Editor's Note: Yesterday, The Diplomat in partnership with Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Fletcher Forum hosted a panel discussion on U.S. Foreign Policy. The following remarks were delivered by our own Naval Diplomat.

The question I’ve been asked to venture a few thoughts on is, can the U.S. military pivot during the sequester? My answer: yes, if it rediscovers habits of mind that come with tight budgets. I am a seaman and view the world through a seaman’s eyes, so my remarks have a saltwater flavor. The good news is that operating on a shoestring used to be second nature for the U.S. Navy. Ours wasn’t a two-ocean navy until World War II, within living memory.

One thing seems clear: if resources are going to shrink, the United States must either shed secondary commitments or keep these commitments through economy-of-force measures. Safe parts of the globe can be entrusted to local allies or to small, low-end military contingents. But here’s a theoretical question for us to ponder: it appears that great powers have a hard time letting go of longstanding commitments, no matter how compelling the logic for doing so appears. Maybe you can help me puzzle out why.

Let me call in some intellectual fire support. Our patron saint at the War College, Clausewitz, teaches that there is no higher or simpler law of strategy than to concentrate resources at decisive places on the map at the decisive time. This is somewhat less true in peacetime, when we have to disperse forces within theaters to perform a variety of missions. But the underlying logic remains. We should match power with purpose in as few theaters as possible, lest we attenuate our military resources into irrelevance.

How do we know when to shed a commitment? Well, Clausewitz offers two thoughts. First, he notes that the value we assign our political goals dictates the magnitude and duration of the effort we put into obtaining those goals. That is, it determines how many lives and resources, and how much treasure we’re prepared to expend on behalf of our objectives, and for how long. The corollary is that when an endeavor starts costing more than it’s worth, we should look for the exit. We should cut the best deal we can and get out.

Second, he sets a rather high bar for undertaking secondary theaters or commitments. Such a theater should pay off disproportionately without risking too much in the theaters that matter the most. Again, we should be choosy about taking on new commitments, and flexible about shucking off old ones. And indeed, top-level strategic guidance seems to abide by Clausewitzian cost/benefit logic. Our 2007 Maritime Strategy, for instance, focuses attention on the Western Pacific and the greater Indian Ocean.

But if you read it closely, it also instructs the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard to remain prepared to seize control of any body of water on the face of the earth—unilaterally if need be. Again, retrenchment is hard. Why is that? Let me offer a few candidate explanations. First, Thucydides depicts fear, honor, and interest as the prime movers that drive human actions. Interests are largely subjective. Consequently, fear and honor color how we measure the importance of interests as well as ideals. As a result, we may fret about losing credibility with allies, or we may simply worry about the unintended consequences of changing the status quo.

Second, powerful constituencies agitate on behalf of particular regions or commitments. For instance, Europe-first is a tradition with a long pedigree in U.S. foreign policy. Entrusting safe zones like Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to local guardians in order to free up resources for Asia is tougher than Clausewitz makes it sound.

Third, allies fear American abandonment. The concept of free-riding has bad connotations, but it says something true about coalition maintenance. If an external provider of security has been there for decades, it’s hard to ask your taxpayers to take on the burden of supplying this international public good—even if you inhabit a region where threats are minimal.

And finally, bureaucratic culture plays some part. The idea of allocating the entire surface of the globe to some regional command or another is engraved on the culture of the U.S. national-security community. Google our Unified Command Plan if you doubt me. Thus a strong bureaucratic interest may lobby against drawing down in what appears to be—to them—a critical place on the map.

What to do? There are no simple answers. As I suggested up front, one thing U.S. practitioners and pundits should do is rediscover an older way of thinking about strategy and forces. To return to a naval example: before the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, U.S. decision-makers never assumed they can manage events everywhere. Our fleet was big enough to oversee events in the Atlantic, or the Pacific, but not both. That’s why thinkers like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt worried incessantly about where to station the fleet, and whether to divide it between coasts. They had to think in terms of managing risk. So must we, if our navy keeps shrinking.

