervention, a market socialist solution in which the state retains ownership of enterprises and sets the general direction of economic activity, or a quasi-market economy characterized by price controls,

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licensing, lack of a rule of law, and indistinct property rights.We would expect the Soviet nomenklatura to support the

outside option that matched their comparative advantages. A transparent market economy, operating according to a rule of law with prices determined by markets did not fit into their skill sets. Rather, the nomenklatura would favor an outside option that rewarded insider knowledge and networking, retained low state prices to allow speculative profits, and used state subsidies and tax preferences to reward clients. In other words, the nomenklatura needed an outside option based on rent-seeking rather than entrepreneurship. The market-socialist option would have left the communist party in control of assets and in charge of economic policies. The system of incentives for enterprise managers and the proper amount of state-owner intervention would have to be worked out, and the outcome would be far from clear.

The outside option chosen in 1987–1988 was “a perfect rent-generating machine,” in the words of Anders Åslund, who gives an example from 1990: “A Soviet operator could purchase three tons of crude oil, worth $300 on the world market, for $1 or one pack of Marloboros.”14

Note that the outside option of a rent-seeking state broadened the constituency. The enterprise manager who controlled real resources (such as an oil export pipeline operator wanting to export $1 oil) needed the services of planners (trade officials who controlled export licenses) to make speculative profits. Presumably these monopoly rents would be divided between the producer and the planner. Although planners would “lose” in the sense that they could issue fewer orders and intervene less, those who controlled monopoly rights could be expected to be rewarded handsomely by rent seekers. Both sides would be winners. Only society would lose, and no one in particular was representing society’s interests.

The networks for distributing monopoly rents were embedded in the hierarchical relationships among enterprise managers, the foreign trade monopoly, ministry branch departments, and supply organizations. Over the years, they had studied together, made deals together, and had drunk together. The odd men out in the distribution of monopoly rents would be regional party officials, who now lacked the authority to order around the state officials through their power to issue licenses, permits, and distributions of price-controlled goods.

14)Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, 58–59.

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The Gorbachev Factor Stalin occupied the position of general secretary of the

communist party. After his victory in the power struggle, the supreme authority of the general secretary was uncontested. He set the tone of political, social, and economic policies. Stalin’s legacy explains the long reform stalemate and its quick reversal under Gorbachev. Under Stalin, any failure, real or imagined, to support his “unified party line” was counterrevolution. Nikita Khrushchev’s corn and chemical fertilizer campaigns had to be supported by the Politburo even as they wrought havoc on the economy. The general secretary had the power to move state and society. Until Gorbachev, that authority was used to maintain the status quo. Stalin triumphed over the right wing in the late 1920s because his support of collectivization and industrialization resounded more with the grass roots of the Bolshevik leadership. Khrushchev defeated Malenkov, in part, by arguing for doctrinal orthodoxy (priority of heavy industry). The Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko succession limited reform discussion to organizational reform, disciplinary campaigns, and to making planning work better.

Although Gorbachev’s predecessors recognized the weaknesses of the system, they were ideologically committed and understood that the power to control the economy, albeit badly and inefficiently, was their ultimate source of power.

“Radical” reform could threaten the key pillars of the system, such as state ownership, monopoly of the party, and planned allocation. They wanted nothing of it.

Mikhail Gorbachev, born in 1931, was the first general secretary after Stalin not from the generation of party officials who came to power during Stalin’s purges. Gorbachev became general secretary at 50. Khrushchev and Brezhnev assumed the position when they were near 60 years of age.

In other regimes, the “challenger” to the status quo (Gorbachev) would have to attract enough defectors from the ruling elite to put together a winning coalition.15 Gorbachev’s path to succession was remarkably smooth. He was elected not as an outsider but as the ultimate insider—Stalin’s worst fear of a powerful enemy from within. Gorbachev was elected as someone with the reputation of a “reformer” without actually ever putting forward a reform program.16 Although there was the usual jockeying for leadership behind the scenes, the power struggle was perfunctory. Gorbachev’s time had come; the party had neither the inclination nor the will to put up another aged leader. The only conceivable alternative to Gorbachev, Yegor Ligachev, could only offer a continuation of past policies.

15) Bueno de Mesquita et al., Logic of Political Survival.

16)Valery Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as

Witnessed by his Chief of Staff (Basic Books, 1994), Chapters 2–3.

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Gorbachev’s embrace of “radical” political and economic reforms was resented but met only muted protests from senior party officials. The newly-appointed Gorbachev, as his predecessors had before him, went about removing presumed opponents while he installed a new slate of Central Committee members. Those who opposed him largely kept quiet and deferred to the general secretary. Many accepted forced retirement with scarcely a whimper as they acceded to party discipline.17 The key administrative agencies of the command system — Gosplan, Gossnab and the Military-Industrial Complex (VPK) implemented his reform decrees without protest, despite an evident distaste for reform.18

Gorbachev, without himself having any clear conception of reform, turned to reform economists, assembled by his reform guru, Alexander Yakovlev. Gorbachev’s economic advisors were drawn from Marxist political economists, who thought that market socialism was possible, and from theorists, who had developed abstract theories of an optimally functioning planned economy. Both groups lacked practical experience and did not even consider crucial matters such as the rising budget deficit. Both promised that the administrative-command system could be saved with relatively minor adjustments, such as opening the economy to the West, giving more authority to enterprises, and reducing the power of those who opposed reform: the bureaucracy.

Gorbachev and his advisors did not believe that the Soviet system itself was to blame and should be liquidated. Instead, they searched for a new and improved form of socialism “with a human face.” Had Gorbachev understood that his policies would lead to the end of Soviet socialism and his own disgrace at home (and acclaim abroad), he would have acted differently.

From the early days of reform thinking, Soviet reformers harbored hopes of a decentralizing reform and they were encouraged by their Western colleagues with the message that partial reforms could yield major improvements without altering the fundamental nature of the system. Yet earlier reform proposals had had huge inconsistencies evident to all. Evsei Liberman proposed in the early 1960s to elevate the role of profits and keep output targets while freeing inputs but without freeing prices. Aleksei Kosygin wished to decentralize investment without loosening central controls on investment

“Gorbachev’s embrace of “radical” reforms was resented, but met only muted protests from senior party officials.”

17) Ellman and Kontorovich, Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, Chapter 2; Boldin, Ten Years That Shock the World, Chapters 2–3.

18) Ellman and Kontorovich, Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, 22.

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resources. Mathematical economists spoke alluringly of “hidden reserves”—as high as 50 percent of gdp—waiting to be released by meaningful reform.

“Mathematical economists spoke alluringly of “hidden reserves” waiting to be released by meaningful reform.”

Spurred on by the promise of such El Dorados, Gorbachev veered from the earlier history of cosmetic reforms. First, he destroyed the power of the ministries with his enterprise reform of June 1987, which freed enterprise managers from “petty tutelage.” Stalin’s industrial ministries, which had been the true allocators of resources, were emasculated and directed to ill-defined “long-term goals.” As an experienced bureaucratic infighter, Gorbachev had personally witnessed how the industrial ministries had annulled Kosygin’s 1965 reform. Fearing another silent sabotage, Gorbachev enlisted the support of the population and of the party in his anti-bureaucracy campaign directed specifically against the industrial ministries.19 A year later, in September 1988, he turned against the party by closing down the Central Committee’s industrial departments—the last outpost of central intervention and control. The Gorbachev reforms of 1987 and 1988 were for real. By the end of the 1989, surveys of economic officials and plant managers showed that the old system was no longer functioning—that most decisions were being made by the enterprises themselves, whose autonomy was not complete but much less restricted than five years earlier.20

Two pillars of the administrative command system—the allocation of resources by the ministries and party interventions —were destroyed without being replaced by a new allocation system. The economy went into free fall; the economy began to shrink; lines formed; and an embittered population again needed ration coupons to buy sugar.

Gorbachev’s reform economists had spent their ammunition. The “easy gains” from decentralizing the system were not forthcoming, and they had no Plan B. According to Ellman and Kontorovich: “The sheer ignorance of the leading economists played an even greater role in the failure of the post-1989 policies aimed at the transition to the market. Since the 1960s, Soviet economists had accumulated a stock of ideas (however unworkable) for decentralization within the Soviet system. This stock carried them through 1988. When they were called upon to advise on the transition to the market, they were unprepared, because such a contingency had previously seemed impossible.”21

19) Ellman and Kontorovich, Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, 21.

