Note On Kaplan On Clausewitz

On Forgetting the Obvious -- Robert D. Kaplan

Both Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz believe—in their states, their sovereigns, their homelands. Because they believe, they are willing to fight. This is so clear that they never need to state it, and they never do.

Those things Clausewitz took as given --belief in state, sovereign, homeland-- were creations of Christian culture. They did not fight per se for Christianity --there is no warrior culture in the New Testament-- but they fought for that totality, that wholeness, that their religion had created. As such, this impulse, this creed, this belief is not easily definable. Honor, Duty, Country define it about as well as possible. Every patriot knows what those things feel like, even if they are so difficult to put into words.

The jihadi, on the other hand, does have an easily expressible belief; it's specifically scriptural, the creation of the Islamic warrior is the whole force of the Koran. In either case, in a war of the West against Islam, the force of the warrior is the force of his creed, but in the West it's felt as a totality, in Islam it's specific scripture.

This is no problem for the West (certainly not for its military class or for much of middle America), but there are so many others --call them "the elites"-- that now despise their given, traditional totality, and specifically it's religious base. If you despise that totality, if you despise most of all its root, you don't have force. This speaks to nearly the entirety of the population of Europe, and to much of that of the United States. These people are called "secular", actually, they merely despise what has shaped them. They're the rich kid that hates his dad. That sort of kid will merely run through a fortune; it's living for a brief time off the accumulated treasure of past generations.