Do I wish we had the resources to sustain our current posture as guarantor of the international system? Of course. But Congress makes strategic decisions when it makes budgetary decisions. If lawmakers decide we will have fewer naval and military resources, it only makes sense to cut back on overseas commitments—keeping ends, ways, and means in sync. That will be even more true if climate scientists have it right and a new maritime theater—the Arctic Ocean—opens to shipping in the 2030s. The Arctic washes against our shores, contains natural resources, and will provide convenient shipping routes for part of the year. We can hardly ignore that theater—and it will tax military forces that are already in short supply.

Bottom line, we need to start relearning how to execute a strategy of relative naval and military poverty. And time’s a-wasting!

Uncharacteristically blunt language issued forth from Tokyo on Tuesday, after the news broke that eight Chinese maritime-enforcement ships had entered the waters around the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. While a Chinese presence in these waters has become commonplace in recent months, this was the largest flotilla to fly the PRC flag near the archipelago. The deployment reportedly came after Japanese nationalists ventured near the islands in small craft. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reported instructing Japanese forces "to take resolute measures against attempts to enter our territorial waters and make a landing." If Chinese personnel landed on the islets, added Abe, "then of course we will forcibly expel them."

There are a few question marks to the encounter. First consider the Chinese side. Some news reporting attributed the Chinese action to Japanese officials' recent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. Such visits are guaranteed to raise hackles not just in China but in South Korea. It stands to reason that there may have been some link between the two events. But correlation isn't causation. Beijing made no explicit connection between Yasukuni and the Senkakus. This week's maritime incursion, moreover, differed from previous Sino-Japanese encounters only in scale, not in kind. And China's leadership has vowed to maintain a regular if not standing presence in waters that lap against the archipelago.

Tokyo's break with low-key diplomacy was more intriguing. Sovereignty is about control of territory. By asserting jurisdiction over the archipelago and adjacent waters, Beijing has in effect asserted the right to land personnel there at its discretion. But again, this is nothing new. It's part and parcel of China's claim. Did Prime Minister Abe have some reason to expect a landing now? Was he afraid Japanese hotheads would go ashore and Chinese mariners would follow? If so, Abe was probably trying to mount a deterrent. Displaying capability while laying down a marker about Tokyo's resolve could dissuade Beijing from doing something rash – and irrevocable.

The larger context may have played some part as well. In late March a PLA Navy flotilla paid a visit to James Shoal, reaffirming Beijing's claim to "indisputable sovereignty" over most of the South China Sea. The Malaysian government was moved to protest the foreign naval presence a mere 44 nautical miles off its shores, and deep within its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. While ASEAN holds out hope for a code of conduct in Southeast Asian waters, that hope dimmed from already weak candlepower with the PLA Navy's fresh provocations. Abe may have meant to serve notice that Japan, a great seafaring power, falls into a different category than weak South China Sea states. It can push back.

Sino-Japanese relations may be entering a new phase. This bears watching.

Editor's Note: Below is the full text of the Naval Diplomat’s essay for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on February 26, 2013. It appeared in Shihoko Goto, ed., Taiwan and the U.S. Pivot to Asia: New Realities in the Region? Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, March 2013, pp. 25-32.

Apathy kills. The Obama administration’s pivot to Asia—a politico-military endeavor that combines strategic mass, strategic maneuver, and geography in intensely competitive surroundings—may well bolster Taiwan’s security vis-à-vis the mainland.Yet the pivot’s capacity to dissuade or defeat China hinges on whether U.S. Navy relief forces can reach the island’s vicinity, do battle, and prevail at a cost acceptable to the American state and society. This is an open question—but one that Taiwan’s armed forces can, and must, help answer in the affirmative. The island must bear a vigorous hand in its defense rather than passively awaiting rescue. Otherwise it may stand alone in its hour of need.