20)Paul Gregory, “Bureaucrats, Managers and Perestroika: The First Five Years.

Results of Surveys of Soviet Managers and Officials,” in nato, The Soviet

Economy Under Gorbachev (Brussels: nato, 1991), 188–202.

21) Ellman and Kontorovich, Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, 18–19.

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The same conclusion of ignorance and helplessness is confirmed by a Gorbachev aide, describing work on the reform program: “People were increasingly wondering whether the leadership really knew which way it was headed and what needed to be done. It might be hard to believe, but at the time nobody knew in concrete terms what needed to be done. We had entered a period of confusing and half-baked theorizing. One thing would be said today, another tomorrow, while a third would actually be done.”22 Politburo meetings became chaotic and haphazard. Gorbachev’s tone became “milder, his voice and his words more hesitant.”23 Decisions were left dangling in midair as Gorbachev wavered. The indecisive Gorbachev could not bring himself to the conclusion that socialism had to be scuttled. It was left to his more politically-adept rival, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, to concede that socialism should be abandoned and to move to a market system. Through the summer of 1991, Gorbachev was still seeking compromises (such as the impossible blending of Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzkov’s conservative proposals with the 500 Day Program of Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky).

My account of “radical” reform places Mikhail Gorbachev at its epicenter. He initiated the reform, and he bore the consequences of its failure. This narrative leaves out the role of the “outside option” constituency. If Gorbachev, as general secretary, had the power to push through reform, what role was left for others?

This description does not explain why those who had a stake in the status quo did not sabotage his reforms as they had done earlier. Anders Åslund relates the following telling anecdote: “In April of 1985 . . . Gorbachev issued a decree on a minor agricultural reform. I paid a visit to Gennady Kulik, an old-style apparatchik and then head of the foreign relations department of the Soviet ministry of Agriculture. When I asked what Gorbachev’s decree really meant, he replied: ‘Not a thing! What should I care about a decree signed by the general secretary of the Communist Party?’”24 This agricultural apparatchik was not unusual. Even during his worst purges, Stalin raged at his “disobedient” subordinates and demanded new “implementation commissions” to make sure his orders were being followed.25 One of the most talented administrators of Soviet history, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, saw his September 1965 reforms sabotaged by a recalcitrant bureaucracy.26 As Gorbachev’s reforms were first announced in 1987, I had every expectation that they would be just another addition to the treadmill of reforms.

Sabotage and Rent-Seeking

22) Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World, 117.

23) Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World, 158.

24)Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, 38.

25) Gregory, Political Economy of Stalinism.

26)Gertrude Schroeder, “Recent Developments in Soviet Economic Planning and Managerial Incentives,” in Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economic

Prospects for the Seventies

(Government Printing Office), 1973.

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A comparison of Kosygin’s reforms of 1965 with Gorbachev’s 20 years later explains why Gorbachev’s were not sabotaged. The 1965 reforms reduced the tutelage on enterprises by giving them fewer targets and allowed them to retain profits for bonuses and to fund their own investments. Strict planning and bank controls remained in place; managerial earnings were strictly monitored, and the envisioned bonuses were modest. In sum, Kosygin’s plan reduced the powers of the bureaucracy while it gave little to the producers in return. The planners had much to lose; the producers had little to gain. It is no wonder the reform died without a whimper.

In contrast, Gorbachev’s reform created an ideal rent-generating machine. Limits were removed from personal earnings; managers could form cooperatives with price setting freedom and basically unlimited earnings; managers could “lease” equipment from the state enterprise for their private small business. Even more alluring, managers were no longer under the thumb of the state monopoly bank. They could form their own banks and they could even engage in foreign transactions, including sending funds to foreign bank accounts. The bureaucrats could also cash in by selling licenses, permits, and other accoutrements of the rent-seeking state. The sky was now the limit!

Gorbachev’s rent-generating machine was not a value-generating machine. There was still no law on private property; managers had seen reforms come and go. They knew their rents could be cut off at any time. In such a setting, it was clear that money was to be earned as quickly as possible by stripping assets and not by creating value.

The transition to a market economy of market prices and private ownership began only after the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian flag on December 25, 1991. The hard work of creating a market economy remained ahead for Gorbachev’s successors in the 15 states that emerged from the ussr.

“Kosygin, one of the most talented administrators of Soviet history, saw his reforms sabotaged by a recalcitrant bureaucracy.”

27) Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World

(Harper and Row, 1987), 19.

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I have discussed the collapse of the Soviet administrative-command system without talking about the ussr’s worsening economic performance. Gorbachev himself listed “slowing economic growth” as his first concern upon gaining power: “In the last fifteen years the national income growth rates had declined by more than a half and by the beginning of the eighties had fallen to a level close to economic stagnation.”27 If the decade-and-a-half experience with declining economic growth (with little hope of improvement ahead) made the continuation of the Soviet system untenable, it would have been only a matter of time before the system collapsed, irrespective of who was in charge. Gorbachev’s appearance on the scene only accelerated the inevitable collapse.

Figure 1 summarizes Soviet economic performance from the 1950 until Gorbachev’s appointment in 1985. It shows that the ussr began the postwar era with high rates of growth (which were matched by much of Europe and exceeded by the economic miracles in Germany and Japan). The rapid growth of the 1950s, however, promoted an air of economic superiority as Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the ussr would “bury” the West. Soviet growth declined steadily after 1970. In the five years preceding Gorbachev’s appointment, Soviet growth settled at 2 percent. A 2 percent growth rate was a bitter pill for a country seeking to compete on the world stage with the United States and Western Europe, but it was far from fatal.

The 1970s and early 1980s were also trying times in the West, as economic growth declined in response to two large energy

Economic Growth 27) Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Harper and Row, 1987), 19.

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shocks. Stagflation contributed to a huge sense of uncertainty throughout the globe. Asia looked better: Japan was recording what would be its last episode of relatively rapid economic growth, while China’s was experiencing the initial successes of its economic reforms begun in 1979 (China’s growth was almost 10 percent on the eve of Gorbachev’s appointment).

Figure 1 itself does not point to a Soviet economic crisis deep enough to justify scuttling the Soviet system. The period 1970–1985, however, offered ominous signs for the Soviet Union: Although the ussr was a beneficiary of the energy shocks of the 1970s and was still churning out high rates of capital formation, it was performing like its Western counterparts or slightly worse. Poor economic performance was at best a necessary but not sufficient condition for the revolution from above. If Soviet economic performance had been better, true, there would have been less interest in reform and less support for the outside option, but poor economic growth per se has little to say about the system’s viability.

The fact that reforms in China, begun in 1979, were starting to pay off with exceptional rates of growth may have had more to do with Gorbachev’s reform than comparisons with the West. Chinese reforms, which had been inspired by the rapid growth of Japan and of the Four Southeast Asian Tigers, suggested to Soviet leaders that their only hope of “catching up” was to do something new.

There was no outright collapse of the Soviet administrative command economy. It continued to have positive economic growth until its final two years, but, by that time, it had already been largely dismantled and the negative growth was a consequence of the collapse of the system, not a cause of the collapse.28

The Western academic and intelligence communities devoted a huge effort to projecting Soviet economic performance, none of which painted an optimistic picture. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that the Soviet Union would continue to “muddle along” on a “treadmill of reforms” without more than token tinkering with its basic economic and political institutions.

There was no clamoring from the population for change in the system. The majority of the population tacitly accepted the official tenets of Soviet socialism and appeared to prefer their way

“Chinese reforms suggested to Soviet leaders that their only hope of

‘catching up’ was to do something new.”

28) Directorate of Intelligence, Handbook of Economic Statistics, 1991, cpas

91–10001 (September 1991), 37.

31



Twenty years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev, his academic advisors, and his rent-seeking accomplices destroyed the Soviet administrative-command economy. It was up to his successors in the 15 nations carved out of the ussr to decide what to do next. Some opted for transition (the Baltic states); others decided to keep as much of the old system as possible (Belarus and Uzbekistan). Most vacillated.

