warrior philosophers

8/2/2019 Warrior Philosophers

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On the beautiful fall morning of 9/11

2001, a new age of mass-terror

began. And like the “shot heard

around the world”, 9/11 introduced a new

era of war, a turning point in the unfolding of

history that will, in hindsight, mark the

strategic pivot that defined the eventual

triumph, or demise, of the West.

While it was a moment of strategic

surprise, 9/11 was an event that was

brewing for some time. Its origins were

clearly articulated several years before when

the visionary of that moment’s violent chaos,

Osama bin Laden, declared war on America.

At first, we did little in response to his bold

declaration. Like ‘the sound of one hand

clapping’, 9/11 was the unmistakable sound

of war being waged by only one party. And

so his war came to our shores, without our

full participation, many years after he began

to mobilize his army of shadow warriors and

armed them in the art of jihad.

The war on terror that began in earnest

on September 11 is a continuation of the

long war against the West and its values

that has been raging, in one theater or

another, since the Persians sought to crush

the democratic spirit of Ancient Greece – an

ancient conflict between freedom and

tyranny that gave birth to the brief

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INTELLIGENCE AND WARNING AMERICA

By Barry Zellen, IT and Security Correspondent

WARRIOR PHILOSOPHERS

TO THE RESCUE



renaissance of Periclean Athens, where the

very idea of the democratic West, so distinct

from the tyrannical East, emerged.

In the ages to follow, Alexander; then the

Romans; and for two centuries amid the

millennium-long Dark Ages, the Crusaders;

and later the Renaissance and early modern

strategic thinkers of Europe; and now finally

ourselves, have all sought to inherit the spirit

of the West, and defend the values so clearly

articulated, during Periclean Athens, in the

hope that its greatness would become ourgreatness, and its vision of an order based

on democratic politics, free market

commerce, and a rich mosaic of secular

cultural expression, would become our

vision of order. This is the vision for which

we are now fighting, from Kandahar to

Baghdad to Madrid.

On September 11, 2001, the opening

shots in what some have called the Fourth

World War – the Cold War, with all its

theatres and numerous proxy engagements,

being the third – came to our shores, as if

from across not just the seas, but across

time itself. It was as if the Dark Ages had

returned in that one, horrific moment when

order turned to chaos, light to darkness, and

life to death on a massive scale. And in that

same instant, our illusion of isolation and

security was shattered, replaced by a new,

unshakable certainty that everything had

forever changed. Indeed, our fates were

sealed the moment those mighty towers fell.

It was time for us to reach out across those

vast, but no longer protective seas, and

back across the ages, to confront the roots

of the chaos that we now tasted.

BY THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

To guide us into this new era of war, we

turn to the power of ideas articulated across

the chasm of time from ancient days. Our

logic leads us into battle against doctrinaire

fundamentalism, just as Sir Thomas Hobbes

witnessed during the long and debilitating

English Civil War. Hobbes, surrounded by the

most violent, frightening and chaotic civil

strife, conjured up Leviathan to shock andawe early modern Europe into submission,

and impose through brute force, a stability

that would replace chaos with order. Just as

Machiavelli before him conjured up The Prince

to shock and awe Renaissance Florence into

submission and fulfill his dream of restoring

Rome’s enduring martial order; just as poor

Plato, his mentor Socrates murdered by the

mob, conjured up his Philosopher King to

shock and awe ancient Athens into

submission; and, just as we have conjured up

our god of technology, the fruit of our

democratic and innovative spirit, to shock andawe our new foes into submission – so far

with preliminary, though by no means

conclusive, success.

Looking back into the chaos of history, we

find our most visionary theorists are alike in

that they seek to find a way to preserve their

Golden Age – or if it had already passed by, to

resuscitate it. Noble leaders, and brutal

tyrants, often share this very same dream – to

bring order – whether it is the ‘End of History’

or the ‘Thousand Year Reich’. Their genius is

to guide us forward, through the chaos, into

the light. Our post-9/11 world of chaos and

fear is no different from that faced by others

who came before us; and if we look back

upon those who sought to lead us out of

darkness into order, we can learn much about

the path that lies before us.

