Eliot Cohen is The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics

Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war.

His new book, The Strategist, is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen’s distrust of what he calls “purely linear descriptions of history where it’s all one thing or another”, he’s unambiguously in the latter category.

So who are the great strategists in history from whom we should learn about war and politics? For Cohen, Churchill ranks high, as does Lincoln. And how do contemporary American “statesmen” like Hegseth and Trump compare? “It’s like you’re dealing with two different species,” Cohen dryly notes.

There’s one question I half regret not asking. Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, is full of stories about people that the forever wars broke. Like the angry ex-Marine who was transformed into a leading neo-Nazi. So perhaps I should have asked Cohen about the human costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. If 21st-century America is to avoid more overseas tragedies, must the strategist also be a moralist? History isn’t so linear, he would probably have replied. As he says at the beginning of The Strategist: “you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you.”

FURTHER READING

•   Eliot A. Cohen, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics (Princeton University Press)

•   His weekly podcast with Eric Edelman, Shield of the Republic

•   Janet Reitman on The Inheritance — the five-act American tragedy Cohen declines to sign up to: listen or watch

•   Elliot Ackerman on The Fifth Act, another five-act tragedy of how the Afghan war ended: listen or watch

•   Jacob Weisberg on Profiles in Cowardice, which takes a much harder line on George W. Bush than Cohen: listen or watch

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He will not call the whole thing a blunder, and he explains why. Asked straight out whether he shares Janet Reitman’s view that American foreign policy after 9/11 was one long miscalculation, he declined to comment on a book he hasn’t read and then gave the historian’s answer. A complicated mix. A great deal of miscalculation, which nobody can deny, and also some things that were successes. His objection is methodological as much as political: judgments made at the time always get amended by longer perspectives, and he dislikes purely linear