Hello. Until now, we've been talking about the progress of war, the progress of battle as this pretty linear process. That is, one that it meant an increased aggregation, increased complexity, increased dependence on logistics, et cetera, that we have all talked about. And we have seen that this kind of progress helped change the kind of political authority in the West whether we're talking about states or whether we're talking about nationalism, and what occurs inside those states and nations such as citizenship and democracy and equality, etc. We are going to take a break in a sense and the break comes pretty easily about 1945. And here what we're going to talk about is how this Western way of war, this progress of war that I have been describing, in a sense, may be at its limit. That beginning in the mid-20th century and certainly into the 21st century, we might see that this kind of progression, that this kind of aggregation, that this process which gave the West such a dominant position in the world for roughly 500 years may be disappearing. So one of the paradoxes of war in this case is that as we go forward in time, as we become as we get further and further into the future, the past may become less and less relevant except that we might be seeing a return to a true past, almost away from this war of armies, or war societies toward something we might better call war of the warrior, but point two. So I'm going to try to do this by looking at what I call the rise of the rest. You'll remember a couple weeks back, we talked about the imposition of Western power on the rest of the world and the extent to which war played a massive amount of influence on this. Now, we're going to talk about the limits of conquest. We talked about conquests being this overwhelming force that clearly by the mid-20th century had put Europe, or the West, or the United States in a very, very strong position. Well, we're going to look at what the limits of this are and again, by looking at these limits, looking at the limits of what we call the Western way of war. Again, one of the possible paradoxes, that even as it has become more deadly, even if it has come to possess things like nuclear weapons, its ability to be used, in a sense, has become more and more limited. And we're going to look specifically at what we might call guerrilla war. The more popular term now is insurgency. I like guerrilla in part because it comes from the Spanish guerilla. It's first used talking about the popular uprisings, against Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula, the Napoleonic Wars. And that was more or less the name preferred term until insurgency sort of became much more important. Insurgency is a broader term, but I think we can collapse, in a sense, some of this discussion. We can talk about whether we want to call it guerrilla war or whether we want to take call it insurgency, whether we want to call it asymmetric war. I want to argue that this can give us a sense of what these limits of the Western way of war. And I'm going to focus a large part on the case of Vietnam. Now, this is not exactly a guerrilla war. It is in part an insurgency. It's also a war between two states, mainly the United States and the Republic of North Vietnam. It is, in a sense, it's got a combination. What I want to suggest that the analysis of Vietnam can give us a very, very clear view, again, on these disadvantages of the Western way of war. Now you may ask why Vietnam, as opposed to Iraq, let's say, or Afghanistan. Certainly from the point of view of the United States, these are much more relative in the 21st century. I want to focus on Vietnam because the story is better understood now. We have enough distance between us and Vietnam that we can look at what some of the problems were of American strategy, look at the limits of American strategy, try to understand those limits within a sociological purpose. I think, as I will make clear at the end, that many of these lessons would apply to Iraq or Afghanistan, but given that we're still, the story in a sense has not been finished. The story has not been told. Certainly I'm filming on June 17th of 2014, and at this point in Iraq, the story certainly has not been finished and we have no idea how it's going to turn out. So we're going to look to our historical element with some obvious references to the contemporary state, and what I want to do is to review first the possible reasons for the Western success in conquest. So if we can isolate what those reasons were that we're so powerful in determining the power of the West, that define the power of war as practiced by the West, if we can define that, then we can see, well, what has changed? What are contemporary limitations for that kind of power? And the first kind of power is technology. The new armaments technology of the West and transportation made the coordination of the whole thing possible. That is that the West, in a sense, possessed a monopoly over a means of violence, whether that was gunpowder, whether that And again, of course, other societies had access to gunpowders, other societies had access to weapons, but generally, especially in the 19th century, the West was unique in having a set of killing technology as it were, and certainly in the 20th century, it had a monopoly over the means of controlling over this kind of violence. Perhaps the most important monopoly over technology was the monopoly over global transport. That is, if we look at the last 500 years, we see that the West, again very broadly defined to include, strangely enough, a post-Meiji Japan, was the only power that was able to, in a sense, impose itself on the rest of the world. Only the West have the technology finely exemplified by the aircraft carrier, that meant that it could take violence very far away from its home, in a sense export it somewhere. So we see this monopoly over technology, specifically over this monopoly over transport. We also talked about what might be called cultural resources. Now this is, this is a very tricky area, as my office hours I hope will make, will make clear. When we talk about culture, it's very easy to be talking about superiority. It's very easy to be talking about better cultures. It's very easy to be talking about advanced cultures. I don't think we need to do that. I think what we can do is to identify particular aspects that seem to be common to all these Western militaries, to this conquest experience, that have to do with the nature of war, particularly as defined in the West, and try to see that the West, in a sense, did have an advantage on the East. These resources include a type of political organization, the creation of these nation states, in part a product of this war, an institutional or cultural an ideological capacity, let's say, for discipline and obedience, a focus on the objective and organizational focus on the objective, a focusing of resources, and unity. A whole set of plethora of characteristics that would be difficult to explain why one region of the world might have had more than others. Let's just take it for now and say, at a particular moment in time, these kinds of resources, which might be not very useful for other things, but are very, very useful for the imposition of violence, they seem to thrive in a particular place and time. And that made it much easier for that place to conquer the, the world. We also have a sense of competition. That is, that there was a competition in the West that fueled this kind of war. We've talked a little bit about this, that if we want to put, and it's very dangerous, always very dangerous to put any kind of evolutionary lenses on a historical or sociological process. But if we think about it in a sense, it would make sense that given the micro-environment of the West for about 1500 years and the importance of violence in surviving in that micro-environment, institutions and organizations would be selected, in a sense, that were able to practice that kind of violence. That means that when that environment breaks open, those in those in those those institutions and those organizations in that environment are particularly capable in practicing this kind of violence, so they come out in a sense with this, if you will, evolutionary advantage. Moreover, what we find is in many of these cases, the West in its process of conquest is helped by local allies. Whether that it's in the case of Central America, of Mexico America in the 16th century, whether it's the case of India in the 18th century, whether it's the case of Africa in the 19th century, whether it's the case against the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century. There are always local allies available that are able to assist the West in this process of conquest. Finally, I think this is important, there is a social element or social legitimacy of conquest. For many years, there was a social acceptance of the costs of conquest. There was a social acceptance of the legitimacy of conquest, of the mission. as, Kipling put it, the White Man's burden. So, there was a support for this kind of conquest. Regimes did not necessarily, obviously there was anti-imperialist movement, there were pacifist movements before, but in general, regimes were relatively politically free to focus on these kinds of conquest without having to sell them to the, the population. So in short, the West, again broadly defined. Again, think about it. This small part of the planet aligned with this small part of the planet, and beginning in the late 19th century with this small part of the planet, essentially conquered the rest. And we have to figure out why. And again, just to summarize, the West, broadly defined, had these technological, cultural if you will, or organizational, political advantages, but, but when these conditions go away, then that capacity to impose one's rules makes go away. So what we need to look in the 20th and 21st century is how these advantages that were so central in a particular kind of war did not necessarily transcend the changes in, war. This tells us that the best way to understand the how of empire is to analyze when it didn't work, and to analyze why the empire didn't work, why the continuation of that conquest doesn't work, why those limits on this kind of war exists. The best way to do it is to go back and say, well, what made it so successful? How can we can understand its success? And then let's understand how when the environment changes, the capacity of those same qualities to produce success are rapidly reduced. [BLANK_AUDIO]