I have not addressed the interactions between the destruction of the administrative-command system and the political collapse of the Soviet Union. If we accept Marx’s principle that “productive forces” determine the “superstructure,” the end of the Soviet economic system would have had profound impacts on the Soviet political system and its infrastructure. But such impacts go beyond the scope of this essay.

The end of the Soviet administrative-command system constituted a paradigm shift. The world was forever changed. The fact that few saw it coming was the greatest intelligence failure of the twentieth century. This failure shows that scholars and intelligence communities are ill equipped to foresee paradigm shifts because they occur so rarely, and we cannot study their general tendencies. When they do happen we cannot prove hypotheses of their causes because we have no repetitions. Their rarity also suggests that paradigm shifts are not monocausal. They require a complex constellation of events. If they had one cause, they would be easy to see coming.

The collapse of the Soviet administrative-command economy required elite dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs; in this case, with declining economic growth. It required a rival embarking on what appeared to be a successful reform (China), and a Soviet leader willing and able to embark on radical

of life, although they were aware of the risks of dissidence. The higher consumption standards in the West were compensated by stability, free health care and education, and the like.29 Even Soviet immigrants in the United States reported being satisfied with their standard of living in the Soviet Union.30 Soviet citizens were moderately optimistic about the future, probably more so than their leaders. The powerful military-industrial complex, although it may have been concerned about falling behind the West, was an unlikely source of support for radical change. Insofar as military r&d and production tend to be state controlled irrespective of the economic system, I would doubt that military interests would lobby for capitalism.

Lessons Learned

29) Vladimir Shlapentokh, “Standard of Living and Popular Discontent,” in Ellman and Kontorovich, 33–34.

30)James Millar, Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR (Cambridge, 1987), 33.

32

Paul Gregory


experiments. That leader would also have to lack the insight of his predecessors that a logical outcome of this experimentation would be the destruction of the system itself. A reversal of incentives at the grass-roots level had to be engineered. A perverse economic system had to be established that offered economic rents to reconcile the two warring factions — producers and planners — and to enlist them as supporters of this endeavor. This explosive combination of ingredients ignited into a “perfect storm” that destroyed the administrative-command system that had held its own for half a century.

Does the unexpected collapse of the Soviet administrative-command system offer insights into the future of other dictatorships, such as in Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba? In my view, we should avoid overemphasizing the economy. We believe that declining economic growth was only one factor in the collapse of the Soviet administrative-command system. Its primary role was to motivate the leadership to undertake risky schemes.

History shows that nondemocracies are generally characterized by poor economic performance,31 but they tend to be more stable than democracies.32 Economic success is more likely to create democracies than is economic failure.33 Poor economic performance may even enhance the stability of nondemocratic regimes by making the relative rents to regime supporters even more valuable.34 Rational dictators may even deliberately block modernization if ensuing change threatens to eliminate their political rents.35 Poorly managed and miserably performing dictatorships can have long lives — as North Korea, Cuba, and Africa show. Dictators can, in fact, retain power while running their economies into the ground as long as they can offer supporters sufficient rents, as the example of Robert Mugabwe in Zimbabwe illustrates.

Rather, in order to predict the end of a dictatorship, we must look for constellations of forces, many of which would not have played roles in the destruction of past dictatorships. The chances of success in this endeavor are limited, however, because we have so few observations.

31) Robert Barro, “Determinants of Democracy,”

Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999).

32) Bueno de Mesquita et al., Logic of Political Survival.

33) Y. Feng and P. Zak, “The Determinants of Democratic Transitions,”

Journal of Conflict Resolution 43 (1999).

34) Bueno de Mesquita et al., Logic of Political Survival; Valery Lazarev,

“Political Labor Market, Government Policy and

Stability of a Non-Democratic Regime,” Journal of

Comparative Economics 35:3 (September 2007).

35) Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.


Henrik Bering is a writer and critic.

F.P. Lock. Edmund Burke: Volume I, 1730-1784.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY Press. 616 Pages. $252

F.P. Lock. Edmund Burke: Volume II, 1784-1797.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY Press. 648 Pages. $199

The Irish ProphetBy Henrik Bering

Edmund burke once asked his friend, the actor and theatre manager David Garrick, why the audience would always titter when a group of Roman senators appeared on stage. That was easily explained, Garrick replied. The audience laughed because they recognized the faces hiding behind the worthy senatorial exteriors as belonging to the extras who played all the bit parts. “They knew that they were no other than the candlesnuffers, revolutionary scene shifters, second and third mob, prompter, clerks, executioners, who stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs—in short the very scum and refuse of the theatre.”

Similarly, Burke continues in his fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace from 1795, while the foreign dignitaries in Paris had been mightily impressed the previous year by all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the investiture of the Directorate—the short-lived five-man council that ruled France until Napoleon took over— the sans culottes in the gallery were laughing, because under the finery and fancy sashes, they recognized their follow revolutionaries, who only the year before had appeared in their true guise “with their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their side pockets,” like the scoundrels that they were.

Book Review


Book Review

greatest intelligence analysts of all time, having accurately predicted how events would unfold, first in America and then, most notably, in France. He even forecast how things would end there, with a popular general taking over. The accuracy of his predictions becomes even more impressive when considering that his Reflections on the Revolution in France was written long before the September massacres and the Terror, when the Revolution showed its true colors.

, intelligence analysis is associated with a cool, dispassionate brain. In this sense, Burke was an anomaly. His was the very opposite of a cool intellect; he was hot and passionate to such an extent that his style often is at variance with his message. Indeed, as the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft noted, “Reading your ‘Reflections’ warily over, it has continually struck me, that had you been a Frenchman, you would have been, in spite of your respect for rank and antiquity, a violent revolutionist.”

According to Burke’s biographer F.P. Lock, whose great project is complete with the publication of the second volume, Burke was a brilliant but fierce-tempered man, given to verbal fireworks and political theatre, as on the famous occasion where he smuggled a dagger into Parliament, one of 3,000 allegedly ordered in Manchester by revolutionaries, and threw it on the floor of the House of Commons with a clatter: “This is what you are to gain by an alliance with France.”

This sort of emotional excess struck many of his contemporaries as un-English — in fact, as quintessentially Irish. Thus, writes Lock, “one of the paradoxes of Burke’s career is the gap between his acknowledged eloquence admitted even by his firmest opponents and his habitual inability to persuade, ” and he quotes Boswell’s observation that “his oratory rather tended to distinguish himself than to assist his cause. There was amusement rather than persuasion.” Gibbon

Instead of their high-sounding pronouncements, Burke argued, Britain should rather concentrate on the moral character of the men in charge. Those in the British government—including its head, William Pitt—who believed that the new French leadership might be more pragmatic than Robespierre and his gang were wrong; Britain was faced with a new kind of threat, “an armed doctrine,” which ignored national borders and was “inimical to all other governments.” Therefore, he warned, Britain had better prepare itself for “a long war.”

The argument, stressing the need to look upon men’s character and past actions rather than their rhetoric, is pure Burke, as is the lively expression. Though Burke’s life was almost wholly spent in opposition—his faction only held office in two short periods in 1765–1766, and again in 1782–1783—the eminent Whig historian Macaulay rated him “the greatest man since Milton.” Burke’s close friend, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, in fact let produce an engraving from his portrait with a caption from Paradise Lost underneath, the lines where Abdiel, alone among the assembled angels, refuses to take part in Satan’s rebellion. The passage concludes: “And with retorted scorn his back he turn’d/On those proud tow’rs to swift destruction doom’d.”

Even people who did not agree with his views, like William Hazlitt, acknowledged his greatness. “It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposition party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.” As a young radical at Cambridge, Coleridge would eagerly buy the latest Burke pamphlet and by evening could “repeat whole pages verbatim” to his fellow students, while Wordsworth in a late edition of The Prelude apologized for the silly bits on the French Revolution. “Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduce d/By spurious wonders and too slow to tell.”

As a prophet, Burke ranks among the


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characterized Burke as “the most eloquent and rational madman I ever knew.”

