“Do We Not Now Destroy Simply to Destroy?”
René Girard, Carl von Clausewitz, and the Future of War
The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.
The original commonplace book format obviously…. didn’t work. It was derailed in part by my need to write a real academic piece, and the fact that Substack seems to have no native app for transferring links from my phone, which is where I access Twitter. So I am going to try to revive this “newsletter” by making it more like a…. well, blog, with occasional longer form pieces related to my larger intellectual interests. I hope to try to do this on a weekly basis—*fingers crossed*.
The following is an edited version of the final class “project” for an Indiethinkers course on Girard, part of Justin Murphy’s network of of guerrilla intellectuals. The class was taught by the indomitable Geoff Shullenberger, theory maestro of the interwebs. Thanks to both of them and the other seminar members for what was the intellectual highlight of my summer. I do hope to convert this into a longer piece at some point.
In many ways René Girard’s reading of Clausewitz runs counter to the orthodox American Cold War interpretation of On War, embedded deeply in the American military establishment, and represented in Girard’s mind by Raymond Aron. This orthodox interpretation focuses on Clausewitz’s dictum that war should have a rational political object, while Girard highlights how Clausewitz’s ideas about reciprocal escalation are far more important—to use Girard’s words, “once unbridled, the principle of reciprocity no longer plays the unconscious role it used to play. Do we not now destroy simply to destroy? Violence now seems deliberate, and the escalation to extremes is served by science and politics” (Girard, Battling to the End, 20).
In some ways, Girard proved strikingly prescient. The French edition of Achever Clausewitz appeared in 2007, which while post-9/11 was years before the collapse of Syria into Civil War, the meteoric rise of ISIS into concrete statehood, the bloodletting at the Bataclan in the heart of French literary culture, the migrant-triggered political crisis in Europe, ISIS attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando—a chaotic political environment that helped lead to the election of Donald Trump. In 2016, Girard’s fears of inter-civilizational apocalypse seemed to be marching more and more forward to fulfilment.
Even at the so-called tactical level, to use the appropriate argot, one sees Girardian mimesis in all these events—First Person Shooter-style video game animations in ISIS propaganda videos, Punisher logos on the uniforms of the Iraqi forces fighting ISIS, or the global proliferation of a military aesthetic first associated with American special operations forces. Some of this imitation has been largely pragmatic—for example, the Taliban’s adoption of night vision devices and its creation of an elite “Red Group” analogous to both American and Afghan Special Operations Forces. But as Girard foretold, there has also been a grisly mimesis and escalation in savagery—we have gone from online beheadings to setting pilots on fire, genocide, slave markets, collective rape, and the like all chronicled on WhatsApp—and in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a war criminal whose acquittal also brought about the downfall of a Secretary of the Navy, that mimesis found replication within the most “elite” of American military units.
But what actually happened, as we roll the tape forward? For all of ISIS’s apocalyptic pretensions, it proved no match for American air power. Despite a miniscule commitment of American ground forces, American aircraft crushed ISIS in conjunction with small numbers of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces. The practical mechanics of that airpower in Mosul remains controversial for good reason, and ISIS continues to lurk in the shadows—including areas not far from the district where I once served as a State Department political officer in Iraq—but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi went from triumphant Caliph to an object of Trump’s gleeful mockery as an American military dog chased him into his final hideout. Trump then turned his grim gaze to the bete noir of my generation of American Iraq hands—the famed Qasem Soleimani, the cunning Iranian spymaster who seemed to outmaneuver the United States Govt at every turn until a drone strike incinerated his car. Soleimani went from a master of social media (including a distinctive sartorial style) to a grim reminder of American power, as an image of his dismembered finger with its distinctive ring circulated around Twitter as proof of his demise.
But did the apocalypse come? It did not. Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes caused traumatic brain injuries on US military personnel taking cover in bunkers in an Iraqi air base, but Trump declined to escalate. In fact, he sought to withdraw US forces from the larger region. He failed to complete a full withdrawal from Northeast Syria, but he did successfully put in motion the chain of events that led to his successor’s complete withdrawal from Afghanistan—punctuated by one last child-killing drone strike as a grim answer to Girard’s haunting question about violence’s true purpose. Nevertheless, neither Trump nor Biden have shown any interest in continuing the process of violent escalation.
My sense is that Girard believed that technology had made the world a “global primitive village” (Williams, The Girard Reader, 252) subject to an apocalyptic escalation of violence. But while the Cold War might have seen broadcast media and ICBMs shrink distances and borders, it appears that the internet has created fragmented subcommunities forming and reforming in an online space. The resulting feuds can be all too bloody, but I think Girard is in some sense too pessimistic about the prospects for a man-made apocalypse. In some circumstances, it should still be possible to extract vengeance and walk away—at least in the short term—because cultural fragmentation can help inhibit the memetic cycle. Nevertheless, I will close with what still seem to me to be an important caution his part (Girard, Battling to the End, 24):