Walter Russel Mead on Sun Tzu

Since I mentioned it, here's an example of the kind of argument that only military historians make, and only conservative military historians at that:

The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality. It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

We believe in reason, and reason is predictable. We claim that the world was made by forces which we can a) understand, and b) harness. This is a matter of gospel in the modern world. A conservatives, faced with an intractable problem which flies in the face of the creed, shrugs his shoulders and says, "it is what it is." A progressive cannot, for that is giving up on those who deserve his aid, and that is the sin by which the world is corrupted.