With all the brilliance also went a certain self-righteousness, Lock argues, an inability to acknowledge that people who disagreed with him might do so from honest motives — which perhaps explains why he never achieved Cabinet rank. Burke typically describes himself as “being perfectly in the right.” Related to this was a predilection for conspiracy theories. After all, his views would surely prevail, were it not for the sinister forces that were thwarting him at every turn. Being in opposition only confirmed him in his convictions.

Predictably, caricaturists had a field day with him. Coming from Ireland, he was always suspected of being a closet Catholic, and James Gillray caricatured him as a mad monk or as an inmate in a lunatic asylum. Isaac Cruickshank did him as a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, while Thomas Rowlandson drew him holding forth dementedly about India.

The other point raised against him by his opponents was a lack of consistency: How could the same man who fought George III’s attempts to control the House of Commons, and who opposed the British war on the American settlers and the East India Company’s methods in India, suddenly turn round and oppose the freedoms promised by the French revolution? As Thomas Jefferson put it: “The revolution in France does not astonish me so much as the revolution in Mr. Burke.”

To understand burke, it seems useful to take as a starting point a key passage from the Reflections describing the protean nature of evil: “Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and far from losing its principle of life by the change of

its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you are gibbeting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers.”

Evil in all its shifting forms was what Burke fought, and rather than supporting any particular interpretation and quoting selectively, as is so often done with Burke, Lock seeks to present his views in their totality. The further challenge in writing about Burke is not to allow the person to drown in his hectic parliamentary schedule, which was why Conor Cruise O’Brien chose to write his book The Great Melody as a thematic biography. Lock has chosen the harder way, but he has left clear signposts throughout.

In Volume I, which came out a decade ago, Lock traced Burke’s emergence as a self-described “New Man.” Born in 1730 in Ireland, he was the son of a pedantic lawyer and a devoutly Catholic mother. After attending Trinity College, Dublin, he left the island at the age of 20, as Ireland was too small and confining for a young man intent on studying “the Great Map of Mankind.” He started reading law in London, but his father’s example had given him a profound distaste for the profession, and he became a writer and journalist instead, making a splash in 1757 with A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, his foray into what gives us pain and pleasure and his one nonpolitical work.

After having served six unrewarding years slaving away as assistant to William Gerald Hamilton, who became Chief Secretary for Ireland, Burke was installed as private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, the Whig leader, and through Rockingham took his seat in Parliament in 1766. Burke became a one-man idea factory for the Whigs, Rockingham himself being the idealistic and well-meaning sort, but


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also somewhat “indolent and supine,” as Burke described him.

a Rockingham Whig, explains Lock, the preponderance of the landed gentry in the House of Commons was a given for Burke, the aristocracy forming a protective barrier both against the usurpations of the tyrant, as exemplified by Henry VIII, and against the anarchy of the rabble. In his view, no nation would survive with “all the middle parts being gone between the Sovereign and the Mob,” and he saw a stable society as an organic pyramid consisting of subtle gradations, “where the transitions all the way are almost imperceptible.”

This should not exclude a measure of mobility. Men of merit, new men like himself should be encouraged to participate, or else their talents could be turned to harm, as the French Revolution was to prove. But to ensure stability, a counterweight was needed: “Ability being a vigorous and active principle should be restrained by property, being sluggish, inert and timid.” Only those who owned a stake in society could be expected to legislate responsibly.

In the early part of his career, Burke saw the efforts of George III to bypass the House of Commons, in exerting what the king deemed his royal prerogative to appoint and dismiss governments at will, as the greatest threat to the constitution. After a period in the 1760s with constantly changing ministries, Burke published his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents in 1770, in which he argued that parliamentarians should decline appointments in governments which they did not control and, as Lock sees it, came close to reducing the king’s role to that of a constitutional monarch.

Burke further accused the king of seeking to undermine the constitution through the use of “a double cabinet” — a sinister group of court favorites he dubbed “the king’s friends” — an idea that was to become an obsession with Burke to the point where it lost all touch with reality.

As Lock notes, though certainly stubborn, Farmer George was no Gustavus III, the Swedish king who in 1772 staged a coup d’état.

But as befits a party manifesto, the overall tone of the Thoughts remains calm and dignified. Against the corrupt system of patronage, Burke calls for men of integrity “to form and unite a party upon real and well founded principles” who would re-establish order in the country. “Party” he defines as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.”

As Lock points out, though a step on the way, this does not amount to a party theory in the modern sense: “Burke had no ‘theory of party.’ Nor did he envisage anything approaching the party system that developed in nineteenth century Britain.” Turning an old slogan on its head, Burke believed in “Men, not measures,” that is, rather than a specific set of policies, what you needed were men of the right moral caliber, who could be depended on to come up with appropriate answers to the nation’s challenges. For Burke, notes Lock, there was really only one party of virtue, namely his own.

Accordingly, members of parliament should be guided by their own judgment, and not by popular demands. “Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member for Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.”

It can come as no surprise that with views like these Burke had little liking for the rough and tumble of eighteenth-century campaigning. He suffered from what Lock diagnoses as “a Coriolanus complex,” after Shakespeare’s proud Roman general whose open contempt


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for the Roman rabble got him banished; Burke found canvassing utterly demeaning and he showed a marked unwillingness to ask ministers for favors on behalf of his constituents.

This, and his support for free trade with Ireland, led to his losing the seat of Bristol, the country’s second most important city after London — which he had won in 1774 as a freely contested seat, and which he was proud to represent — and instead being given another pocket borough. But begging for votes was not Burke’s way.

Burke’s maiden speech in the House of Commons, which he delivered on January 12, 1766, was on America; in it he presented a merchants’ petition against the Stamp Act, which, in an attempt to make the defense of the American colonies self-financing, the previous ministry of George Grenville had imposed. The measure was killing trade with the colonials.

As records were not kept at this early stage, Lock notes, we do not know precisely what he said on this occasion, but urging repeal of the Stamp Act became a recurring topic of his. He argued in characteristic fashion that even if you have a right to do something, you should not necessarily exercise it, especially not when circumstances on the ground speak against it. The Rockingham administration repealed the Stamp Act shortly thereafter.

But the British persisted in their foolishness when, under the following administration, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townsend, in that nonchalant manner of his, imposed taxes on a number of items like tea, glass, and paper in 1767. Again, in the face of stiff American opposition these had to be repealed; all except for the one on tea, that is, with well known and disastrous consequences.

After the Boston Tea Party, instead of singling out the Bostonians for collective punishment, Burke urged concessions, arguing that the relationship between the colonies and the mother country should

be one of shared benefits and of common rights: “My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. They are ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government— they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance.”

Any feeling that the Americans were treated differently from British subjects would be fatal to the cohesion of the empire. And he warned that, steeped as they were in the British legal tradition, the Americans were not going to roll over. Urging a show of magnanimity, he recommended that the government drop the tea duty and drop the penal acts. Thus, while both he and Tom Paine opposed coercion, notes Lock, Burke only accepted independence “most reluctantly as an accomplished fact.”

Reconciliation was not what George III and his ministers had in mind. To George, the Americans were rebellious children and needed to be punished as such. After Bunker Hill, still acutely conscious of Britain’s overextended lines of supply, Burke predicted catastrophe, even if the British might prove successful in the early skirmishes “The spirit of America is incredible. God knows they are very inferior in all human resources. But a remote and difficult country and such a spirit as now animates them may do strange things. Our victories can only complete our ruin,” he wrote his boss Rockingham.

Burke was now the leading voice against the war. But Burke would not be Burke without occasionally going berserk: When George III ordered church services in support of the war, according to the O’Brien book, he ranted, “Till our churches are purified from this abominable service, I shall consider them, not as temples of the


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almighty, but the synagogues of Satan.” If you want to make converts, this is scarcely the way to go about it. Lock supplies one or two more examples, noting that in such instances Dr. Johnson, who accused Burke of behaving like “a Lion who lashes himself into Fury with his own Tail,” had a point.

But Burke’s sarcasm in the House of Commons could be deadly, as when he attributed Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga to his threat to use Indians as auxiliaries against the colonists, particularly the hypocrisy of paying for scalps while admonishing the Indians to be sparing of women and children. Resorting to this kind of savagery, he argued, had only strengthened the colonials’ determination.