Get Serious

Taiwan, then, must think of itself as a partner in as well as a beneficiary of the United States’strategic pirouette.Why? Because the remorseless logic of self-help, whereby nation-states bear primary responsibility for their own defense, still rules international affairs. And because appearances count in alliance politics. A lesser ally that covets help from a stronger one must demonstrate that it merits the effort, lest the strong stand aside during a crisis. Taipei’s performance is suspect in both military and diplomatic terms.Defense budgets, a rough gauge of political resolve, have dwindled from already meager levels. Military spending stood at 2.2 percent of GDP in 2012, down from 3.8 percent in 1994.

For comparison’s sake, 2 percent of GDP constitutes NATO’s benchmark for defense expenditures. Taiwan barely meets the standard fixed by an alliance whose members face no threat. This is not the behavior of an ally serious about its defense.

Taipei thus remains on a peacetime footing even as the cross-strait military balance tilts more and more lopsidedly toward the mainland. Its armed forces’ capacity to withstand assailants long enough for U.S. forces to reach the theater is increasingly doubtful. Only by conspicuously upgrading its defenses can the island’s leadership help a U.S. president justify the costs and hazards of ordering increasingly scarce, and thus increasingly precious, forces into battle against a peer competitor. Otherwise the American people and their elected officials may ask why they should risk vital interests for the sake of an ally that appears unwilling to help itself.

Granted, this is a dark picture to paint at a time when knowledgeable observers proclaim that peace has broken out in the Taiwan Strait. But think about it. America’s superpower status—among the most vital of vital interests—hinges on sea power. Losing a major part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in an afternoon would set back the republic’s standing in the world. Even in victory, a costly encounter could carry dire consequences for both the United States and the global order over which its sea services preside.

In short, U.S. presidents can no longer blithely send forces into combat in the Western Pacific. It is no longer 1995-1996, when the Clinton administration dispatched two aircraft-carrier task forces to the island’s vicinity to deter Chinese aggression during presidential elections. The prospective adversary is far more capable, the costs of battle mounting in relative terms. After all, each ship or aircraft lost in combat constitutes a bigger proportion of a smaller force. Beijing is counting on the increasing “lumpiness” of U.S. military capital to help dissuade Washington from involving itself in a cross-strait war.

The decision will be doubly difficult if Taiwan seems indifferent to its own security—indeed,to its own political survival.The island must help America pivot to the region rather than assume help will automatically arrive during times of strife.

Competing to Mold Washington’s Cost/Benefit Calculus

Theory helps clarify such matters. Strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz urges statesmen and commanders to impose rationality on international strife—an arena for chance, “friction,” and dark passions—as best they may. The value of the political object, writes Clausewitz, should govern the magnitude and duration of the effort a belligerent puts forth to gain that object. In other words, how much importance a combatant attaches to its goals determines how many resources—lives, weaponry, treasure—it should expend on theundertaking, and for how long. It is the price a belligerent is willing to pay.

Should the costs come to exceed the likely gains, adds Clausewitz, the leadership should write off its losses and exit the conflict as gracefully as possible. Such hard scrabble logic should trouble Taipei, raising the prospect of American abandonment. And it gets worse. No enthusiast for alliances, Clausewitz adds laconically that

"One country may support another’s cause, but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help; but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off, and one tries to withdraw at the smallest cost."

Allied commitments, that is, are typically tepid. Harvard professor Steve Walt maintains that common interests and threats, cultural and social affinities, and incentives or coercion furnished by the leading partner can bind together alliances and coalitions. If so, his taxonomy offers scant comfort for Taipei.

Consider. The same things are not at stake for Taiwan and the United States in East Asia. Washington must uphold regionwide and global interests while keeping the peace in the Strait. Taipei concerns itself mainly with cross-strait relations. Taipei clearly cannot pay off or compel Washington to fight on its behalf.That leaves sympathy for a fellow democracy under threat as the chief motive impelling the United States to intervene.Yet Walt declares that social and cultural affinities are relatively weak adhesives. Doubtless Clausewitz would agree.

To bias a stronger patron’s cost/benefit calculus in favor of military intervention, accordingly,a lesser ally like Taiwan must shoulder as much of the burden as it can, demonstrating it remains a going concern while keeping down the costs to its ally. To help the United States pivot to its defense, Taiwan must demonstrate that the fight will not be too costly or take too long. Showing the American people and their leaders that they can advance a worthy but secondary—for them—cause at an acceptable price will easeWashington’s decision to intervene.

"Scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt, / And any thing that may not misbecome / The mighty sender, doth he prize you at." Since it's the week after Patriot's Day, it's probably heresy not to quote Longfellow or some other patriotic man of letters in response to the Boston bombings. But to me it's Shakespeare, the greatest of Englishmen, who sums up the proper sentiment toward such atrocities. The Bard has the Duke of Exeter deliver this marvelous taunt from Henry V to the Dauphin of France on the eve of Henry's cross-channel offensive. It certainly embodies the attitude of this former denizen of Cambridge and Watertown.

And attitude matters in twilight struggles such as this one. Readers of this site know I'm a follower of the late Rear Admiral J. C. Wylie, who classifies military campaigns as "sequential" or "cumulative." Sequential campaigns unfold from tactical action to tactical action, each leading to the next. You can generally use vectors to plot them on the map or nautical chart. They have destinations. Cumulative campaigns are nonlinear. Plotting them on the map looks like spattering paint everywhere, with each spot depicting a tactical action unrelated to any other action in time or space. The aggregate effect of this scattershot approach is to wear out an adversary -- much as Henry Adams observed that the British blockade, a quintessential cumulative campaign, drove the American economy to "exhaustion" during the War of 1812. It leads to no decisive battle or definite end. Morale is crucial when under prolonged assault.

Terrorism is another cumulative mode of warfare, and so is counterterrorism. Counterterror forces can't be everywhere at all times to thwart individual attacks. It would bankrupt the public treasury, and no one would want to live in such a garrison society. That being the case, ordinary people will bear the brunt of the initial response, whether by fighting back -- remember the heroism of the passengers of Flight 93, self-made warriors who prevented a third strike on September 11 -- or by rendering aid and comfort to victims, or by supplying the authorities with information. Everyone is a potential first responder.

Come to think of it, there is a Patriot's Day tie-in here. "Minutemen" such as Captain John Parker -- rank-and-file citizens who took up arms to defend their communities -- make a fitting model for societies under siege. Parker led his ragtag force of citizen-soldiers out onto Lexington Green on April 19, 1775 to oppose a Redcoat column marching to seize a weapons cache at Concord. Thus commenced the American Revolution. His statue still adorns the green. (My daughter seems unimpressed when reminded that she learned to walk under Captain Parker's watchful gaze.) The heartening public response to last week's events suggests that the defiant Minutemen ethos lives on in Boston. Let's keep it that way.

Last month the Economist published a brace of articles setting in motion a spirited debate over whether India has a strategic culture. The authors draw an unfavorable contrast between neighboring China, whose "rise is a given," and India, which "is still widely seen as a nearly-power that cannot quite get its act together." They catalogue several factors that purportedly explain New Delhi's underperformance in diplomacy and strategy. They pronounce the diplomatic apparatus "ridiculously feeble," for example, not to mention trivial in size; the political class evinces little interest in or taste for grand strategy; civilian officials at the Defense Ministry are "chronically short of military expertise." The authors mention ideas mostly in passing. Nonalignment, quasi-pacifism, and mistrust of the West remain the north star for decision makers, inhibiting strategic thought and action.

Insightful as the Economist pieces are, they conflate several related but separate things under the rubric of strategic culture. Indian commentators such as retired rear admiral Raja Menon have largely followed suit. Individual leadership, bureaucratic politics, and civil-military relations put in appearances in such accounts alongside strategic culture itself. These dimensions are closely related but far from identical. It's worth separating them out to glimpse the challenges before India. Some of these challenges are relatively straightforward to tackle. Others will demand time, determined political leadership, and, in all likelihood, some event or series of events that demonstrates -- in irrefutable fashion -- that the cultural reform project is worth undertaking. Military defeats and other setbacks have a way of clearing the national mind. Often times it takes a debacle to overcome political inertia and create a constituency for modifying a nation's strategic culture.

