Strategika

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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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Nuclear bomb's tell-tale mushroom cloud
Related Commentary

Meet The Missile Challenge With The Anti-Missile Response

by Bruce Thorntonvia Strategika
Friday, October 30, 2015

Challenge and response has been the dynamic of warfare since the beginning of civilization.

Featured Commentary

It’s Mad To Forgo Missile Defense

by Frederick W. Kaganvia Strategika
Friday, October 30, 2015

American thinking about missile defense has been incoherent from the very beginning. The issue is superficially simple: the Soviet Union threatened the American people with nuclear missiles, so the U.S. should naturally have tried to defend them against those missiles.

Featured Commentary

The Pragmatics Of Missile Defense

by Victor Davis Hansonvia Strategika
Friday, October 30, 2015

Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense, as originally conceived in the 1950s and 1960s, was a Cold War era answer to the nightmare of Mutually Assured Destruction, the linchpin of Soviet and American deterrence.

Background Essay

Missile Defense: Past, Present, And Future

by Kiron K. Skinnervia Strategika
Friday, October 30, 2015

A new era of modern warfare began when German V-2 missiles hit London in September 1944. Within the next few years, the U.S. military was issuing reports on how to proceed in the development of defensive counters to ballistic missiles.

Strategika: “Arms Control, Ancient and Modern” With Barry Strauss

interview with Barry Straussvia Strategika
Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Chronicling the history of efforts to restrain violence.

Strategika: “Why Arms Control Agreements Are Superfluous,” With Angelo Codevilla

interview with Angelo M. Codevillavia Strategika
Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Why diplomacy can’t alter underlying realities.

Strategika: “Can The United States Restrain Iran?” With Walter Russell Mead

interview with Walter Russell Mead via Strategika
Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Is the Iranian nuclear deal destined to fail?

Featured Commentary

Lessons Of Past Arms Control Agreements For The Proposed Iran Deal

by Barry Straussvia Strategika
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The history of arms control agreements is the history of violations. States sign agreements when they must, but break them when they wish. Secret violations are especially hard to monitor in dictatorships and closed societies.

Featured Commentary

The Checkered History Of Arms Control

by Walter Russell Mead via Strategika
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Arms control agreements have become an accepted part of the diplomat’s toolkit. They’re taught in seminars at places like Johns Hopkins’ SAIS and Harvard’s Kennedy School; they’re name-checked alongside peace treaties and trade agreements as things diplomats do; negotiating and monitoring them is even a career track.

Background Essay

The Flaws Of Arms Control

by Angelo M. Codevillavia Strategika
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The U.S.-Iran “agreement” of 2015—its genesis, the negotiations that led to it, and its likely consequences—is comprehensible only in terms of a set of ideas peculiar to the post-WWI era, which distinguishes it from previous historical examples.

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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.