ABy this time, Lord North was making conciliatory noises, conceding the points Burke had recommended three years earlier; but now it was a question of too little and much too late, and the war rumbled on until the final British defeat at Yorktown. Even at this stage George III was for continuing the fight, but following Burke’s rule that no minister should accept responsibility in a government he does not control, Rockingham in 1782 made it a precondition for again assuming office that the king not veto American independence. After having threatened to abdicate, George caved in, thereby proving that in Britain, power rested in Parliament.

The other great colonial issue facing Britain at this time was India. As one of the trial managers in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, whose trial takes up much of Volume Two, Burke played a leading role.

From a modest start in 1600 with a few trading posts on the coast, the East India Company had vastly expanded with Robert Clive’s victory over the Nawab of Bengal in the battle of Plassey and now controlled Bengal though puppet rule; but the company’s dealings had come under increasing scrutiny in London, with calls for government control.

At first Burke had opposed government interference in the affairs of the company on the traditional Whig grounds that such a move would only play into the hands of the King’s Friends; but based on persistent reports of extortion and torture coming out of India, Burke changed his mind. And over time he was to develop his grand theory of “Indianism,” his term for what he saw as the all-pervading influence on British politics of the huge wealth of returning company officers, the so-called Nabobs — another conspiracy theory which, in Lock’s words, became something of a “distorting lens” on his view of Indian affairs.

Bringing Hastings down thus became a crusade for Burke, with the impeachment proceedings dragging on for almost a decade. “We have brought before you the chief of the tribe, the head of the whole tribe of eastern offenders, a captain general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined, arrayed and paid,” Burke thundered in his opening speech.

With what Lock refers to as “lurid rodomontades,” Burke worked himself into a frenzy, and because of these outbursts, Hastings gained a lot of sympathy. What it felt to be on the receiving end of Burke’s emotional onslaught is vividly conveyed by Fanny Burney, who had met Burke earlier and liked him, but witnessing his performance in the House of Lords found him “a cruel prosecutor of an injured and innocent man.”

“The spirit of America is incredible,” Burke wrote. “God knows they are very inferior in all human resources. But a remote and difficult country and such a spirit as now animates them may do strange things.”

“She describes the “wild and sudden flights” of Burke’s imagination, his “fluent, forcible and varied” language, his expert changes of pace, until “his own violence recovered me, by stigmatizing his assertions with personal ill will and


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designing illiberality. . . . Yet, at times I confess, with all that I felt, wished, and thought concerning Mr. Hastings, the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drove me into his vortex.” No wonder, then, that one lady attending the trial fainted.

In keeping with Burke’s tendency to personify politics, Lock notes, he wanted Hasings’s trial turned into an indictment of a system, while the House of Lords leadership wanted it conducted more narrowly as a criminal trail, to be governed by lower court rules, whereby Hastings had to be proven personally culpable in

the misdeeds he was charged with. To Burke, this constituted legal nitpicking. It also meant that there was no way he was going to prevail.

Burke does not get out of the trial with much credit. According to Lock, Hastings was precisely the kind of enlightened administrator with a great respect for Indian culture and customs that one would expect Burke to support, as they were very similar in outlook. Hastings was also an excellent commander-in-chief. Many of his contemporaries saw him as the man who single-handedly saved India for Britain with his victory over the French-supported Mahratta Confederacy, at a time when Britain was busy losing everywhere else. If winning had required raising money as best he could, so be it.

But such arguments were wasted on Burke, and in Lock’s view, “his loss of any sense of the importance of due process, or of the value of the law as an autonomous system designed to protect the innocent as

well as convict the guilty” weighs heavily against him. In Burke’s mind, Hastings was guilty and that was that.

Burke’s compulsive pursuit of Hastings over so many years alienated many, especially since everybody, including Burke himself, knew he would not succeed. Lady Georgina, the Duchess of Devonshire, commented, “Sheridan [a leading Whig] who is heartily tired of the Hastings trial, and fearful of Burke’s impetuosity says that he wishes Hastings would run away and Burke after him.”

The impeachment trial ended on

April 23, 1795 with Hastings’ acquittal, an outcome which Burke again chose to see as the result of conspiracy. According to Lock, his handling of the Hastings affair “illustrates one of the most alienating aspects of his character, his self-righteousness.”

In his view of India, which he never visited, Lock considers Burke too much of a universalist. Despite his stated concern for local customs and conditions, he too readily applied European modes of explanation to Indian social phenomena: India’s horrible caste system, for instance, in his eyes became just another manifestation of the normal human desire for hierarchy.

The long-term ramifications of his hounding of Hastings were profound, Lock points out: While advocating neither British withdrawal nor Indian self-determination, Burke sought to convince his audience that the Indians should not be treated as inferiors, and that crimes committed against them should be taken

“‘The spirit of America is incredible,’ Burke wrote. ‘God knows they are very inferior in all human resources. But a remote and difficult country and such a spirit as now animates them may do strange things.”


Book Review

as seriously as crimes back in Britain, thus making India part “of their own moral universe.” Many have seen this as the first step towards the dissolution of British rule in India.

Of some of his notions of Indian society were too universalist, and his theory of “Indianism” a distortion, Burke was spot on with his predictions in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, despite the fact that he had only visited the country briefly in 1773 to secure French lessons for his son. But he read everything available and had a steady stream of informants visiting him in his home at Beaconsfield. Most notably, he knew how to tune out the surface noise and hone in on the underlying essentials.

Many Britons welcomed the French Revolution, among them Charles Fox, the easygoing dandy and inveterate gambler, who had taken over as party leader after Rockingham’s death in 1782 and who had allowed himself to be carried away by the ideals the revolutionaries espoused; he referred to it as “how much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world. And how much the best.”

From his reading, Burke knew what French mobs had been capable of in the past, once their passions were exited, the St. Bartholomew massacre providing a scary precedent. And just a few days after the storming of the Bastille, two Parisian officials had their heads cut off and put on pikes. Heads on pikes are always a bad portent. Burke’s intimations were only strengthened by the march on Versailles, where the queen’s bedroom was attacked and the royal family ignominiously transported back to Paris.

Burke himself had briefly experienced mob rule during the Gordon riots of 1780, when adherents of the Protestant fanatic Lord George Gordon attacked the houses of those who had voted for the Catholic Relief Act for Ireland, and Burke had been forced to remove his furniture, an incident he never forgot, according to Lock. His great fear now was that the French disease

would spread to England though its British sympathizers.

The French Enlightenment philosophers bore a heavy responsibility in having paved the way for all this with their hatred of religion, their overweening faith in man’s rationality, and their fondness for abstract theory rather than past experience. Burke saw religion as the very foundation of society, and the revolution had confiscated church property and destroyed all manner of traditional hierarchies. Thus, Burke laid bare the rationalist madness of the revolutionaries, pouncing on “the geometrick folly” of their initial scheme to divide France into squares, ignoring local bonds and loyalties.

The social contract, he warned, could not just be cancelled like some trading contract on coffee, as it also involved past and future generations; the present generation therefore should not be allowed simply to follow its whims.

Again, Burke recommended taking a hard look at the people involved. As he warned Chames-Jean-Francois de Pont, the young gentleman referred to on the title page of the Reflections, “Never wholly separate in your mind the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it.” What Burke saw here was a bunch of restless lawyers “of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds” leading along hairdressers, tallow-chandlers, and “a handful of country clowns,” illiterates to boot. In the Assembly, he noted, there were not 50 men of property worth £100 a year, and hence there was nothing to keep its radicalism in check.

The views expressed in the Reflections led to Burke’s break with the Fox faction. The two had a great clash in the House of Commons. Fox, reminding Burke of his speeches on America, accused him of having reversed himself; Burke, in reply, proclaimed them friends no longer, reducing Fox to tears. Among those who approved of the Reflections was George III, whom Burke had fought tooth and nail earlier: “I know that there is no Man who


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calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen.”

Picking up from Fox’s clue, Burke’s critics, including Thomas Paine, accused him of having gone from being a champion of Liberty to being a supporter of the reactionary ancien regime in France. A Gillray cartoon entitled “A Uniform Whig” shows him holding his Reflections, his left side in tatters, while the right side is spiffily dressed, with the clear implication that he had been bought off. Any such notion Lock dismisses out of hand: Burke’s acceptance of a pension came at a later stage.

