The Soldier and the State initiated what has become a familiar pattern in Huntington’s long career: His work has not immediately earned brilliant reviews and academic awards but, rather, has garnered mixed reviews and harsh denunciations that ultimately yield to widespread if grudging acceptance. Even Huntington’s enemies unwittingly define and worry about the world in ways and in phrases that originated with Huntington. Roger Hilsman, a specialist on Southeast Asia and a Huntington critic, complained in 1957 that many parts of The Soldier and the State “are noisy with the sounds of sawing and stretching as the facts are forced into the bed that has been prepared for them.” Well, maybe. Nonetheless, The Soldier and the State put the issue of civil-military relations on the map.
The subject that Huntington has more recently put on the map is the “clash of civilizations” that is occurring as Western, Islamic, and Asian systems of thought and government collide. His argument is more subtle than it is usually given credit for, but some of the main points can be summarized.
• The fact that the world is modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic divisions, will not lead to peoples’ everywhere thinking as we do.
• Asia, despite its ups and downs, is expanding militarily and economically. Islam is exploding demographically. The West may be declining in relative influence.
• Culture-consciousness is getting stronger, not weaker, and states or peoples may band together because of cultural similarities rather than because of ideological ones, as in the past.
• The Western belief that parliamentary democracy and free markets are suitable for everyone will bring the West into conflict with civilizations—notably, Islam and the Chinese—that think differently.
• In a multipolar world based loosely on civilizations rather than on ideologies, Americans must reaffirm their Western identity.
The 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon highlight the tragic relevance not just of Huntington’s ideas about a clash of civilizations but of his entire life’s work. Since the 1950s he has argued that American society requires military and intelligence services that think in the most tragic, pessimistic terms. He has worried for decades about how American security has mostly been the result of sheer luck—the luck of geography—and may one day have to be truly earned. He has written that liberalism thrives only when security can be taken for granted—and that in the future we may not have that luxury. And he has warned that the West may one day have to fight for its most cherished values and, indeed, for physical survival against extremists from other cultures who despise our country and who will embroil us in a civilizational war that is real, even if political leaders and polite punditry must call it by another name. While others who hold such views have found both happiness and favor working among like-minded thinkers in the worlds of the corporation, the military, and the intelligence services, Huntington has deliberately remained in the liberal bastion of Ivy League academia, to fight for his ideas on that lonely but vital front.
II.
The history of the intellectual battles surrounding American foreign policy since the early Cold War can be told, to an impressive degree, through Huntington’s seventeen books and scores of articles. Kissinger and Brzezinski have also produced distinguished works of scholarship, but these men will be remembered principally for their service in government—Kissinger as national security advisor under Richard Nixon and secretary of state under Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Brzezinski as national security advisor under Jimmy Carter. Huntington, though he served briefly in the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Carter, is a man of the academy to a far greater extent than his two friends. His ideas emerge from seminars and lectures, not from sudden epiphanies. If he couldn’t teach, he probably couldn’t write. And unlike many professors, he values his undergraduate students more than he does his graduate students. Graduate students, he told me, “are more reluctant to challenge this or that professor” and have often been “captured by the jargon and orthodoxy of the discipline.”
One of his former undergraduates observes, “Other academics want to ram down your throat what they know, and then go on to the next victim. Huntington never dominates classroom discussions, and he listens intensely.” Huntington disdains “rational-choice theory,” the reigning fad in political science, which assumes that human behavior is predictable but which fails to take account of fear, envy, hatred, self-sacrifice, and other human passions that are essential to an understanding of politics. In an age of academic operators he is an old-fashioned teacher who speculates historically and philosophically on the human condition. His former students include Francis Fukuyama, the author of the famous Post Cold War anthem The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and Fareed Zakaria, the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and the current editor of Newsweek International.
You aren’t likely to see Huntington on C-SPAN, let alone on The McLaughlin Group. He is a worse than indifferent public speaker: hunched over, reading laboriously from a text. His status and reputation have come the hard way: through writing books that, though often publicly denounced, have had a pervasive influence among people who count. Although he is the classic insider (a former president of the American Political Science Association and a cofounder of Foreign Policy magazine), he writes as an outsider, someone willing to enrage the very experts who will ultimately judge him. “If a scholar has nothing new to say he should keep quiet,” Huntington wrote in 1959. “The quest for truths is synonymous with intellectual controversy.”
In many ways Samuel Huntington represents a dying breed: someone who combines liberal ideals with a deeply conservative understanding of history and foreign policy. Huntington is a lifelong Democrat. He was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s (and met his wife, Nancy, during the 1956 campaign), a foreign policy advisor to Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s, and one of the authors of Jimmy Carter’s speeches on human rights in the 1970s. This same Huntington, though, is the founder of Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, a redoubt of foreign policy realism that has been financed by a triad of conservative philanthropies: the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation.