What is strategic culture? To borrow from scholar Colin Gray , it refers to the "disarmingly elementary" notion that "a security community is likely to think and behave in ways that are influenced by what it has taught itself about itself and its relevant contexts. And that education, to repeat, rests primarily upon the interpretation of history and history’s geography (or should it be geography’s history?)." What have the subcontinent's geography and venerable history primed Indians to think about strategy? How should New Delhi comport itself in regional and world affairs, and what sorts of actions are unthinkable?

Conscious cultural reform is a project of mammoth scope. Inexpert individuals can be replaced with knowledgeable ones. Civil-military relations can be revamped, as the United States has done several times within living memory. One of my mentors, Professor Carnes Lord, observes that bureaucracies can be remade through the artful -- and, one hopes, metaphorical -- wielding of Niccolò Machiavelli's "poisoned stiletto" to remove recalcitrant officials. But revising Indian strategic culture requires investigating the dim recesses of the subcontinent's past. Scholars must foray well beyond the post-independence decades to sketch a meaningful cultural profile. Kautilya's Arthashastra, a manual of statecraft from classical antiquity, is worth studying. So are the habits of mind foisted on the nation by outsiders such as the Mughal Dynasty and the British Empire. And on and on. Figuring out where the nation stands is central to discerning its path ahead.

Once scholars and statesmen understand Indian strategic culture, what should they so about it? It's ultimately up to Indians to decide what kind of nation they want to be. To manage the culture, they could do worse than study U.S. history, especially the century after our founding. Nonalignment, quasi-pacifism, and mistrust of the West -- in this case European empires -- were once the watchwords of American diplomacy and strategy, just as the Economist notes they are for India today. New Delhi could do worse than review how Americans consulted their "usable past"  and used it to manage the republic's self-image, and its strategic behavior, as it ascended to world power.

India has a strategic culture. Learning from others can advance its cause of self-discovery.

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Terence Roehrig, a Professor in National Security Affairs and the Director of the Asia-Pacific Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is also a Research Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard University in the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom. The views voiced here are his alone."

Barring a miscalculation or accident, in the next few weeks tension levels will begin to decrease along with continued assessments of what happened and the motives of the new Kim Jong-un regime.  Yet, the more important question is what’s next in dealing with North Korea.

Several key parameters shape any future policy toward North Korea.  First, Pyongyang is unlikely to relinquish its nuclear weapons capabilities.  Nuclear weapons have become a core element of its security strategy and the lesson to North Korean leaders from Iraq and Libya is that regimes without nuclear weapons are vulnerable to a take-down. 

Second, despite Pyongyang’s hopes, the international community will not accept it as a nuclear weapons state.  A nuclear North Korea threatens regional security, sends the wrong message to others trying to acquire nuclear weapons, particularly Iran, and seriously weakens the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Third, military action against the North Korean nuclear program is unlikely.  A military strike against North Korean nuclear facilities would be very dangerous, possibly setting off a chain of events that could wreck the peninsula. South Korea has made absolutely clear that it will retaliate if North Korea initiates some type of provocation but a direct military strike to eliminate its nuclear program is unlikely. Finally, despite some indications of unhappiness with Pyongyang’s actions, there are limits to what China is willing to do to exert pressure on North Korea.  To be clear, Beijing has not been happy with North Korea’s behavior but the historical bonds and strategic interests between the two countries make it unlikely China will turn up the heat. 

So once the current tensions die down, where do we go from here?  Many have called for increased dialogue with North Korea. The United States has had a few low level meetings with the North’s UN delegation with little progress. Given the collapse of the 2012 Leap Day Deal, Washington is unlikely to expend much capital to begin high level talks.  Fittingly, South Korea will likely take the lead in beginning a dialogue with Pyongyang. Throughout the past few weeks, South Korean President Park Geun-hye has talked about engaging North Korea through a trust-building process.  Pyongyang has not said much about these efforts but recently rejected talks as a “cunning ploy.” Thus, it is not clear North Korea is interested in talking just yet.  Dialogue is a good direction; talks need not be appeasement and help to increase our understanding of the regime and its new leader. Yet given the irreconcilable positions on denuclearization and levels of mistrust on both sides, it will be a long, tough road.    