Burke hit back with his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs of 1791, in which he set out to demonstrate that his views were entirely at one with his support for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and in which he defined true Whiggism as “a rational and sober liberty upon the plan of our existing constitution,” a very different thing from the mindless uprooting in France. And as proof that he was not against reform per se, as long as it was gradual and organic, he cited his support for the revolution in Poland.

In his remaining years, he urged Britain to take a leading role in the fight against revolutionary France. William Pitt had first been unwilling to interfere in what he saw as France’s internal affairs, but when France declared war on England and Holland on February 1, 1793, this was moot. Yet Pitt still fought the war as a traditional war, rather than as a war against an ideology. Instead of marching on Paris, the center of evil, the allied army allowed itself to be sidetracked into besieging Dunkirk. And when Britain’s Prussian allies made peace with France in 1795, and the Pitt administration was putting out peace-feelers, Burke in his fury produced his Letters on a Regicide Peace.

In Burke’s view, though still the only man capable of saving Britain, Pitt had failed to provide the inspired leadership the contest required. In words aimed

squarely at Pitt, he noted, “They never entered into the peculiar and distinctive character of the war. They spoke neither to the understanding nor to the heart. Cold as ice themselves, they never could kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal which is necessary to a conflict with an adverse zeal.”

As for Pitt’s qualms about interfering in the internal affairs of another nation, Burke was rejecting the notion that those in charge of a country were entitled to act as they pleased on their own territory: “Men are never in a state of total independence of each other.” In Burke’s view, a messianic, expansionist regime like the French was simply incompatible with Britain’s national security.

Lock painstakingly demonstrates how Burke’s writing on the French Revolution grew out of his earlier writings. By 1789, the threat to Britain’s well-being no longer came from the king. It now came from the other end of the spectrum, the Parisian mob. Evil had transmigrated, to use Burke’s own term. And as the nature of the threat changed, so did Burke’s focus, but the principles of his arguments remained consistent throughout, making him a true conviction politician.

P e r h a p s C h u r c h i l l p u t i t b e s t : “His soul revol ted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt court and parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watchwords of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the ideals of society and government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.”


Book Review

Jim webb, elected by Virginia to the United States Senate in 2006, is the finest novelist ever to serve in Congress. One must temper this praise by adding that he is the only novelist of any note ever to serve in Congress. Other nations can claim a Disraeli or a Havel, but when the occasional American writer (Upton Sinclair, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, James Michener) has entered the political ring, it has been on a lark and with predictably dismal results. Webb’s election may hint at future developments, however. As politics becomes more confessional and campaign finance laws complicate the task of raising money, writers who have achieved prominence and riches may be able to leverage these assets into political office.

If so, Webb will be hailed as a trailblazer, but in truth he has never had much in common with his literary brethren. In his new book, A Time To Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, he complains that

“the modern American novel is too often simply an interior monologue, a story about a writer trying to write a story about a writer.” His complaint is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s plea two decades ago that American novelists venture beyond their Manhattan salons and search out “this wild, bizarre unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.”

Craig S. Lerner is associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law, George Mason University School of Law. [email protected].

JIM WEBB. A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a

Fair and Just America. Broadway.

272 Pages. $24.95

Fighting Words By Craig S. Lerner


Book Review

Webb and Wolfe are unusual among contemporary novelists for yet another reason: One of their principal subjects is manliness. Testosterone roils through Wolfe’s characters’ veins as they navigate through boardrooms, athletic fields, trading rooms, and prisons, but with the exception of The Right Stuff, he has avoided any military dimension. Even then, Wolfe’s topic was bravery in pushing technological barriers, a topic that holds little interest for Webb. Manliness, for Webb, has a precise and bellicose meaning: the willingness to test one’s strength and even life against other men in combat. Physical heartiness is a given in all of his heroes, and to be small or fat in a Webb novel is almost necessarily a sign of moral imperfection. (The only characteristic more highly correlated with degeneracy is a Harvard degree, and, needless to say, one of the most repellent characters in all of his fiction, one Ronald Holcolmb in Something to Die For, is a “physically small and unathletic” Harvard graduate.)

In a half-dozen novels, several of which were bestsellers and earned critical acclaim, Webb has contemplated the martial virtues. We see men preparing for combat; men in the thick of combat; and men adjusting, more or less well, to lives after combat. Women appear, but few achieve independent significance. Webb’s novelistic interest is the frayed romantic attachments between women and the men whose calling is battle. Writing of his long-ago Scots-Irish ancestors in Ulster and the mountains of western Virginia, Webb reports that “the men expected to fight

. . . and the women expected their men to fight.” Modern women, even those of Scots-Irish ancestry, have wider expectations of their men, and his novels are unsparing in depicting the havoc military lives wreak on even the best marriages. Webb rejects the

happy reconciliation of love and duty suggested in Richard Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”: “I could not love thee, dear, so much/Loved I not honor more.”

The son of an Air Force officer, Webb grew up all over America and would later mine his varied experiences in his novels. His upbringing did not conform to contemporary standards:

“When I was very young [my father] would ask me if I was tough, and then hold out his fist and have me hit it again and again, telling me I could stop if I admitted I wasn’t tough.” Webb’s indifferent record as a student still apparently rankles: In published writings, at least, he seems to have difficulty laughing at himself and his failures, however trivial. Thus it is that Webb—United States senator, decorated war hero, bestselling author—tells the reader that, despite his academic difficulties, he had “the fifth highest score in our school on the psat math test.”

Perhaps it was that psat score, or maybe some discerned spark of greatness, but the Naval Academy admitted Webb to its class of 1968. Disappointingly, he skips over his time at Annapolis, a tumultuous period in the Academy’s history, with little comment. Except for an allusion in one of his novels, Webb never mentions his brigade championship boxing match with fellow cadet Oliver North. In Webb’s view, as recounted in Robert Timberg’s 1995 The Nightingale’s Song, North colluded with a coach to steal the fight. Webb was one of the relatively few Academy graduates in 1968—North being another—to choose to do their mandatory service in the Marines. He received several medals, including a Navy Cross, for extraordinary acts of bravery in Vietnam, but a leg wound never healed and he was forced to retire from the Marines. Enrolling at Georgetown


Book Review

Law School in 1972, he faced at best coolness and often outright hostility from his classmates and professors. A criminal law exam singled Webb out for mockery, hypothesizing that a soldier named “Jack Webb” was responsible for the death of two fellow Americans and then tried to smuggle jade into the United States. Webb complained to the law school’s dean, who did nothing.

Webb had his revenge a few years later. Fields of Fire, published in 1978 when he was only 32, is still the novel for which he is best known. It is a hand grenade lobbed into the drawing rooms of Georgetown, Cambridge, Scarsdale—wherever rich and spoiled Americans strategized to avoid the draft by finagling bogus medical diagnoses, accumulating postgraduate degrees, or securing cushy assignments in the stateside “reserves.” In the beginning of the novel, a character wanders by a restaurant for the “neat and elite.” Gazing at “the Beautiful People in their stylish clothes, languishing over their just-right meals, he became seized with scorn. He banged on the window and most of them looked back curiously

at him as he mashed his face against the pane in a grotesque gargoyle stare and flipped two birds at them.” This is Webb to all his law school professors and classmates and to the entire class from whence they came. In Fields of Fire, Webb settles scores.

Much of Webb’s v is directed at those who attribute America’s loss in

Vietnam to the soldiers on the ground, and in particular to the Marines who bore a disproportionate brunt of the battle. (Webb has noted that 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, compared to 1.4 million enemy soldiers. As some have said, the only reason the North Vietnamese won is they never realized they lost.) The novel’s dedication, eschewing the saccharin “to the men and women who served . . .” one has come to expect from war books, is to the injured “Marines.” This is Webb in a tribal mood, and it is probably just as well that his father, whom he adored, served in the Air Force, for otherwise he might more fully have indulged the contempt so many Marines harbor for the other services.

Much of Webb’s ammunition is directed at those who attribute America’s loss in Vietnam to the soldiers on the ground, and in particular to the Marines who bore a disproportionate brunt of the battle.

