The liberal values that a democracy holds dear, Huntington explained, are also the values that can undermine a professional officer corps. “The heart of liberalism is individualism,” he wrote. “It emphasizes the reason and moral dignity of the individual.” But the military man, because of the nature of his job, has to assume irrationality and the permanence of violent conflict in human relations. “The liberal glorifies self-expression” because the liberal takes national security for granted; the military man glorifies “obedience” because he does not take that security for granted. A democracy may fight better than a dictatorship, because its middle-level officers are more inclined to make risky decisions; that is one reason for our success on the beaches of Normandy, and for the success of the Israelis over Arab armies. Nevertheless, a truly liberal military would lack the lethal effectiveness required to defend a liberal society threatened by technologically empowered illiberal adversaries.
Only conservatism, Huntington argued, proves properly conducive to military professionalism. Indeed, conservatism grows organically out of the military ethic that dominated society in ancient times. Conservatism recognizes the primacy of power in international affairs; it accepts existing institutions; and its goals are limited. It eschews grand designs, because it has no universal value system that it seeks to impose on others. The conservative mind, like the military one, believes that human beings learn only from human experience, which leads to an accent on the study of history. History forms the centerpiece of war college curricula.
But don’t assume, Huntington said, that the conservatism of the military is inherently reactionary, in an ideological sense. In nineteenth-century Europe the professionalization of militaries allowed men of all backgrounds to advance in the ranks; militaries challenged the aristocratic basis of society. In egalitarian America the dynamic between the military and society was bound to be different. The United States was already democratic, and under no threat. The military was more isolated, and over time it developed an ethos that was markedly more aristocratic than that of society. The more a liberal society isolates and reproaches the military, Huntington implied, the more conservative the military may become in response.
Now here is where the young Huntington really got interesting. Our very greatness, he said, is what makes it difficult for the American liberal mind to deal with the outside world. “American nationalism,” he wrote, “has been an idealistic nationalism, justified, not by the assertion of the superiority of the American people over other peoples, but by the assertion of the superiority of American ideals over other ideals.” French foreign policy can be whatever the French decide it is, provided it is in their momentary self-interest. But American foreign policy is judged by the criteria of universal principles. According to Huntington, this leads to a pacifist strain in American liberalism when it comes to defending our hardcore national interests, and an aggressive strain when it comes to defending human rights. Although the professional soldier accepts the reality of never-ending and limited conflict, “the liberal tendency,” Huntington explained, is “to absolutize and dichotomize war and peace.” Liberals will most readily support a war if they can turn it into a crusade for advancing humanistic ideals. That is why, he wrote, liberals seek to reduce the defense budget even as they periodically demand an adventurous foreign policy. It came as no surprise to readers of The Soldier and the State that the same intellectuals and opinion-makers who consistently underappreciated NATO in the 1970s and 1980s, when the outcome of the Cold War remained in doubt, demanded aggressive NATO involvement in the 1990s, in Bosnia and Kosovo, when the stakes for our national security were much lower, but the assault on liberal principles was vivid and clear-cut.
The only way to preserve a liberal society, Huntington wrote, is to define the limits of military control. And the only way to do that across the uncertain decades and centuries ahead is to keep the military and the advice it offers strictly professional. Therefore, a soldier should recommend battle only in the case of national interest. If he is to fight for other reasons, even humanitarian ones, the pressure to do so must come from his civilian superiors.
In 1993, General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed opposition to U.S. military involvement in Bosnia and was branded a “political general” by some. But a reader of Huntington might think a little differently about Powell. If his client’s territory is under no direct danger, the professional officer cannot recommend “the involvement of the state in war except when victory is certain,” as Huntington wrote. Powell’s opposition to war in a case where the impact on our national interest was inconclusive and where victory appeared unsure was not so much a “Powell doctrine” as it was the age-old dictum of the military professional, who seeks to avoid becoming “political” and refuses to promote moral crusades, however justified they may be. (Of course, the military’s ability to intimidate our civilian leadership into inaction in Bosnia points up Huntington’s other realization: about how democracies are encroached on by overbearing defense establishments.)
The first decade of the Cold War indicated to Huntington that although tension would persist between a liberal society and a vast new defense establishment, the two would find ways to coexist. He saw Truman as a harbinger of this emerging order: liberal at home, but profoundly conservative in foreign affairs. It was the civilian business community, Huntington observed, that was now providing a bridge between the military and the rest of society. For many of us, big business embodies conservative pragmatism and what is known as the military-industrial complex. But Huntington exposed this image as a Cold War artifact. “Business pacifism” is how he describes the capitalist’s view of the world through most of our earlier history. Religious moralism and economic liberalism combined to make most American businessmen see international trade and multilateral treaties as more important than power politics. The end of the Cold War has revived that view of the world. Liberals and neoconservatives who now worry about the American business community’s growing economic involvement with an authoritarian China are revisiting an old Huntington argument.