The Naval Diplomat has been critical of our Taiwanese friends of late, so it would be churlish not to send out a hearty huzzah! when one is due. This is one such time.

Last week the news broke that officials in Taipei and Tokyo had agreed to permit fishing vessels from Taiwan to ply their trade within the 12-nautical-mile belt of territorial sea girdling the Senkaku/Diaoyu archipelago. Though the deal may look trivial, here are three intertwined reasons it's a nifty bit of statesmanship:

3. It shows that Taipei is no one's crummy little toady. For awhile it appeared as though Taiwan might side with the mainland in the Senkakus impasse. Ganging up against Japan would have set a disturbing precedent for playground-style diplomacy in the China seas. Cross-strait cooperation of this sort would not just bestow legitimacy on Beijing's effort to strongarm Tokyo, but also start to turn Japan's southern marine flank. To Japanese eyes, driving a salient into the Western Pacific would constitute a worrisome geostrategic development indeed. President Ma Ying-jeou and his lieutenants wisely desisted from helping the mainland bully their common neighbor.

2. It reminds everyone that Taiwan remains a responsible de facto sovereign. International agreements are made by sovereign governments -- a status the mainland denies Taipei. China has sought to constrict the island's "international space" for many years, for instance by foisting the stilted name "Chinese Taipei" on it at international gatherings large and small, and by denying it entry into multinational institutions whose members are, after all, sovereign states. By concluding even a modest deal like the one with Japan, Taiwan subtly reminds outsiders that it retains its independence in international affairs, and that its people possess the capacity and the right to decide their own destiny.

1. It shows how mature powers conduct themselves. A stench has surrounded the term appeasement since 1938, when the Munich Conference bartered away parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler's Germany without the Czechs' consent. Munich involved a particularly toxic variant of appeasement, but in reality nations appease one another all the time. One doubts, for instance, that the United States will come to blows with Canada or other NATO allies over how the Arctic fits into the law of the sea. They will debate, and sparks may be struck, but they will find some mutually acceptable compromise. Similarly, the Taiwan-Japan pact shows that it is indeed possible for Asian powers to shelve big disputes indefinitely while getting on with everyday life.

Not a bad piece of diplomatic judo vis-à-vis, ahem, a certain regional power that appears to view the land grab as the way to resolve nettlesome territorial disputes. More, please.

We're rapidly closing in on the centennial of the outbreak of World War I. The Great War is like an ugly bug. You want to look away but are too fascinated to. It appears as though all of the European belligerents underwent a kind of inversion experience that turned the rational calculus of war on its head. The more lives and treasure armies spent in battle, the more commanders, pressure groups, and rank-and-file citizens wanted out of the effort. The more they demanded, the greater resistance they provoked from the enemy, and the more the bloodletting on the Western Front dragged on. No one appeared willing to abandon the sunk costs of war, as economics would mandate. Political leaders who might have done so proved too weak-willed to resist popular and military sentiments. Buffeted by passions and bereft of strong leadership, Europe stepped through the looking glass.

Carl von Clausewitz opines that the value a society assigns its political goals governs how much effort it expends to obtain those goals. That is, it determines the rate at which the combatant invests lives and resources in the endeavor, and how long it will keep up that rate of expenditure. Makes sense, doesn't it? Rational actors decide what price they're prepared to pay for something, and they cancel the sale if the seller raises the price above that level. But again, Clausewitzian cost/benefit logic presupposes a kind of sobriety that was conspicuously absent from European capitals until late in the day, when statesmen like Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson restored some semblance of rationality to the Allied cause.

In a real sense, then, the mounting "magnitude" and ever-longer "duration" of the war effort -- how much the belligerents spent and for how long -- drove the value European decisionmakers assigned their cause. If so, this mental reversal also negated the corollary to Clausewitz's rational calculus, namely that leaders should look for a graceful way out of an enterprise whose costs have grown unbearable. If there's no upper bound on the expenditure of national resources, whence do you summon the discipline to cut your losses?