Fields of Fire, which in large part tracks a platoon as it makes its deadly way through the An Hoa Basin in 1969, has long been included on recommended reading lists for the

Marines. It portrays the valor of individual soldiers, as well as the corps’ wondrous power to transform young men of various backgrounds into “the best we have.” One character named Goodrich — an idealistic but, of course, unlikable Harvard student — loses a leg but “finally grew some balls.” No higher compliment is possible in a

“Much of Webb’s ammunition is directed at those who attribute America’s loss in Vietnam to the soldiers on the ground, and in particular to the Marines who bore a disproportionate brunt of the battle.”


Book Review

Webb novel. In a preachy conclusion, rather at odds with the tone of the rest of the novel, Webb presents a scathing portrayal of draft-dodgers and anti-war protesters, who are said to accept the benefits of our rich society while shirking its burdens.

Yet considering the novel in its entirety, it is remarkable that the Marines should recommend Fields of Fire. One officer told me that he read the novel several times while in the Marines but would never have joined had he had read it in college. The cruel lottery of battle, in which the best are maimed and opportunists escape unharmed, is unhesitatingly presented. If some young men’s character is forged in the fire of combat, others are destroyed by the experience. The imminence of death can stir esprit de corps, but it can also promote withdrawal and self-absorption.

Most striking is the novel’s occasionally harsh judgments on the Marine Corps itself. (Webb’s second novel,ASense of Honor, is even more critical in its treatment of the Naval Academy.) A first lieutenant is more anxious about his career than the lives of the men he commands; soldiers in the rear scheme to avoid service in the front. And although Fields of Fire seldom rises above a grunt’s-eye view, the novel hints at the grotesque strategic leadership during the war, the true cause of America’s defeat. As one soldier, having returned home, says,

“We just roamed around the bush, or went somewhere on an operation for a while and then left. We just moved in circles mostly. . . . It was crazy as hell.” In later writings, Webb unloads on Robert McNamara and others in the Pentagon who, in their arrogant incompetence, sentenced thousands of soldiers to pointless deaths. In his most ambitious novel, A Country Such As This, one character muses that “there was something almost malevolent in

the way Navy and Air Force pilots were being wasted, in the restrictions forced on them.” Webb’s own father, seeing the civilian mismanagement of the war from up-close while on detail at the Pentagon, quit in protest and advised Webb to serve out his time eating ice cream on a ship safe at sea.

It is unlikely that the advice was seriously entertained. Webb was destined to fight. And if asked why, his answer would surely be that it was in his blood.

Blood as destiny is a theme that runs through every Webb novel. It is especially pronounced in A Country Such As This, in which three Naval Academy cadets celebrate their graduation and friendship by slitting their wrists and mingling their blood.

“So how does it feel, having Jewish blood?” one jokes. Another character, having become a fighter pilot, infuses blood determinism with mystical powers: “Somewhere back in that Slavic blood there really was a falcon.” Yet another character, poised to launch a suicidal raid on an enemy’s trench in Korea, thinks: “I am doing this for many reasons, but the overriding one is this: because I am Judd Smith, and I am powerless in my blood and soul to do anything else. I am Judd Smith, prisoner of my history.”

Judd Smith is of Scots-Irish ancestry, as are countless other characters in Webb’s novels, each bearing an autobiographical imprint of one kind or another. The most haunting character in all of Webb’s writings, and the dominating presence in Fields of Fire, is a lieutenant from eastern Kentucky named Robert E. Lee Hodges, Jr. Hodges’s grandmother, like Webb’s own, filled him with tales of his ancestors and their many battles. Pride in their deeds “pulsed through his own dark veins”:

That one continuous linking that had bound father to son from the


Book Review

first wild resolute angry beaten Celt who tromped into the hills rather than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years ago, who would hold out in an icy marsh by standing for days with only his head above water, and who would chew the bark off a tree, fill his belly with wood rather than surrender from starvation and admit defeat to an advancing civilization. That same emotion passing with the blood: a fierce resoluteness that found itself always in a pitch against death, that somehow, over the centuries, came to accept the fight as a birthright, even as some kind of proof of life.

Webb’s lifelong fascination with

his Scots-Irish ancestors, and their purportedly fiery Celtic blood, resulted in his first effort at popular nonfiction in 2004, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.

Trekking through graveyards in mountainous western Virginia, Webb writes in the book’s opening that “I’ve been right over there, once upon a time, or at least my blood has.” He traces his ancestry back more than 2,000 years, to the Celtic tribes who battled their way westward across Europe until finally they were “caught in a cruel genetic joke, all their energies bottled up” in isolated Scotland and Ireland. (Recent genetic evidence undercuts Webb’s story: Overwhelmingly, the residents of the British Isles arrived over 6,000 years ago; there is surprisingly little genetic differentiation among those who became the Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics or even the English; and there does not seem to be a close genetic link between the

“Celts” in England and the Celtic tribes in Southern and Central Europe.) Whatever their genetic antecedents, the tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall fought with a tenacity that astounded would-be invaders. The Romans and English who, over the centuries, tried to subdue them were occasionally successful but always bloodied. The culture that emerged was democratic and tribal, with attempts to forge a Scottish national spirit slow to develop. In periods without outside invaders, the clans fought amongst themselves with all the passion that, in other times, they reserved for the Romans

and English.The tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall

fought with an astounding tenacity. The Romans and English who tried to subdue them over the centuries were occasionally successful but always bloodied.

Having converted to Presbyterianism in the sixteenth century, the Scots faced discrimination from the English, and thousands migrated across the sea to Ulster. There they made new enemies of the Irish Catholics and were still persecuted by the English. So they continued their journey westward. From 1715 to 1775, as many as 400,000 Scots-Irish crossed the Atlantic to the New World and yet did not receive a friendly welcome. The Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Cavaliers in the South all regarded the Scots-Irish as uncouth: illiterate, quarrelsome, and physically dirty. But they could fight, and they

“The tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall fought with an astounding tenacity. The Romans and English who tried to subdue them over the centuries were occasionally successful but always bloodied.”


Book Review

were encouraged to push inland to the frontier, where they served as a safeguard against the Indians.

Sneered at by the East Coast elites in the eighteenth century, despised today by the “upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood,” the redneck Scots-Irish are, in Webb’s account, the “molten core” of America. Much of what we still regard as the American character — individualistic, contemptuous of hierarchy, populist, audacious — has its origins in the Scots-Irish. Later arriving groups have sustained an ethnic pride, and even wielded it as a weapon in our increasingly quota-driven society, but the Scots-Irish, so vital to the American spirit, easily blended in and are now lost in the unheralded miasma of “white Americans.” But our very existence and preservation as a country has depended on them: They fought in disproportionate numbers and with characteristic zeal during the Revolution. America still “cannot go to war without them,” Webb writes, noting that West Virginia, which is heavily Scots-Irish, incurred casualty rates in Korea and Vietnam twice those of New York and Connecticut.

Born Fighting aims to recover the Scots-Irish pride and tell their story. Although often riveting, it suffers from the flaws one expects in the ethnic mythologizing genre. The Puritans and Cavaliers (and the English before them) are the villains in Webb’s tale; scarcely acknowledged is their indispensable role in fashioning the Constitution and formal political institutions that are the envy of the world. By contrast, a respect for the rule of law was never a trademark of the Scots-Irish. Assuming the perspective of his ancestors, Webb writes, with an approving wink, that

“justice was a fancy legal term used in Williamsburg or Charleston.” He seems unable to appreciate the grave difficulty with this perspective, as

emerges in his air-brushed portrayal of Andrew Jackson, whom he calls

“the quintessential tribal chieftain Scots-Irish leader,” a “great man” who transformed American politics “with no other motivation than a passion for the common good.” The fact that Jackson was a “true fighter” prevents Webb from rendering a more nuanced assessment. He makes light of Jackson’s violent temper, his tendency to turn political disagreements into personal feuds, and his brutal treatment of the Indians. And although Webb acknowledges Jackson’s penchant for settling legal disputes by duels, he presents it as a charming matter, not a serious flaw in someone who, as president, is in charge of enforcing the nation’s laws.