When I suggested to Huntington that he is “an old-fashioned Democrat, the kind that no longer exists,” he indulged in a rare display of emotional animation. He snapped in reply, “That’s it—that’s what I am. As Arthur Schlesinger would say, I am a child of Niebuhr.” Reinhold Niebuhr was the leading Protestant theologian of twentieth-century America—a devout Christian who believed that men are sufficiently wicked to require tough methods for the preservation of order. Huntington, an Episcopalian, was attracted to what he describes as Niebuhr’s “compelling combination of morality and practical realism.” Though an ardent Cold Warrior, Niebuhr never succumbed to moral triumphalism, believing that history was more profoundly characterized by irony than by progress. Even if the United States were to win the Cold War, Niebuhr wrote in 1952, this outcome might only cause the nation to overextend itself, dissipating its power in an excess of righteousness. Niebuhr’s tragic sensibility constitutes a thread connecting all of Huntington’s major works. It is the key to Huntington’s definition of conservatism.
In the June 1957 edition of The American Political Science Review, Huntington published a monograph titled “Conservatism as an Ideology.” Liberalism, he wrote, is an ideology of individualism, free markets, liberty, and the rule of law. “Classic conservatism,” in contrast, has no particular vision: It is a rationale, “high and necessary,” for ensuring the survival of liberal institutions. Conservatism, Huntington observed, is the “rational defense of being against mind, of order against chaos.” In England, he explained, Edmund Burke mounted a conservative defense of a “commercial society and a moderate, liberal constitution.” Real conservatism is ab
out conserving what is, rather than crusading abroad for what is not or proposing radical changes at home. In the United States, Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton expounded conservative principles to defend a liberal constitution. “The American political genius,” Huntington wrote, “is manifest not in our ideas but in our institutions.” And in his view, “The greatest need is not so much the creation of more liberal institutions as the successful defense of those which already exist.”
III.
Samuel Huntington was born in 1927 in New York City and grew up in middle-class housing projects in the Astoria section of Queens and in the East Bronx. He was the only child of Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a short-story writer, and he was the grandson of John Sanborn Phillips, the co-editor of the muckraking magazine McClure’s. Huntington was a prodigy. He went to Yale from Peter Stuyvesant High School at age sixteen and graduated with “exceptional distinction” after two and a half years. He served in the U.S. Army and then earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He believes that the strain of writing his Ph.D. dissertation over the course of four grueling months in 1950 is what precipitated the diabetes he suffers, which has necessitated six daily blood tests and three daily insulin injections ever since. (He interrupted our conversation to test his blood sugar level and to jab himself with a syringe. After looking at the blood sugar number, he said, “Good, I can have a salad and a glass of wine for lunch.”) His doctoral dissertation, “Clientalism,” carried on in the muckraking tradition of his grandfather. It described how federal agencies, notably the Interstate Commerce Commission, get taken over by the very industries that they are supposed to regulate. “We were all liberals, and Franklin Roosevelt was God,” Huntington told me. “I couldn’t imagine that anyone thought differently.” Psychologically, Huntington’s world at this time bore the imprint of the New Deal. Still, Harvard manifested an occasional irregularity. “There was one student who vigorously opposed collective bargaining, the minimum wage—all the conventional wisdom, in fact. It was quite a shock for all of us.” This student, William Rehnquist, eventually left for Stanford Law School.
Two towering intellectual figures then ruled Harvard’s Department of Government: Carl Friedrich and William Yandell Elliott. Friedrich, the more liberal of the two, had helped to write the constitution for the Federal Republic of Germany (that is, the old West Germany). Huntington gravitated toward Elliott, an Oxford-educated southerner and a conservative philosopher with much experience in Washington. Elliott believed in a vigorous stance against the Soviet Union and loathed moral relativism. “Elliott would travel to Cambridge once a week from Washington to meet with his graduate students,” Huntington recalled. Among those profoundly influenced by Elliott was Huntington’s contemporary Henry Kissinger. “We would wait in [Elliott’s] outer office as the minutes went by, incensed that he was running late because of the time he took mentoring this one student, whom Elliott had identified as showing particular promise. Then the door would open and this chubby student would walk out.” Kissinger dedicated his first book to Elliott: A World Restored (1957), which described Metternich’s creation of a stable, post-Napoleonic world order. “Elliott was no great theorist,” Kissinger told me, “but a good teacher is someone who sees talents in you that you didn’t know you had. After I had written a paper on Kant, Elliott told me, ‘You have a fine mind, but now you have to read novelists, like Dostoyevsky.’ And so I read Dostoyevsky. This is how he helped his students grow.”
