John David Lewis on War and Foreign Policy

Tell me about your first book, Rise of the Roman Empire by Polybius.

The ancient writer Polybius narrates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean within a 53-year period, an achievement that he calls unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes. For example, he sees Hannibal’s attack on Italy as caused by Hannibal’s ambitious moral character, which was incited to action by the unfair conditions imposed by Rome after the First Punic War. Now I don’t think that Polybius is right about this. It is Hannibal’s ideas and those of his supporters that led to war, not his character. He thought that he could get glory for himself and his city through war, while avenging the earlier mistreatment by Rome: that was the real cause of this 20-year disaster. So the foreign policy of Carthage was led by this man’s ideas and the actions that followed from them. The warrior ideas that dominated both Rome and Carthage made war inevitable, even though Polybius does not quite see the cause this way.

Do you think he is one of the first people to pin down a theory about the causes of war?

Yes, he’s one of the first people to really lay out a method of approaching the causes of war. For example, were I to ask what caused World War II, some people would say Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. But Polybius would say no, that was the start of the war. The cause of the war has to be prior to that. So he lays out proximate causes as well as deeper, longstanding causes. Given this perspective, the cause of World War II would have to be something like Germany’s acceptance of a sacrificial war of conquest as a means to national aggrandisement, and their willingness to follow a dictator into such destruction. In other words, the ideas held by the Germans were the truest causes of the war. The attack on Poland would be the beginning of the war, and a consequence of the earlier causes.

Let’s move on to your next book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea by C Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook.

This book focuses deeply on the ideas behind one of the most important political movements of modern day – neoconservatism. Like all of the books I have chosen here, the concern is for how ideas affect human action, and how ideas will lead them to make certain wilful decisions. What Thompson and Brook do is to dissect neoconservatism in terms of its fundamental ideological source, and to trace out the consequences of those ideas.

This book ties the neoconservatives to Professor Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago. It takes his ideas apart layer by layer, shows their connection to neoconservatism, and exposes the true meaning of the neoconservative movement. The nature of this movement is not pretty.

This is a very complex issue so I will name one important factor here: the idea, drawn from Strauss, that there are certain truths available only to an intellectual or political elite (the esoteric meaning of a text), and that these truths must be presented to average people in terms they can grasp (the exoteric meaning of a text). Therefore if you read an ancient text such as Plato’s Republic with Straussian premises, it never quite means exactly what it says. Its real meaning is only available to these elites. When applied to political governance, these elites have a right to lie to the population if this is the way to get them to do what the all-knowing elites want. Thompson and Brook decimate this movement intellectually. They show how the neoconservative veneration of nationalism leads to a foreign policy of perpetual war overseas, through the sacrifice of the population to the ‘nation’.

Your third book is Winning the Unwinnable War by Elan Journo.

Journo has promoted a controversial thesis. He says that America has crippled itself in the war against terrorism by a failure to forthrightly identify its enemies, and to defend itself against them. He says this stems from altruism, which values others over self, which leads to the idea that America must not defeat enemies but rather bow down and appease them. He maintains that the war against terrorism is not unwinnable. The first step toward victory would be to name the enemy for what it is: Islamic Totalitarianism, a movement that aims to impose sharia [Islamic law] over a subjugated population. This failure to name the enemy has hamstrung the United States, and led us into an overseas war that is approaching a decade in length, and for which we see no end.

What do you think of his theory?

I think he is fundamentally correct. When I look at the history of World War II, I see that leaders such as Roosevelt and Churchill named the enemy as the adherents of Nazism and fascism in Germany and Japan. We have statements from Roosevelt which say (paraphrasing), ‘The people of Germany must understand that they have been involved in a conspiracy to subjugate and enslave others.’ These leaders pursued total victory over these enemies without compromise or appeasement. The results over two generations speak for themselves.

What stops America from pursing the same tactics today?

What stops American leaders is a certain sense of inferiority, drawn from multiculturalism and political correctness.