Art of War
by Niccoló Machiavelli
translated by Christopher Lynch
Univ. of Chicago Press, 312 pp., $25 THE WAR ON TERROR poses novel challenges. And as we wage it, the United States is undergoing a revolution in military affairs that requires us to adjust our defense posture in light of new capabilities. But it would be wrong to conclude that the past offers no guide--for something similar happened in sixteenth-century Italy, and the town of Florence produced a genius to help explain it. Machiavelli's "Art of War," newly translated by Christopher Lynch, arrives at an opportune moment.
Thanks to peremptory dismissals by most scholars of strategy and to the lack of interest of political theorists, the only work Machiavelli published in his lifetime may be his least-read book today. Military historians, for instance, typically consider the book's author a thoroughgoing apologist for ancient practices, incapable of appreciating the significance of modern advances in weapons and tactics.
Lynch argues convincingly that "Art of War"'s detractors have failed to approach the text in the right way. Because it is written not as a treatise but as a dialogue, the "Art of War" demands interpretive labor from the reader--for which Lynch's notes and accompanying essays prove very helpful.
Lynch cites Machiavelli's other works as evidence for his disapproval of the backward-looking humanists of his day and analyzes the descriptions of the dialogue's characters for clues about Machiavelli's judgment of them. Machiavelli's view of antiquity was not rosy, Lynch insists. In the "Art of War," as in Machiavelli's more familiar "Prince" and "Discourses on Livy," historical examples serve to illuminate the predicament of his native Florence, but the past offers both positive and negative examples. While Fabrizio Colonna, the chief speaker of the "Art of War," refers admiringly to the customs of the ancient Romans, he recommends imitating them only "in the strong and harsh things, not in the delicate and soft ones" and distinguishes "the true and perfect antiquity" from "the false and corrupt one." Further, none of the dialogue's characters, not even Fabrizio, can be assumed to speak for Machiavelli. Instead, the dialogue tests arguments and counterarguments for rival views--some dear to Machiavelli and some repugnant--about how a state must be organized to defend itself.
The result is a work that goes to the heart of today's military-political dilemmas. In explaining the current revolution in military affairs, defense analysts typically speak of technological innovations and novel uses for old technologies, ranging from hardware (such as precision-guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles, and directed-energy weapons) to operational and tactical arrangements (such as networking special operations forces on the ground with bomber pilots and central command). But the revolution also contains a moral and political dimension--and in this regard, it bears remarkable similarity to the one heralded by Machiavelli.
During the 1990s, some proponents of the revolution in military affairs rued the failure of politicians and Pentagon officials to adapt America's defenses to the post-Cold War world. Under President Clinton, the military was increasingly deployed for peace-seeking and peacekeeping missions. The soldiers sometimes objected, on the grounds that they had enlisted and received training to be soldiers, not nation-builders or civil police. But most Americans agreed that humanitarian missions were an appropriate use of our sizable defense resources. Meanwhile, however, the need to adjust--particularly in the training, equipping, and stationing of troops--to confront new kinds of threats and aggressors was largely neglected.
That is, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took office and made waves by championing "transformation." Rumsfeld's determination aroused such animosity within the defense establishment that pundits had him pegged as the cabinet member who would be forced out first. But the terrorist attacks of September 11 changed all that. The general population supported retaliatory action against the Taliban and a war to oust the rogue, terrorist-harboring regime of Saddam Hussein. At Rumsfeld's urging, soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq employed the most advanced weapons systems and techniques.
Machiavelli is no help in debates over how many troops should be stationed in Iraq or whether traditionally trained soldiers should be serving as nation-builders and counter-saboteurs. But these flash points are bound up with a broader debate to which Machiavelli has much to contribute: the internal pressures on a state at war and the state's obligations to other powers, or what we today call the international community. This set of concerns implicates not just America's military capabilities but also the nation's moral principles and political priorities.
The subject of the "Art of War," announced in Machiavelli's preface, is the conflict between two ways of orienting a state: the civil and the military. Fabrizio's association of antiquity with the military mode--and his denunciation of the soft, civil ways of contemporary Florence--has contributed to the "Art of War"'s reputation as an encomium to classical civilization, but this association is not clear cut. As the conversation unfolds, Fabrizio explains the unenviable aspects of antiquity.
When Rome was in its prime, its citizens served as soldiers--a practice that inculcated robust patriotism. Eventually, however, prosperity and the absence of serious military challenges allowed the ascent of mediocre emperors. Fear of popular insurrection led these weak leaders to abolish the militia, replacing citizen-soldiers with hired guns. Soon, the leaders found themselves at the mercy of their mercenary captains, and thus the state collapsed from within, or as Fabrizio recounts, "Sometimes it happened that there were many emperors created by various armies, from which proceeded the first division of the Empire and ultimately its ruin." Internally weak, Rome was susceptible to Christianity's message.
In his "Prince" and "Discourses," Machiavelli depicts Christianity as a sweeping power wielding a universal claim about peace and justice. In the "Art of War," Fabrizio advances a similar argument: Christian faith disarms men, turning their minds from the mortal realm, where martial strength and virtue are rewarded, to the immortal sphere. Heaven houses those who live righteously, not those who save their skin in combat.
MACHIAVELLI'S FOCUS on the Romans rather than the Christians suggests that he intends his Church history to be taken not just literally but also figuratively. Christianity represents a force that can undermine a polity by propagating a universal claim. By focusing on what people share with all of humanity, this claim tends to cast particular ties--the bonds of family, community, and country--in a subordinate position. It degrades local politics as it exalts a global ethic of peace and justice.
One could reject Machiavelli's sinister portrayal and still appreciate the larger point: Superpowers contain the seeds of their own undoing, and one means of defeating them is to induce them to embrace a universal claim at odds with military necessity.
As Machiavelli states famously in "The Prince," "There is so great a distance between how one lives and how one ought to live that he who rejects what people do in favor of what one ought to do brings about his ruin rather than his preservation; for a man who wishes to do in every matter what is good, will be ruined among those who are not good."
In our time, international law and the institution that embodies our aspirations for it, the United Nations, urge the United States to subject national security decisions to the will of the United Nations. This message is attractive because most Americans share the presumption that military action is a last resort and that differences should be resolved through law and diplomacy whenever that is possible.
And yet, when cast as part of a universal claim about how the world not only should but actually does operate, the inflexible insistence on negotiation and the ceding of national sovereignty can do harm. The danger lies in the belief that law and diplomacy can become a substitute for, or eliminate the necessity of, military readiness in a world of rogue states and actors who themselves know no law.
Machiavelli does not urge an excessive respect for human rights and the dignity of the individual--universal claims fortified by the Christianity he condemns. Judging by its protection of human rights and the individual, the liberal democratic nation-state has proven better than all other regimes that have been tried.
But if Machiavelli's works bear the mark of a pre-liberal age, his thought also transcends his age, not least his timeless warning about ideologies that, in the name of abstract principles, ask us to refrain from defending and strengthening the nation in which we actually live.
Jacqueline Newmyer is a doctoral candidate in politics at Oxford University.