Sweeping and icy statements dominate Huntington’s books. These blunt judgments contrast sharply with Huntington’s unimposing physical presence and unaffected demeanor. He looks like a character from a John Cheever story, someone you might forget that you had ever met. He blinks. He plays nervously with keys. He is balding, and stares intently at his palms as he talks. The fragile exterior conceals a flinty core. “Sam is very shy,” Brzezinski says. “He’s not one of those guys who can shoot the breeze at a bar. But get him into a debate and he is confident and tenacious.” A former student says, “Sam is a geek with a backbone of steel.” Another of his students demurs: “Sam isn’t a geek. He’s a quintessential Victorian man of honor—very quiet and contained, yet extraordinarily tough when the occasion demands.”
In the early 1980s, walking home one night from a Cambridge dinner party with his wife and Francis Keppel, the retired dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Huntington was approached by three young men who demanded his money. “What?” Huntington asked. “We’re not fucking around, we want your cash,” one of the young men said before attacking him. Huntington repulsed him and wrestled him to the ground, calling for help. Then he took on a second, who was on top of Keppel. Ultimately the three men ran off. Huntington did not volunteer this story: I learned about it from one of his former students, and then had to get the details from Nancy. When I asked Huntington himself about it, he said, “A week before there had been an article in one of the newsmagazines recommending that you shouldn’t fight with a mugger. But my immediate impulse was to fight back.”
IV.
From the outset Huntington’s thinking has been focused on the big issues of the modern world; he was always interested in applying intellectual rigor to real-life concerns. Henry Kissinger’s first book was largely inspired by early-nineteenth-century European history. Huntington’s first book was inspired by what was going on in America when he was a graduate student. As Robert D. Putnam, of Harvard, has written in an essay on Huntington, The Soldier and the State was inspired by President Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, in 1951. MacArthur’s political generalship had disturbed Huntington, in part because it undermined the idea of a professional military. The military—and the U.S. Senate, another conservative institution—would later prove to be the most effective bulwarks against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assault on America’s liberal values. The Soldier and the State was no apologia for militarism, as some simplistic critiques have claimed, but, rather, a penetrating analysis of the relationship between the military and society.
The most telling passage in The Soldier and the State is in the preface, where the twenty-nine-year-old Huntington came to a conclusion that formed the template of an entire career. On the one hand, he conceded that “actual personalities, institutions, and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories.” But on the other, he argued passionately that “neat logical categories are necessary if man is to think profitably about the real world in which he lives and to derive from it lessons for broader application and use.” A scholar, in order to say anything significant, is “forced to generalize.” The true measure of a theory is not that it accounts for all the relevant facts but that it accounts for those facts “better than any other theory.” Without abstraction and simplification there can be no understanding, Huntington maintained. Those who concentrate on the imperfections of a theory, without coming up with a better alternative, are helping no one. Thus begins a book of relentless, empirical generalizations.
From the end of the War of 1812 through the attack on Pearl Harbor, Huntington wrote, Americans had little reason to worry about foreign threats. National security was taken for granted—an inheritance of geographical circumstance, rather than a creation of wise policy. With neither security nor economic expansion on a resource-rich continent in doubt, the liberal ideology that Americans acquired from their English forebears could be firmly established without contradiction. In the absence of any threat to the nation’s liberal institutions, there was little need to defend them, and thus little need for real conservatism. Conservatives like Hamilton and Adams could thrive only because during the first years of the Republic it was surrounded by French, English, and Spanish territory, and was hampered by the British fleet. But for many decades thereafter no foreign threats existed on any significant scale, and the “lo
w view of man” cultivated by conservatives entered a state of dormancy. Indeed, when President Woodrow Wilson read in The Baltimore Sun in 1915 that his general staff was preparing pragmatically for the possibility of war with Germany, he was “trembling and white with passion,” and insisted to his aides that if the story was true, the staff officers should be fired. “Liberalism,” Huntington observed, “does not understand and is hostile to military institutions and the military function.”
Of course, the early twentieth century did witness a brief rebirth of Hamiltonian realism and interventionism, identified with the aggressive foreign policy of President Theodore Roosevelt. But the aversion to power politics was so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that Wilson’s foreign policy failures in the aftermath of World War I led to “abandoning intervention altogether and returning to liberal isolationism.” With no one left to carry the torch of Hamilton, whose realist philosophy could reconcile the military to the rest of society, the American military in the interwar period withdrew into itself. It did so just as it was undergoing intensive professionalization and specialization, near the climax of the Industrial Revolution.
Huntington reminded us that the modern officer is a professional, whose job is the management of violence and whose client is the state. Although war is as old as humankind, a professional military essentially began with the Napoleonic Wars. The Founding Fathers put their uniforms on and off as the occasion demanded, and saw little distinction between soldiers and civilians. The Constitution does not provide for “objective civilian control” of government, which came about, again, because of the accident of geography: Without a foreign threat, our standing army long remained small and politically weak, and could be reduced in size after every war. But the advance of technology that culminated in World War II, with Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb, meant that geography was no longer a barrier. Security might at times have to take precedence over liberal values.
The Return of Marco Polo's World Page 17