V.
By the mid-1960s Samuel Huntington had settled into the life of a Harvard professor, quietly raising a family in the Boston area. This life was briefly interrupted by an assignment for the Johnson administration in 1967: as a State Department consultant, he prepared a one-hundred-page report on the Vietnam War that was later declassified and used as the basis for an article in the July 1968 issue of Foreign Affairs. The article caused a tremendous furor. It embraced the administration’s objective of defeating the North Vietnamese, but explained why the administration’s methods for achieving that objective were all wrong.
Huntington rejected the significance of the Johnson administration’s claim that the proportion of the South Vietnamese population under government control (rather than under Viet Cong control) had risen from 40 percent to 60 percent. “This change,” he wrote, is “the result of the movement of the population into the cities rather than the extension of the Government’s control into the countryside”—where the Viet Cong were as strong as ever. But although the Johnson administration was guilty of “unwarranted optimism,” its critics, he asserted, were guilty of “misplaced moralism.” Huntington pointed out that the question Whom does the majority of the population really support? was relevant only in a stable constitutional democracy like America’s, not amid the mounting chaos and violence of a country like Vietnam. Further, winning popular support by promoting rural development would achieve nothing; it wasn’t rural poverty that drove people into the arms of the Viet Cong but rather “the absence of an effective structure of authority.” And where such a strong authority existed, Huntington wrote, “even though it be quite hierarchical and undemocratic, the Viet Cong make little progress.” The one-third of the rural population that had withstood Viet Cong infiltration had done so because of tough ethnic and religious communal organizati
ons that were often as inimical to Western values as the Viet Cong were. “Even back then we were nation-building,” Huntington told me, with disapproval. “We rejected religious and ethnic loyalties as counterweights to the Viet Cong because we wanted a modern, democratic nation-state with a national army. One problem with Vietnam was our idealism.”
Such idealism, he says, now characterizes other American involvements overseas: “The media appeal to our national egotism, which assumes our values and political structures are those the rest of the world wants; and if it doesn’t want them, it ought to.” Huntington believes that we should proclaim our values abroad in ways that allow us to take advantage of our adversaries but do not force us to remake societies from within. Thus in the late 1970s he helped Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter to implement a human rights policy designed to embarrass the Soviet Union, but he has remained skeptical about putting troops on the ground to build Western-style democracy in places with no tradition of it.
Huntington’s analysis of Vietnam derived from his newly emerging worldview. In the 1950s and 1960s the big issue in social science was political modernization. The conventional academic wisdom was that new countries in Africa and elsewhere would develop democracies and legal systems similar to ours. Huntington would have none of this. His insight about Vietnam—that the kind of authority that worked there was not at all like ours—fit into the larger theme elaborated in his book Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Political Order is a study of how states are formed, and is perhaps Huntington’s most important book. In the fourteenth century the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun described in his Muqaddimah how desert nomads, in aspiring to the comforts of a sedentary life, created the dynamic for urbanization that was then captured by powerful dynasties. Huntington continued the story. He described how development leads to new patterns of instability, including upheavals and revolutions, which result in the building of more-complex institutions. Political Order in Changing Societies, though written three and a half decades ago, is still the clearest road map to what developing countries face in their attempts to establish stable and responsive governments in an era of globalization. The book opens with a bold assertion.
The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, [and] stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities.
The statement that the distinction between democracies and dictatorships is less important than it seems will come as no surprise to those who have experienced the social chaos in, say, Nigeria and Ghana, despite the elections that those countries hold, and have also experienced the relative openness and civil stability of more autocratic societies, such as Jordan, Tunisia, and Singapore. More than other academics, Huntington pays attention to ground-level realities. Throughout his career he has displayed an academically atypical fondness for quoting on-the-scene observers (as well as academics) in his footnotes. “There are no academic sources for recent events,” he told me. “There is only academic opinion.”
The central argument in Political Order is that despite what we may instinctively believe, the American historical experience is inappropriate for understanding the challenges that developing countries face. “Americans believe in the unity of goodness,” Huntington wrote. They “assume that all good things go together”—social progress, economic growth, political stability, and so on. But consider India, he suggested. India had one-tenth the per capita income of Argentina and Venezuela in the 1950s, yet it was politically more stable. Why? Part of the answer is something “bad”: India’s illiteracy. Illiteracy in India fostered democratic stability, because rural illiterates make fewer demands on government than a newly literate urban proletariat. Illiterates or semiliterates merely vote; literate people organize, and challenge the existing system. India, Huntington contended, was stable and democratic for decades despite its poverty because of an unusual combination of factors: a poorly educated electorate and a highly educated elite large enough to administer modern governmental institutions. Now that a newly literate lower middle class is emerging in India, the nation’s politics have become far nastier.
