Although attributed to Winston Churchill, the famous aphorism that “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources,” was actually first coined by the South African born Israeli statesman Abba Eban. Whether that sentiment best describes what is happening in Europe or whether it is another famous misquotation from Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue in his History of the Peloponnesian War, that the “Strong … Continue reading Why Does Europe Insist on Being Weak?

Predictions are extraordinarily difficult; particularly when they’re about the future! I drew this tongue-in-cheek conclusion in my PhD dissertation. But I wasn’t attempting to be funny. I was making the point that in spite of the near impossibility of making such predictions, daily we are overwhelmed with opinions published by futurists, geopolitical analysts, and countless self-proclaimed experts. There was a sentence that I used to … Continue reading Geopolitical Predictions

When I was younger I could not imagine that someone might actually choose to be ignorant. Because of my good fortune in having been raised in a household that valued education, choosing not to know something was unthinkable to me. And yet, large swathes of Western society have done so. And even more shockingly, done so with determination! In Charles Dickens’ heartwarming tale of moral … Continue reading Choosing Ignorance

Most of us are familiar with this derogatory term and I am using it so that I do not have to mention the current chief executive of the USA. The media universe is filled with pundits who spend barrels of ink and zillions of electrons explaining why this policy or that policy has been enacted in the US today — even though yesterday the opposite … Continue reading Mansplaining

Military leaders have frequently been accused of constantly preparing to fight the last war. I wonder if NATO is not guilty of that sentiment today. Since its inception, the political-military alliance has had as its primary mission, the deterrence of aggression against Europe by the Soviet Union, led by Russia and since 1991, Russia alone. In mid-May of this year in a post titled Military … Continue reading Fighting the Last War

For those readers who don’t speak French, my title refers to what came to be known in the French military as The Young School and referred to a strategic concept developed during the 19th century (1870-1905) by the French Navy. As I described in my book Strategia, it got its name from the fact that it embraced leading edge technology to replace the use of large … Continue reading La Jeune École : The Siren Song of Advanced Technology

Sir Niall Ferguson (not related to the person after which the law is named) is a Scots professor who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University and has studied and been a professor at many of the world’s most prestigious universities including, Harvard, the London School of Economics, New York University, Oxford and Hamburg University. He is an economic/international historian and currently lives in … Continue reading Ferguson’s Law

Recently The British PM The Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer sated: “My first duty as Prime Minister is to keep the British people safe.” Several people have lauded the PM’s comment and wondered aloud why we never hear something like that from a Canadian PM. All I can say is, “thank goodness we never hear a Canadian PM say something like that.” Safety is NOT … Continue reading Unintended Consequences

Everyone thinks they know what strategy is. But the definition of strategy seems to be malleable. A bit like pushing on a badly under inflated balloon. If you press on one portion of the balloon, another portion rises. The limited amount of trapped air simply shifts. In the many various definitions of strategy, there is inevitably some amount of commonality of terms, but no two … Continue reading Strategic Patience

Most readers will recognized Carl von Clausewitz’s most often cited statement that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This declaration, often misinterpreted — even by famous military thinkers like chiefs of the German General Staff — is pregnant with meaning. Today, I would like to share an incident that I have thought of regularly in the nearly four decades since it occurred. … Continue reading Military Thinking and Politics