Webb bristles with resentment at the unflattering portrayals of Southern rednecks—as slaveholders and racists —that one has come to expect of elite America. There is much that fairly can be said here, but Webb overstates his case. Determined to rescue his ancestors from any measure of opprobrium, Webb cites evidence (in several of his books) that only 5 percent of white Virginians owned slaves. A more telling statistic is the percentage of Confederate households that owned slaves. The answer is probably almost a quarter in border states such as Virginia and a third or more in the states of the Deep South.

Skipping lightly over Jim Crow laws, Webb vents elaborately about Northerners “raping” the South during Reconstruction and in the decades that followed. Among other flaws of this account, given that Webb so often touts as a virtue the Scots-Irish indifference to conventional status and wealth, a simpler explanation for the South’s historic economic backwardness suggests itself. A “take this job and shove it” attitude may be manly and admirable, but it is not


Book Review

conducive to climbing the corporate ladder, and even Webb acknowledges that the Scots-Irish “emphasis on boldness and raw audacity would also have its drawbacks as America became more sophisticated”; that is, as the economy put less of a premium on physical labor and courage and more on intellectual skills and teamwork.

But what of the South’s recent economic success? Acknowledging that Arkansas—ground zero of the caricatured cousin-marrying, know-nothing redneck—is the headquarters of Wal-Mart, the third richest corporation in the world, Webb nonetheless writes that Wal-Mart’s wealth has not “trickled-down.” This would be news to many residents of northwest Arkansas, and one suspects that Webb is chilled to contemplate the modern redneck, with all that once-fiery blood, sitting in a cubicle in Bentonville tracking diaper sales in the new Des Moines superstore. That Celtic blood is running a bit thinner these days, it would seem. (The same could be said of the blood of the Irish who remained in Ireland, who have seemingly beaten their swords into spreadsheets on their way to becoming a capitalist powerhouse.) Yes, Scots-Irish West Virginia incurred high casualty rates in Korea and Vietnam, but Webb fails to carry this analysis forward. In the latest Iraq war, that state’s casualty rate is only slightly above the national average and well below that of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska. Ultimately, Webb concedes that his references to the blood of the Scots-Irish are to a large extent metaphorical; his real focus is the fighting and individualistic culture they brought to America.

This culture is now centered in states that vote Republican in national elections. Undoing the connection between the Scots-Irish culture and the party of Lincoln is the core of Webb’s

project in A Time to Fight.It is as a Republican that one of

Webb’s autobiographical characters —a Naval Academy graduate from western Virginia who receives the Navy Cross—is elected to the House of Representatives and, at the novel’s end, is poised to run for the Senate. And it was as a Republican that Webb himself began his political career, first as a Hill staffer and then in the Reagan administration. Yet Webb was never altogether at home in the Republican Party, rubbing shoulders with the country club set. Like many in the 1970s, Webb turned away from the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party had turned away from him, and “lost its historic emphasis on working men and women.” Abandoning its traditional focus on “economic fairness,” a phrase Webb bandies about but never defines, the Democratic Party became a hotbed of antimilitary and anti-American sentiment. Instead of Andrew Jackson’s concern for

“farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” the Democratic Party emphasized such issues as racial quotas, abortion, gun control, and the environment.

In Webb’s view, the top echelon of the Democratic Party still consists of people who made their bones fighting the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s and whose priorities are misguided as a result. Despite these concerns, he threw in with the Democrats soon after President George W. Bush’s election in 2000. He suggests there were two reasons. First is that the Republicans have, through various policies, coddled the “very rich” in ways that have entrenched a money

“aristocracy.” America, in Webb’s view, is calcifying along class lines, and he makes disapproving references to globalization, immigration, nafta, the wto, and executive compensation. The second reason for Webb’s political


Book Review

conversion was the invasion of Iraq. He belabors his misgivings with this venture, documenting their origins prior to the messy occupation that turned some cheerleaders into skeptics. The wisdom of the invasion can, of course, be fairly debated, but Webb takes the charge a dubious step farther, accusing the war’s planners with not simply negligence, but

“conscious deception.” He adduces little evidence to support this latter claim, and it would seem that Webb’s animus towards the Bush administration has skewed his judgment. He berates Republican leaders as “‘chicken hawks’ who talked up the war [in Iraq] but who had ‘other priorities’ when it came to serving” in Vietnam. It sometimes seems that Webb is unable to quite trust a man who has never been in combat, especially when he opines on matters of state. As he writes in one novel, veterans “purchased their right to congregate and debate American foreign policy by sailing off to places like Belleau Wood and Biak Island.”

Webb seeks to reclaim the Scots-Irish culture for the Democratic Party, but it will be a tricky sell as long as the party’s standard bearer, in unguarded moments, derides those who “cling to guns or religion.” In the hopes of galvanizing his fellow Scots-Irish, he tars the Republicans as the party of the rich, but it is not a wholly credible accusation. Had Webb cast his gaze at his fellow senators, he would be forced to acknowledge that the richest (Kerry, Kohl, Rockefeller, Kennedy) tend to be Democrats. Webb’s preference for classically manly activities renders him skeptical of the value of any labor, such as investment banking, that does not generate calloused hands, and he singles out the great Goldman Sachs for censure; but in fact these masters of the universe have given more to Democrats than to Republicans in the latest election cycle by a two-to-one margin. Although he complains that “an uncaring amorality has seized much of America’s business

community,” Webb offers few, if any, concrete proposals to promote

“economic fairness,” and the book’s concluding chapter fails to deliver on its portentous title: “What Then Must We Do?” The chapter meanders for some time, recounting his experiences as a platoon leader, then riffs into a discussion of a movie and a novel, and only in the final page is the flaccid punch line delivered: America should

“find good leaders and hold them accountable.” Suffice it to say that Webb’s rifle is locked and loaded, as it has always been, but he is still looking for a target.

Jim webb, unapologetically pugna-cious, is a distinctive figure in Ameri-can politics and letters. His taste for battle and prickliness about honor ren-der him, to some extent, inappreciative of the benefits of peaceable capitalism. And his spiritedness is not a natural fit in a country becoming richer and softer. Soon after his election to the Senate, he displayed his fighting spirit at a White House function. Webb de-clined to have his picture taken with the president, but Bush cornered him on the State Floor of the East Wing.

“How’s your boy?” the president asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine. The senator-elect responded curtly, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.” The president continued, “That’s not what I asked you. How’s your boy?” Webb cut off the exchange: “That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President.” The encounter was studied at the time, with much of the inside-the-Beltway opinion criti-cal of Webb’s alleged boorishness. It would indeed seem that the setting called for a gracious acknowledgment of the president’s regard for his son. Yet let us consider this from Webb’s perspective: The president expected a showing of deference, and rather than indulging him, Webb responded with manly frankness. In A Time to Fight,


Book Review

Webb refers to his refusal to consent to a picture with the president, but not the verbal exchange: “I have since regained a more proper sense of courtesy.” If Webb truly repents his performance at the White House that day, it might mean that he is becoming, if by small steps, a little bit tamer and more civilized, a little bit more like everyone else in Washington, D.C.

As part of the Democratic Party’s outreach to Scots-Irish voters, Webb was touted for a time as a possible vice-presidential candidate. Yet his own election to the Senate may hint at the difficulties Democrats will face in reclaiming this segment of the population. In the three counties in western Virginia that Webb has specifically claimed as his blood, he lost overwhelmingly to his Republican opponent. It was not the Scots-Irish who launched Webb into the Senate, but the affluent, effete, chardonnay-sipping voters of Arlington County in northern Virginia: exactly the sort of people Webb has despised his entire life. It is a rich irony, though not one he seems inclined to savor, that he won Arlington by 30,000 votes, allowing him to eke out a narrow victory state-wide.

Whether he admits it or not, Arlington is Webb’s political base, and perhaps there is some poetic justice in this fact. Just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Arlington is the home of our nation’s most famous military cemetery. A character in one of Webb’s novels — one of his martyred Marine lieutenants — stipulates that he be buried there “so the gutless wonders in Washington will have to look at his grave every day when they drive to work.” I assume that Webb shares this sentiment wholeheartedly and will one day join his father in Arlington Cemetery. In death, as in life, he can remind his gutless countrymen of their debt to those who, in blood or fighting spirit, have preserved America’s Scots-Irish heritage.

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