Domestic Policy by Other Means

Prussian military theorist Carl von Clauzwitz famously said "War is the continuation of policy by other means." In this, he was pointing out the link between conventional diplomacy and warfare, both of which are intended to achieve the state's objectives. What he didn't say is that foreign policy, and even war, is often an extension of domestic politics by other means, too. Stirring up anger against foreigners is a great way to distract from issues at home, and if popular support really is wavering, a "short, victorious war" may even be necessary. Of course, then you're in a war and the enemy gets a vote on when it stops, which rarely turns out well for the people who initiate it.

Probably the purest example of this is the Falklands War, driven almost entirely by the need for a repressive military junta to distract the population from an increasingly bad economic situation. It did not end well for them. This is an unusually clear example of domestic policy/politics driving a war, given the lack of any concrete economic or military benefit from possessing the Falklands, but we have seen the same thing happen repeatedly over the last few centuries.

To be clear, this is not a maximalist claim that all participation in war is driven by domestic politics.¹ Even leaving aside defensive wars, there are certainly plenty of cases where war is driven by the classical realist motives of maximizing state power or preventing some other state from doing so. But, particularly in the last 100 years or so, war has gotten more destructive and basically undermined any economic justification for conquest, leaving domestic issues as the main driver.

One early example is the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, driven largely by Charles X's attempts to distract from his growing unpopularity among the French populace. Unusually, the military side actually worked, with France conquering Algeria fairly quickly, but it wasn't enough to save Charles X, who was deposed shortly after the campaign ended. Four decades later, the ruler of France, Napoleon III, was again unpopular and considering taking military action to solve the problem, this time against Prussia, which was in the process of consolidating the various German states. While this was an entirely standard geopolitical objective, the actual declaration of war was sparked by the Ems dispatch, a message sent by Bismarck in a successful attempt to incite the French people to demand action against Prussia. In the ensuing war, Napoleon III personally led the French Army to defeat at Sedan, and was deposed by the French even before the war ended.

The record of such wars didn't improve much in the 20th century. Although the Russo-Japanese War is the source of the quote "what this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution" by the Russian minister of the interior, it was the Japanese who started shooting, and there's not a lot of evidence that Russia even wanted a war, much less for the purpose of suppressing discontent. Of course, Russia's defeat supercharged unrest, and forced the Tsar to give up absolute power. Nor did the war end peacefully in Japan, where riots broke out against the terms of the peace treaty, negotiated while Japan was effectively bankrupt, and the government fell due to the loss of popular support.

A decade later, other people tried the strategy more explicitly. The Austro-Hungarian leadership acted aggressively against Serbia in large part because of concerns about the stability of the multi-ethnic empire in the face of rising nationalism, although this was at least as much an attempt to push back Serbian influence in the Empire's Slavic territories as it was a purely domestic matter. The motives for Germany's actions during the crisis are still disputed, but one major school, drawing on the work of historian Fritz Fischer, argues that the German leadership deliberately provoked the war in hopes of using aggression abroad to pacify the population behind the existing government. In particular, the Social Democrats had become the largest party in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections, and while they had been kept out of the government, there were fears that might not be possible if trends continued.

Obviously, this didn't work out great for either of those governments, and the lesson that this is a bad way to make serious foreign policy seems to have mostly been learned through the 20th century, with the Falklands being the outstanding exception. The biggest example since then is probably the western intervention in Libya, which was driven less by carefully-crafted policy and more by a desire on the part of western leaders to appear like the good guys in front of their voters. In practice, it mostly destabilized Libya, and, more importantly, convinced every dictator out there that Western promises of normalizing relations in return for giving up WMD programs would last only as long as it was convenient. While this hasn't caused direct problems for the west yet, the long-term effects on proliferation are obvious, and not ones we should welcome.

All of which brings us to the recent confrontation between the United States and Venezuela, which is hard to read any other way than the use of foreign policy to achieve domestic political ends. Venezuela was not a military threat of any sort, and all of the increase in tension between the two countries in the last year has been driven by Washington, not Caracas. The most obvious comparison is to Manuel Noriega and the 1989 invasion of Panama, but Venezuela has neither killed any American troops directly nor declared war on the United States. Obviously, the initial stages of the military intervention went shockingly well, but what will happen next remains to be seen. The record of history suggests it will probably not happen the way the Administration hopes.

For new readers, this is not normally very much of a current events blog, and I hope that normal service (by which I mean being geeky about weird corners of naval history) will resume shortly.