Another problem for American thinking, Huntington continued, is that our history has taught us how to limit government, not how to build it from scratch. Just as our security, a product of geography, was largely unearned, so were our governing institutions and practices, an inheritance from seventeenth-century England. The Constitution is about controlling authority; throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the formerly communist world the difficulty is to establish authority. “The problem,” Huntington wrote, “is not to hold elections but to create organizations.”
In politically advanced states loyalty is to institutions, not to groups. States like ours are the result of a long process of urbanization and enlightenment, but this process can be destabilizing in its own right. “The faster the enlightenment of the population, the more frequent the overthrow of the government,” he observed. The French and Mexican revolutions were preceded not by poverty but by sustained social and economic development. The economic growth that the global elite now champions around the world will lead to instability and upheaval before it leads to politically advanced societies.
At international conferences experts frequently wring their hands about corruption. Political Order demonstrates that the very modernization they champion causes corruption in the first place. The eighteenth century saw unprecedented levels of corruption in England, owing to the onset of the Industrial Revolution; the same can be said of nineteenth-century America. But corruption at this stage of development can be useful, Huntington wrote, and should not be high-mindedly disparaged. Corruption provides the means for assimilating new groups into the system. The selling of parliamentary seats, for example, is typical of an emerging democracy, and preferable to armed attacks against Parliament itself. Corruption, Huntington pointed out, is a less extreme form of alienation than violence: “He who corrupts a system’s police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system’s police stations.” In late-nineteenth-century America, legislatures and city councils were corrupted by utilities, railway companies, and new industrial corporations—the same forces that were spurring economic growth and helping to make the United States a world power. In India many economic activities would be paralyzed without baksheesh. Corruption in moderate doses can overcome unresponsive bureaucracy and be an instrument of progress.
At the same time, Huntington explained, the hurly-burly of modernization and corruption invites a puritanical reaction. The seamy trade-offs necessary for growth and stability are denounced by zealots, delegitimizing the political process. This happened in Iran a decade after Political Order was published.
The United States, Huntington said, has trouble understanding revolutionary ferment in the rest of the world because it never experienced a real revolution. Instead it went through a war of independence—and not even one “of natives against alien conquerors,” like that of the Algerians against the French, but one of settlers against the home country. Real revolutions are different—bad—Huntington made clear. Fortunately, they are rare. Even as the proletariat in third-world slums continues to radicalize, the middle classes become increasingly conservative and more willing to fight for the existing order. Writing in the late 1960s, Huntington was describing the world of the early twenty-first century. When a revolution does occur, continued economic deprivation “may well be essential to its success.” The idea that food shortages and other hardships caused by economic sanctions will lead to the overthrow of a revolutionary regime like Saddam Hussein’s or Fidel Castro’s is nonsense, in Huntington’s view. Material sacrifices, although intolerable in a normal situation, are
proof of ideological commitment in a revolutionary one: “Revolutionary governments may be undermined by affluence; but they are never overthrown by poverty.” The Spanish and Canadian developers now building hotels in Havana may know better than the American government does how to undermine a revolutionary regime.
Huntington portrayed the problem of revolutions, monarchies, praetorian regimes, and feudal states by drawing on a wealth of examples from all over the world. He offered a panorama of the messiness, intractability, and complexity of our times, even as he efficiently distilled and summarized. In one sentence (in Political Order) he laid out the different roles played by militaries throughout the twentieth century: “In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle class world, he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms…he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order.” A better description of the changing role of the Turkish army over the decades, or of the evolving status of the Egyptian army, has never been written. Indeed, the more backward the society, the more progressive the role of the military may be—and the more cautious the West should be about wanting to replace it with civilian politicians.
America’s confidence in “democratic” reform for its own sake is misplaced. “Reform can be a catalyst of revolution,” Huntington wrote, “rather than a substitute for it…great revolutions have followed periods of reform, not periods of stagnation and repression.” In any case, reform in underdeveloped societies is effected not by transparency and greater public participation but, as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk showed in Turkey, by “celerity and surprise—those two ancient principles of war.” If a reform program is revealed gradually, a free press will dissect it and create opposition to it. Because one sector of society will support one reform but not another, a reformer must work by stealth, isolating one set of issues from the next, and often relying not on the media but on the gaps in communication that exist within a society.
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