The Pact: An Exegesis

When I write something like "The Pact," I often feel as is I'm indulging a personal need: a yearning for an unrealizable fantasy world populated by superhumans and heroes. There's some truth to that. My protagonists are usually larger than life. I prefer to leave the dreary musings upon the fancies and failings of ordinary folk to the "literary" set.

All the same, a story such as "The Pact" expresses an important insight, one that today's gray heads of international relations and diplomacy will not suffer to be mentioned in their presence:

In relations between nation-states,
Power and the will to use it are all that matter.

Statesmen dispute this at their peril.

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Power -- the capacity to compel, prohibit, and expropriate by the use of force and / or intimidation -- is the antipodes of freedom.

It's not as widely known as it should be that the Founding Fathers were extremely reluctant to permit the federal government a standing army. Standing armies had been for centuries the bane of the common people of Europe. They were seldom used in "defense of the realm," but rather as instruments of oppression and depredation against the very populations that were taxed to fund them. When Article I of the Constitution was finalized, the major reactions against it, from within the Convention and from persons outside privy to its deliberations, was that allowing Congress both the taxing power and the power to maintain a standing army constituted an obvious threat to the people's newly won liberty.

Hearken to Patrick Henry, orating to the Virginia Convention:

Congress, by the power of taxation, by that of raising an army, and by the control of the militia, has the sword in one hand and the purse in the other. Shall we be safe without either? Congress have an unlimited power over both; they are entirely given up by us. Let him candidly tell me where and when did freedom exist, when the sword and the purse were given up by the people? Unless a miracle in human affairs interposed, no nation ever retained liberty after giving up the sword and the purse.

Yet in a world partitioned into quarrelsome nation-states, each poised and ready to encroach upon the territory and prerogatives of the others, no security is possible without a substantial military establishment. Indeed, the much-discussed condition we call sovereignty is a consequence of the possession of such an establishment. A nation without the power to enforce its borders is not and cannot be sovereign. It exists solely at the sufferance of other nation, and will cease to exist upon the instant another nation perceives advantage in molesting it.

So long as nation-states exist, there will be standing armies, and navies, and air forces, and strategic deterrents, and war colleges to train their commanders, and intelligence establishments to inform them, and squabbles over just how much military the nation needs and can afford. A nation whose people are largely free and want to remain so must accept that, or confront the loss of all freedom to the first predatory nation under whose lustful gaze it comes.

Military fiction author Tom Kratman, in his recent novel Countdown: H Hour, put it most memorably:

"People band into nations, real nations -- not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations -- to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that."

There's more wisdom in those seventy-six words than in the entire Congressional Record.

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If we go solely by the size and capabilities of its military establishment, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, indeed in all of history. But capability is not enough; it must be mated to the willingness to use it when the occasion demands it.

When I had President Stephen Graham Sumner say:

“The United States has seldom played the diplomacy game as well as your nation, Ambassador....We have this problem, you see. We’re habitually honest with others, even when those others have displayed no penchant for honesty themselves....But in the usual case, once we’ve discovered that we’d been lied to, we ceased to talk. I dare say you’d rather we kept talking, wouldn’t you, Ambassador? Considering the alternatives, that is?”

...he was articulating one of our severest deficiencies in international dealings: our desire to accept the other party as sincere in all his representations. We don't rise above that desire nearly as often as we should. In a typical diplomatic interchange between nations, the sincerity level seldom rises above 25% and never reaches 50%. Yet our diplomats habitually take the other fellow's word as reliable and sincere.

[If you'd like to read more about Sumner and his rise to power, go here.]

That desire to believe the other guy good-hearted has been our undoing on several occasions. We'd probably have fought half as many wars had our diplomats managed to pull off their rose-colored glasses at the appropriate times. That includes those occasions when the diplomat in question was the president of the United States.

A provocation such as the one described in "The Pact" is a probe: an exercise undertaken specifically for the purpose of eliciting a response to be analyzed. The aggressor nation seeks to gauge its target's willingness to court open conflict. If the will is there, the probe is unlikely to be repeated; if not, further, deeper probes are guaranteed, possibly culminating in a full-scale war.

“Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” -- V. I. Lenin

Whatever his failings as an economist, Lenin understood the dynamic that governs international relations.

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Along with the view of international relations I've explicated above, I had another goal in mind with "The Pact:" to depict the conduct I want to see in a president of the United States when confronted with an aggressive probe. In recent years, only John F. Kennedy has exhibited firmness anywhere near that -- and he had to suffer a number of painful international humiliations to convince him that a strong stance was necessary if the U.S. was to thwart the threat posed by Soviet nuclear-armed IRBMs in Cuba.

A president with Stephen Graham Sumner's grasp of reality and a strength of will to match it would be a hero of a sort we haven't had since long before Kennedy -- and Americans are starving to death for a genuine national hero. The parade of sports poseurs and celebrities "famous for being famous" has failed to nourish us, as we should have realized.

In my view, any man who accepts the duties and responsibilities of Commander-In-Chief has made a pact with the nation that elevated him: to represent its interests fearlessly and in full confidence that the government, the military, and the people are wholly behind him. Many a president has failed not just one of those criteria but all of them.

Yet it was not always so. Before World War II, even men who disputed the wisdom of this or that international sally, or of our entry into this or that conflict, would close ranks behind the government while negotiations progressed, and behind our forces when a decision to go to war was reached. The presidents of those times could wage both diplomacy and war in confidence -- justified confidence.

May it be so again...and may we have presidents worthy of such wholehearted support.