The baneful effects of flouting cost/benefit logic were felt well beyond the battlefield. I think the decoupling of costs from benefits helps account for the surreal feeling you get from reading about the Great War. It may also help explain the black, apocalyptic mood that gripped European populaces during the interwar years, as deftly recounted by Richard Overy in The Twilight Years. Doomsaying was commonplace in that age. It was the era when the dystopian novels of Aldous Huxley appeared, when George Orwell chronicled the failings of British imperialism in Burma and his life as a bum on the streets of London and Paris, and when radical ideologies took hold among the resentful and dispossessed.

Such is the cultural and social backsplash of abandoning the rational calculus of war. That potential for malign consequences is worth remembering.

A question came up last week at the International Studies Association (ISA) conference in San Francisco about how U.S.-China economic interdependence relates to maritime security. Through a bit of serendipity, we covered World War I -- which marked the close of an age when arguments about the economics/geopolitics interface were much in vogue -- this week in Newport. While we spent some time with this subject in seminar, I didn't answer at the ISA panel, lest I hog up more of the Q&A session than I already did. Let's correct that oversight.

Now, I am a professor. As such I reserve the sacred right to answer a question with a question. My non-response at ISA would have run something like this. There's a spectrum of views on this topic. Few would maintain that interdependence bears no relation to geopolitical competition. For one thing, fighting against a trading partner would clearly drive up the costs of the enterprise. Losing a market or a source of imports is no small thing. But fighting at all would tend to elevate the costs, simply because of the prospect that neutral shipping, aircraft, or land conveyances that transport raw materials and finished goods would be caught in the crossfire. Lloyd's of London and other firms would raise insurance rates for cargoes transiting the conflict zone, much as they have for merchantmen traversing pirate-infested waters off Somalia. In Clausewitzian terms, belligerent leaders would have to place high value on their political goals to justify paying such costs.

Short of that, opinions about the extent to which interdependence deters war vary widely. We can put the faces of David Starr Jordan, Norman Angell, and Thomas Friedman on three schools of thought. Jordan, a long-ago president of Stanford University, made a speech in 1913 that began as follows: "What shall we say of the Great War of Europe, ever threatening, ever impending, and which never comes? We shall say that it will never come. Humanly speaking, it is impossible." He wisely left himself an out, conceding the possibility that "some half-crazed archduke or some harassed minister of state" would set the continent ablaze. But after tallying up outstanding debts from past wars and estimating the costs of a general conflagration, Jordan reaffirmed his strong prediction that high costs rule out warfare. No sane statesman would pay such a price.

Angell stopped short of seconding Jordan's estimate of the pacifying effects of economics. An English intellectual and author of The Great Illusion, he argued that economic logic should -- but wouldn't -- avert war. He accused most everyone of false consciousness. The mathematics of commerce and warfare discouraged the resort to arms, but pacifists were "at one with the veriest fire-eaters" -- Alfred Thayer Mahan, call your office -- in their assumption that nations could improve their geopolitical fortunes through military might. Where Jordan prophesied, Angell pled. Statesmen would heed economic logic if only they could see the national interest clearly.

Fast-forward a century, to Friedman. A few years back the New York Times columnist told PBS host Charlie Rose that interdependence raises the costs of geopolitical competition but cannot end it altogether. Sounds like common sense to me. There exist human motives apart from dollars and cents. Honor and fear can be the prime movers behind foreign policy, and they color perceptions of what may look like objective interests. Leaders and societies may prove willing to pay an exorbitant price to preserve or improve their standing in the international pecking order, avenge past slights, or burnish their reputation for martial prowess. Such not-strictly-rational motives can deflect policy from the course a David Starr Jordan or Norman Angell would prescribe as the obvious one.

Will economic logic come to govern international politics, driving out the competitive impulse? Sure, when men become angels and lambs lie down with lions. Until then, I'll keep company with the fire-eaters who put their trust in a strong navy. But you knew that already.

