"No End of a Lesson"

By Paul Kennedy

The quotation is, of course, from Rudyard Kipling, the poet of patriotism, of purpose, of great dignity at a time of loss. Both Kipling and Winston Churchill were audible in the extraordinary speech that President Bush gave last week. When Kipling wrote those words, 100 years ago, the British Empire had been humbled in South Africa by a small group of Boer fighters who hated the overweening presence of Queen Victoria's realm. They were scruffy, hairy faced, profoundly religious in their battle against Anglo-Saxon materialism and extremely hard to find and destroy. It took no less than 300,000 men from Britain and the other dominions to overwhelm the Afrikaaner resistance in a three-year campaign. "We have had no end of a lesson," Kipling warned. British military forces were not equipped for guerrilla warfare. Intelligence was lacking. Stock markets swooned. Foreign states expressed regret but privately enjoyed the British discomfiture. The empire was compelled to rethink its strategy, its priorities, its trade-offs and its future. It was badly shaken.

Does this sound familiar? We too have had no end of a lesson, and we too may be compelled to rethink and retool our Grand Strategy. This involves weaving together all those elements of national strength (military, economic, financial, social) to preserve and enhance the entire people in both war and peace. This is hard, but not impossible. On any consideration of America's relative power in the world today, all the signs are favorable. Our defense spending equals 36% of the world's total military spending. We engage in 40% of the world's Internet traffic and produce 70% of Nobel prizewinners. We are probably more powerful relative to other states than any other nation has been since the Roman Empire. But though we had a Grand Strategy that saw us successfully through the cold war, we have been without one since it ended. Now it is time to find another.

Where, then, are our possible weaknesses? The first may lie in the military. If the future of warfare between the U.S. and its foes is no longer a reprise of the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Midway but something more insidious, then the almost $300 billion we have been spending each year at the Pentagon's request might have little utility. Ironically, at the beginning of this year the Hart-Rudman report on security challenges to the U.S. very clearly identified terrorist attacks on the American homeland as something we were not well prepared for. The report should get a lot of respect now. We also need to rethink our system of intelligence gathering. If we are to understand and anticipate the terrorist world, we need to make serious investments in "human" intelligence--agents in place, stronger links with foreign intelligence services, many more agents trained in foreign languages. Our new Grand Strategy will also need to rethink how we use international agencies to buttress our goals. We have been skeptical about their utility, from the Kyoto global-warming protocol to the United Nations, but they also deserve improvement, fresh resources, better personnel and enhanced purpose. Above all, a shell-shocked America will need to understand that a Grand Strategy to preserve this richly varied democracy is not just a wartime matter but something that has to be pursued in peacetime too.

If the foundation is in place, all that is needed is a leadership that can bring together the parts in a purposeful, wise and calibrated way. The President's speech gave cause for hope. We have had no end of a lesson. But it is the mark of a great nation that it can learn a lesson, pick itself up and continue the fight.

Paul Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers