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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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Related Commentary

Pivot? What pivot?

by Ralph Petersvia Strategika
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Related Commentary

Have We Forgotten the Middle East?

by Williamson Murrayvia Strategika
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Hoover Archives poster collection: UK 2756
Featured Commentary

Drones—An Evolution, Not A Revolution, In Warfare

by Mark Moyarvia Strategika
Wednesday, January 1, 2014

In the past five years, drones have acquired the aura of a revolutionary military technology, as a result of spectacular successes in killing Islamist militants.

Hoover Archives poster collection: UK 2756
Background Essay

Drones: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

by Thomas Donnellyvia Strategika
Wednesday, January 1, 2014

In 1907, just four years after the Wright Brothers had flown a few hundred yards across the beaches of North Carolina, H. G. Wells imagined The War in the Air. In Wells’ dark fantasy, the German Empire employs a fleet of airships to preemptively attack the United States, its only potential scientific, industrial, and geopolitical peer. The German target was New York.

Hoover Archives poster collection: UK 2756
Featured Commentary

What, If Anything, Is Strategically New About Weaponized Drones?

by Kenneth Anderson, Benjamin Wittesvia Strategika
Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Since the introduction of weaponized drones as a tool of counterterrorism by the Bush administration not long after 9/11, and especially since their use was ramped up dramatically by the Obama administration, their strategic meaning and value has been sharply debated. The answers vary wildly and often run to extremes, starting with the question of whether they constitute something “new” in armed conflict.

Is our NATO ally Turkey emerging as a regional power that is hostile, neutral, o

“Turkey at the Crossroads”

by Barry Straussvia Strategika
Monday, December 16, 2013

Barry Strauss discusses recent events in Turkey and what they mean for the country’s future and for its standing in international affairs.

Is our NATO ally Turkey emerging as a regional power that is hostile, neutral, o

The Case for Optimism in Turkey

by Williamson Murrayvia Strategika
Thursday, December 12, 2013

Williamson Murray on why Turkey’s prominent role in the Middle East will actually redound to America’s benefit.

Hoover Institution Archives Poster Collection, RU/SU 205
Featured Commentary

Turkey's Struggles Point to the Need for Allies

by Walter Russell Mead via Strategika
Sunday, December 1, 2013

The Republic of Turkey is geographically, politically, and culturally, an odd-looking member in an alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Turkey has a long coastline washed by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean, but it is hundreds of miles from the Atlantic. Turkish democracy for most of NATO’s history could best be described as an aspiration rather than a reality.

Poster Collection, TU 28, Hoover Institution Archives
Background Essay

Turkey at the Crossroads

by Barry Straussvia Strategika
Sunday, December 1, 2013

Turkey is in the midst of an era of dramatic change. That matters in a big way for both American foreign policy and the world, because Turkey is of enormous strategic significance. It is a big and important country. With a population of 74 million people, Turkey is larger than Britain or France, and in area it is slightly larger than Texas. The population is industrious and increasingly wealthy.

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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.

Is there a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

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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.