THE WARRIOR PHILOSOPHER

Just as earlier ages had their Platos,

Machiavellis and Hobbes, we have a new

crop of warrior philosophers like Rumsfeld,

Cheney and Wolfowitz who have been deeply

inspired by these visions of order. The ‘realist’

tradition that links their thoughts reads from

this very same, and very old script. For the

first time in a generation, America is throwing

everything it’s got – treasure, blood and hope

– into fighting a war against this new wave of

faceless, mass-terror that has been waged

against us from the shadows. Without a vision

to guide our strength, to focus the laser beam

of our technology, our efforts will fail.

A NEW VISION

When President Bush articulated hiscommitment to the transformation of the

entire Middle East last November, and

accepted our responsibility and complicity in

propping up tyranny to keep our gas tanks

full this past century, he presented a noble

vision – to continue our revolution, and

export its principles to foreign lands where

we long thwarted this very vision from taking

root. For once, our vision was not just to

protect our own democracy, but to plant the

seed of democracy throughout the deserts

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of Arabia and beyond. As Bush said in his

speech at Whitehall Palace on November

19: “People from the Middle East share a

high civilization, a religion of personal

responsibility and a need for freedom as

deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose

that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to

liberty. It is pessimism and condescensionand we should have none of it.”

His vision is a bold and active vision to

secure our frontiers, to render chaos into

order and to plant the seeds of eternal peace,

a dream shared by many across the ages.

With war as their tool to reshape the

international environment, President Bush

and his closest advisors have joined the

pantheon of men with bold visions who have

the courage to invoke the god of war in

pursuit of their visions of order.

intellectual, a scholar lacking in power and

social influence what he has in smarts. Thisman has not dominated history per se, but he

has thoroughly commented on it. When

forced into exile, warrior philosophers have

turned to their pens to record events as they

see them – gaining insight and offering

uniquely sophisticated analysis.

Plato in his travels, recorded in his letters;

Xenophon in Persia, and later in exile;

Thucydides after the Athenians sent him out

of the city for his tactical failure at

Amphipolis; Machiavelli after his own fortune

changed and he was sent into the

countryside; and Hobbes when on the

continent, awaiting change and calm at

home. Wandering intellectuals, these

visionary theorists were like warriors armed

with a pen. They grappled with the balance of

the role of military force in politics.

Warrior philosophers have always been

somewhat out of place on the battlefield,

where physical strength is key. Their forte is

intellectual strength, so they look back not to

Alexander, but to Aristotle – the master warrior

philosopher who gave voice to the western

vision of order, encouraging young Alexander

to impose by force of arms this vision of the

West upon the East. They look less to the

martial conquests of Rome than to the ideals

of Greece, thus forever speaking a different

language from the fighting man, a language of

thought and not of action. As such, our warrior

philosophers have sought to shape the forces

that they alone understood at a grand

strategic level. Not tacticians or logisticians,

but philosophers, they sought to carve out

their own visions of order and security.

WAR AND THE CONQUEROR

Clausewitz wrote that war is a continuation

of policy by other means. He was not the first.

In Plato’s republic we see this principle

dictating the relationship of the guardians to

the Philosopher-King. And in Thucydides’

Peloponnesian Wars, we see the lack of this

ends-means balance bringing down the

Athenians. Herman Kahn argued that it is a

moral imperative to “think about the

unthinkable” and to awaken in the minds of

The warrior philosopher lives at the

crossroads of ideas and action, a man often

misunderstood, and as often maligned –

witness poor Machiavelli, one of history’s

most passionate republicans. Desperate times

breed desperate theories, and desperate

theories during times of peace, can seem

extreme, radical, overstated. But in fact, suchtheories are meant for times like ours.

