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Friday, September 24, 2021

Issue 75

America After Afghanistan
Background Essay
Background Essay

Our Revels Now Are Ended

by Ralph Petersvia Strategika
Friday, September 24, 2021

It’s hard to win a war when you refuse to understand your enemy. It’s harder still when you cannot realistically define your strategic mission. You lame yourself further when you reduce a complex history to a single inaccurate cliché; i.e., “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”

Featured Commentary
Featured Commentary

Afghanistan Post-Mortem

by Peter R. Mansoorvia Strategika
Friday, September 24, 2021

The United States has lost its longest war. After twenty years of conflict and nation building in Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed Afghan regime collapsed like a house of cards in just a few weeks after the announced departure of American and NATO troops from the country. A final flurry of activity by the U.S. military managed to rescue 123,000 people from Kabul, but as Winston Churchill once said of Dunkirk, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

Featured Commentary

Dented, Not Damaged: The American Empire After Afghanistan

by Josef Joffevia Strategika
Friday, September 24, 2021

When small, even middle-sized powers make grievous mistakes like fighting a losing war or ignoring deadly threats, they risk their place in the global hierarchy or, worse, their existence. Thus did France and Britain when they failed to fight Nazi Germany in the Thirties while still in position of strategic superiority. 

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Featured Commentary

Europe To The World: “Count Me Out!”

by Josef Joffevia Strategika
Tuesday, May 12, 2015

World Order, Henry Kissinger muses in his eponymous book, requires somebody—a state or an institution—to maintain it. He holds up the Westphalian System, put in place after the murderous Thirty Years’ War, as one institutional pillar. As another instance, he cites the Congress of Vienna (1815), which spawned the Quadruple as well as the Holy Alliance.

Background Essay

Whither NATO?

by Peter R. Mansoorvia Strategika
Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Formed in 1949 in response to the onset of the Cold War, the purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to British General Hastings Lionel Ismay, the first Secretary General of the alliance, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Sixty-five years after the creation of NATO, little it seems has changed with the exception...

Related Commentary

Repeating History Yet Again

by Bruce Thorntonvia Front Page Magazine Online
Sunday, April 5, 2015

Helping the Mullahs make a quantum leap toward nuclear weapons capacity.

Related Commentary

The Shadow of Munich Haunts the Iran Negotiations

by Victor Davis Hansonvia National Review
Thursday, April 2, 2015

Once again our leaders are needlessly appeasing a hostile state that shows them nothing but contempt.

Strategika: “More Energy, Fewer Problems?” with Williamson Murray

interview with Williamson Murrayvia Strategika
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

The economic and strategic implications of the US energy boom.

Strategika: “An Abundant Energy Future?” With Walter Russell Mead

interview with Walter Russell Mead via Strategika
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

How will new energy resources affect America’s standing in the world?

Strategika: “Energy Resources: A Curse or a Blessing?” with Kori Schake

interview with Kori Schakevia Strategika
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

What the United States’ energy revolution means for the nation’s future.

Related Commentary

America’s Too Much of a Good Thing

by Victor Davis Hansonvia Strategika
Monday, March 30, 2015

The United States is currently importing oil at about 1996 levels, or roughly 2.5 million barrels per day less than its peak years of 2005-6 when imports topped 10 million barrels per day. And the price per barrel has collapsed by more than half to about $50. The old 1970s dream of a U.S. self-sufficient in fossil fuel energy is now conceivable.

Featured Commentary

America Strikes Oil, Literally And Figuratively

by Kori Schakevia Strategika
Thursday, March 26, 2015

J. Paul Getty advised young people to rise early, work hard, and strike oil. It was the recipe to success for many an American robber baron of the nineteenth century, a fortune in both senses of the word being made all over again as hydraulic fracturing enables American energy production to burgeon. American energy production is advancing our national security, as well, emboldening our friends and impinging on our enemies

Featured Commentary

A More Powerful United States

by Walter Russell Mead via Strategika
Thursday, March 26, 2015

The revolution in U.S. energy production is one of the big stories of our time, and it has consequences for the future of America’s primary geostrategic project of generating, leading, and defending a liberal capitalist world order. Not every result of American energy production will be positive, but the net effect will be to support America’s ability to play a leading role in world affairs.

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The Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict strives to reaffirm the Hoover Institution's dedication to historical research in light of contemporary challenges, and in particular, reinvigorating the national study of military history as an asset to foster and enhance our national security. Read more.

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Strategika is an online journal that analyzes ongoing issues of national security in light of conflicts of the past—the efforts of the Military History Working Group of historians, analysts, and military personnel focusing on military history and contemporary conflict.

Our board of scholars shares no ideological consensus other than a general acknowledgment that human nature is largely unchanging. Consequently, the study of past wars can offer us tragic guidance about present conflicts—a preferable approach to the more popular therapeutic assumption that contemporary efforts to ensure the perfectibility of mankind eventually will lead to eternal peace. New technologies, methodologies, and protocols come and go; the larger tactical and strategic assumptions that guide them remain mostly the same—a fact discernable only through the study of history.

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The opinions expressed in Strategika are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Hoover Institution or Stanford University.