Autumn 2012 Glenn Fellows at the Embassy of the Netherlands

From left to right, front row:  Maddie Fireman, Paige MacMorland.  Second row:  Katie Colburn, Maggie Murdock, Marissa Cooper.  Third row:  Joe Sadek (program coordinator), Amber Seira, Erin Moeller, Leah Apothaker, Isaac Choi.  Fourth row:  Jade Holmes, Adam Kase, Grace Fry.  Fifth row:  Ken Kolson (WAIP director), Robert Whiteman (European Union), Cameron Griffith (France), Tim Wood (United Kingdom), Julia Koppius (the Netherlands). 

Glenn Fellows Meet with President Gee

From left to right, first row:  Joe Sadek, WAIP program coordinator; Katie Colburn; Paige MacMorland; Dr. Gee; Maddie Fireman.  Second row:  Ken Kolson, WAIP program director; Amber Seira; Marissa Cooper.  Third row:  Maggie Murdock, Isaac Choi, Jade Holmes, Leah Apothaker.  Top row:  Adam Kase, Erin Moeller.  Photo by Christine Kontra.

Glenn Fellows at Bryce Harlow Advocacy Forum

From left to right:  Erin Moeller, Gianna Rendano (Duquesne University), Amber Seira, Andrea Peralta (Lynn University), Adam Kase, Maddie Fireman (in front), Ryan Sewicke (Roger Williams University, behind), Yanbeli Gomez (SUNY Plattsburgh), featured speaker Scott Salmon (United States Steel Corporation), Katie Colburn, Jade Holmes, Paige MacMorland (in front), Ken Kolson (Director, Washington Office of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, behind), Maggie Murdock, Marissa Cooper (in front), Isaac Choi (behind), Leah Apothaker (in front), Mark Dalhouse (president of the Washington Internship Institute, behind), Joe Sadek, WAIP program coordinator.  Photo by Linda Dooley, president of the Bryce Harlow Foundation.

Turkey on the World Stage (reprise)

Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Four years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar that is now PUBAFRS 4020, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking and removing their missiles and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not particularly Arabic), and some European (though not especially Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

Finally, in October, 2012, there is much talk of the civil war in Syria creating instability throughout the Middle East, and Turkey may be the first case in point.

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

November 12, 2011 update: Soner Cagaptay has a column in the Washington Post on U.S.-Turkish relations.

November 3, 2012 update:  Anthony Faiola reports in today's Post that Turkey's economic boom seems to be petering out, and that problems caused by events in neighboring Syria have put new pressures on Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Guns of August (reprise)

When I was a high-school sophomore, I was assigned on the basis of standardized testing to Advanced Placement social studies. After suffering for a year—I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate primary resources or to contribute to seminar discussions—I bailed out of AP. Unfortunately, that meant that I had missed the standard Plato-to-NATO narrative of Western Civilization that the mainstream kids had taken in tenth grade. As a result, my knowledge of European history remains spotty to this day. What were the Wars of the Roses all about? Who was Albert Dreyfus, anyway? And when, exactly, was the Italian Risorgimento? I have to look these things up every time.

At about the time I was seceding from Western Civ, Barbara Tuchman was putting the finishing touches on The Guns of August, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1962. I have imagined ever since that the book might offer a painless way of addressing some of the deficiencies resulting from my misspent youth. The Guns of August has been on my reading list for a very long time.

Now, a half-century later, I have done my duty. All in good time. The Guns of August turns out to be an extraordinarily good read, as President Kennedy recognized while it was sitting atop the best-sellers lists fifty years ago. Kennedy gave copies to members of his cabinet and top military advisors. There are those who say that Tuchman’s analysis of the first month of the Great War influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It’s hard to know which of the book’s many virtues Kennedy valued the most, but for me it’s Tuchman’s vivid account of how military goals are routinely undermined by the random blundering and miscommunication that inevitably occur in the fog of war.

For example, Tuchman relates the story of the Goeben and Breslau, two of a handful of German warships that happened to be in the Mediterranean in early August, 1914. When Germany attacked France, the Goeben and Breslau got busy shelling French ports in Northern Africa. The British naturally assumed that the German ships would worry about getting trapped in the Mediterranean and so would make a break for the Strait of Gibraltar and the open seas in the event of a British declaration of war against Germany. And so, when Admiral Milne cabled London to report the position of the German ships at 37.44 North, 7:56 East, Prime Minister Winston Churchill telegraphed back: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” Unfortunately, Tuchman writes, “when reporting their position, Admiral Milne had neglected to say which direction the Goeben and Breslau were steaming. Churchill naturally assumed they were heading west with further evil intent upon the French.”

In fact, the ships were heading east, and so Admiral Milne was halfway between Malta and Greece when he was informed by the Admiralty that Austria had declared war on England. Milne abruptly gave up the chase to avoid an encounter with any Austrian fleet that might emerge from its base in the Adriatic. “Unfortunately the word [i.e., the cable from Admiralty] was an error by a clerk who released the prearranged code telegram for hostilities with Austria by mistake. . . . One more opportunity was lost.” That meant, to make a long story short, that the Goeben and Breslau were now free to proceed to Constantinople, where the Germans negotiated an alliance with Turkey. From there, the German ships moved into the Black Sea, blocking Russian access to the Mediterranean and provoking them into declaring war on Turkey.

Then there were the French, whose military was smitten with the idea that effective warfare consisted of two things: élan, or the will to conquer, and a policy of relentless offense, even to the point of neglecting national defense. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was among those who recognized the absurdity of such a plan of campaign, but “it had to be accepted because there was no time to make another. . . . The momentum of predetermined plans had,” Tuchman concludes, “scored another victory.”

But none of Tuchman’s stories about the futility of master planning is better than the one about the German plan to attack France by sending an enormous army through the heart of Belgium, which was a neutral country whose security was guaranteed by the five Great Powers, including both France and England (not to mention Germany herself!). The great disadvantage of this plan was that it would draw England into the war on the side of Belgium and France. And yet, the Belgian route had been the Germans’ game plan for many years.

And for the Chief of the German General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the predetermined plan was the only thing that mattered. And so, on August 1, 1914, the night before the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm (pictured above), finally recognizing the grave risks inherent in the default plan of attack against France, announced to General Moltke that he wanted him to turn his armies east, initiating a Russo-German war instead. Moltke, we are told by Tuchman, “refused point-blank.”

Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.

Tuchman’s book destroys a number of shibboleths along the way, including the idea, prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century, that free trade had made the leading economies so dependent on one another that major, continent-wide wars had become unsustainable, which meant in turn that 20th-century wars were likely to be short and to turn on a small number of decisive battles. No such luck! Finally, The Guns of August excelled at demonstrating that military men stubbornly refused to appreciate the significance of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means; in other words, they underrated the importance of politics.

In addition to influencing actual decision makers in the Kennedy Administration, The Guns of August profoundly affected the academic study of public policy by shaping the thinking of a young scholar named Graham T. Allison, who came up with a model of decision making based on Tuchman’s insights, one that he posited as an alternative to the notion of unitary states basing policy on a perfectly rational calculation of costs and benefits.

Allison’s Organizational Process model of decision making stressed the importance of pre-established routines in limiting policy options to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Organizations, Allison argued, are “blunt instruments,” which is why they cannot be expected to come up with nuanced policies, and why the decisions taken by their leaders are “frequently anticlimactic” and not necessarily rational in any conventional sense; they are about as rational as the curriculum-planning decisions of a fifteen-year-old.

Autumn 2012 Glenn Fellows Visit SCOTUS

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is covered with scaffolding, so Joe Sadek took a picture with the Capitol dome in the background.  First row, from left to right:  Maddie Fireman, Marissa Cooper, Paige MacMorland, Katie Colburn, Maggie Murdock.  Back row:  Amber Seira, Erin Moeller, Isaac Choi, Grace Fry, Jade Holmes, Adam Kase, Leah Apothaker.

Autumn 2012 Glenn Fellows at the White House

Bending over, from left to right: Paige MacMorland, Marissa Cooper, Isaac Choi.

Standing, from left to right: Adam Kase, Amber Seira, Erin Moeller, Leah Apothaker, Jade Holmes, Katie Colburn.