ORDER VERSUS CHAOS

Across the ages, this individual thinker

whom we call the warrior philosopher has

articulated a strategic vision of order as an

alternative to his real world of chaos. He

strives to shape his reality, to impose his

vision of order. The warrior philosopher is

sometimes an enlightened general or

statesman, but more often an ambitious

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man the possibilities of action that earlier

thought had declared taboo.We have identified theorists as the

architects of new or revised systems, using

language to build an alternative to their

anarchical societies. Yet the conqueror, a

product of historical and philosophical

convergence, is the ‘system-smasher’, using

force and violence (and not their linguistic

mirrors) to wipe away the previous system.

Alexander, with his sword, made history.

He engineered a new international system.

The same is true for Napoleon and Hitler.

They, by means of raw power, altered their

worlds, leaving them forever changed.

Conquest, then defeat, paved the way for a

stronger, more resilient international system.

Alexander’s conquests prepared the world

for Rome; Napoleon’s inspired the

congressmen in Vienna and their multipolar

system to strike a new balance; and Hitler’s

assault left, in its wake, the bi-polar East-West

system that defined the Cold War.

CHANGING THE FACE OF HISTORY

Those men of action, in overstepping and

overreaching their capabilities, as well as our

tolerance, directly inspired the subsequent

brand new order. In defeat, they gave birth

to new worlds that could live without them,

but which were forever grateful to their

reckless ambition. These new worlds

emerged in their shadows; shaped not by

their visions, but the visions of those who

followed, those who won, or inherited, the

smoldering ruins of these tragically heroic

figures. These men of action used the sword

to construct their visions, but these painful

sweeps across the Eurasian theater were, inthe end, only as suggestive as theory itself.

New systems popped up, sprouting from

the seeds planted by these conquerors. But

they were not the visions of the conquerors.

Yet the causal-link between the conqueror and

the new system is both clear and strong. In

aim, realist theory and action converge. In

fact, the ends are often different. The former

leave their mark upon a world of language,

and concepts – a linguistic web that links

the minds of men. The latter leave their mark

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Taken from Visions of Order: The Rise of the Warrior Philosopher in Western Thought – from the Philosopher

King to the War on Terror by Barry Zellen, publisher of TechnologyInnovator.com.

‘West’ fusing into one, largely because we

had more in common with our ideological

nemesis than we thought. We both valued a

secular order, both valued certain western

principles: technology, equality (ours

political, theirs economic), progress. We

were woven of the same cloth and so in the

end, we could not destroy one another to

protect ourselves from each other. In fact,

we felt compelled, in the end, to join one

Western super-state, a grand alliance bound

together by our common heritage.

Together, we can now turn and face the

chaos of the Islamic realm. The West must

now confront this potent religious force,

perverted by hatred, bullied by terror, that

seeks to triumph over the modern, secular

state just as the early Christians’

triumphant spirit overwhelmed, and in the

end, defeated, the might of Rome – and fora thousand years we knew darkness and

chaos. Once again, we find ourselves back

at that precipice between chaos and order,

unsure whether our vision of order or their

vision of chaos, will triumph. ■

on a world of action, a world of burned

villages, trench-torn battlegrounds and

unmarked mass graves. Both language and

action make up the world of politics –

though the mix varies contextually.

It is interesting to note that the ‘conqueror’

is an outsider to the system; Alexander, the

Macedonian, Hellenizes Eurasia. Napoleon, the

Corsican, brings the French Revolution to

Moscow. And Hitler, the Austrian, gives birth to

the Thousand Year Reich. Each an outsider,

using chaos as their ally in the seizing of state

power, usurping the ideas of others in the

quest for global domination. Each knew a sort

of alienation that our theorists faced; each

knew a sort of perpetual exile. My belief is that

these heroic conquerors are the makers of

new systems, their legacy transcending action,

influencing thought itself. And in this context,

our newest foe, Osama bin Laden, is nodifferent from these earlier systemic threats

that sought to undermine the system of

international order in place.

The Cold War turned into a very warm

and enduring peace, with the ‘East’ and

warrior philosophers

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