The Naval Diplomat is winging his way back from San Francisco to Rhode Island in a Teddy Roosevelt frame of mind. That's because tomorrow (today when you read this) I lecture on the diplomacy and strategy of Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before the slavering hellhounds of our Senior Level Course. My overall take on Roosevelt and Wilson is an unconventional one, and probably represents a minority view. Such will remain my lot until enlightenment reaches the rest of you! John Milton Cooper designated this mismatched pair The Warrior and the Priest in a book by that title. And the contrast makes outward sense. The combative Roosevelt ranched in the Dakotas and led the infantry charge up San Juan Hill, parleying his cowboy persona into the presidency. Indeed, he inspired the phrase "cowboy diplomacy." The contemplative Wilson came from a university background, serving as president of Princeton University before vaulting into the White House (with a short sojourn as New Jersey governor along the way). That implies a stark dichotomy between the two presidents.

Henry Kissinger draws another seemingly unbridgeable contrast between TR and Wilson. Kissinger is a Roosevelt booster. That's because he sees Roosevelt as a realpolitiker, an amoral master of balance-of-power politics ... a sort of proto-Kissinger! He portrays Wilson as an idealist who let principles get the best of him, putting in place international instutions unable to withstand the ravages of power politics or the murderous ideologies that arose by the 1930s. Here again, there's an either/or feel to a side-by-side comparison between these two statesmen.

Sorry. Neither Kissinger nor Cooper gets this one right. The differences between Roosevelt and Wilson stemmed more from expediency than from some fundamental difference in philosophy. Both men were Progressive reformers, intent on taming all manner of domestic ills. In fact, it was hard to see daylight between their domestic platforms in 1912, when TR bolted the Republican Party to mount a third-party campaign to regain the Oval Office. Both -- contra Kissinger -- wrote and spoke in avowedly moral terms, appealing to ideals as well as interest. Both envisioned gradually reforming the international system, both to safeguard America from predatory Old World politics and to put in place laws and institutions to maintain order while furthering the blessings of peace and civilization. Wilson had his League of Nations; Roosevelt formulated the idea for a more muscular, more judicially oriented "League of Peace" years before.

In short, the chief difference between them was that, of the two Progressive reformers, only one, Wilson, got the chance to accomplish big goals through direct means. The linear route matters. Our old friend Admiral J. C. Wylie writes compellingly about the contrast between "sequential" military campaigns that proceed stepwise in time or on the map, with each action dependent on the last, and "cumulative" campaigns in which individual actions are unconnected to one another in time or space. Reform is a cumulative endeavor. In domestic policy, reform-minded leaders battle common crime, prepare for emergencies and disasters, try to improve working conditions for labor, and so forth. They hope to achieve aggregate effects for the better. Much the same can be said of peacetime diplomacy, when officials and diplomats try to modify conditions gradually, bolstering not just the national interest but international peace and prosperity. But again, these are scattershot endeavors, unlikely to lead straight to some final goal. Reformers tinker.

War, especially a maelstrom like World War I, is more sequential in character than domestic reform or peacetime diplomacy. It upends the established order, so you no longer need to tinker. Like a revolution, then, a system-shattering conflict supplies the opportunity to sweep away the old and replace it with something better. That's the difference between the Progressive presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. TR led the country through an interval of relative quiet, whereas Wilson got the opportunity to put his vision into practice through sequential if not revolutionary methods. By leading the United States to war in 1917, he helped demolish the European system and design something new. Did he succeed? Not in the short run. But it's commonplace to observe that all Americans are Wilsonians now. No one says they're all Rooseveltians, despite the affection TR still commands. Seems people respect a stand-up guy who not just pushes big ideas but has the gumption to act on them should the opportunity present itself.

Too bad we can't run an experiment in which TR wins the 1912 election and guides the United States through World War I. Now that would reveal some interesting lessons, letting posterity compare his handling of war and peace to Wilson's. Alas, that's the quandary of social science: there are no controlled, laboratory-grade experiments. Guess we have to content ourselves with what-ifs.