Published: 1 December 2008
Air & Space Power
Journal - Winter 2008
Seeing the Elephant: The U.S. Role in Global Security by Hans Binnendijk and Richard L. Kugler. National Defense University Press and Potomac Books, Inc. (http://www.potomacbooksinc.com), 22841 Quicksilver Drive, Dulles, Virginia 20166, 2007, 336 pages, $48.00 (hardcover), $24.00 (softcover).
Professional military education (PME) programs are typically reading-intensive. As any PME student knows, though, it’s only a lot of reading if you do it. In Seeing the Elephant, PME students have a tool that goes a long way toward reducing that burden.
The authors of this work are well suited for the task. Dr. Hans Binnendijk is director of the Center for Technology and National Security Policy and Roosevelt Chair at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Dr. Richard Kugler is Distinguished Research Professor at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy. As they mention in the preface, the authors have written the book especially for students attending the war colleges—students who typically have not had the time to develop a deep-seated knowledge of issues concerning national security and international relations.
The study serves as “an intellectual history of national security thinking since the end of the Cold War” (p. xi). Since that time, hundreds of books have described the international environment in the post–Cold War world and/or have provided a variety of often-contradictory prescriptions for a new national security strategy. Seeing the Elephant addresses these disparate ideas. Binnendijk and Kugler summarize the ideas from more than 60 books on national security topics and critique them, based on the outcome of real-world events. This may seem a rather simple task, but several qualities set their book apart from what might at first glance appear to be a basic review of the literature.
First, the summaries are superb. Although I have not read all of the books addressed in Seeing the Elephant, Binnendijk and Kugler’s summaries of those I have read are exactly right. They discuss the authors’ arguments and rationale without giving short shrift to the subtleties of those arguments, thus providing the reader with a very thorough understanding of each author’s ideas.
The second quality that sets this book apart is its organization. The title refers to the parable of the blind men, each of whom touches a different part of an elephant and tries to describe the whole. The reviewed books are arranged in a series of subgroups that involve different parts of the national security elephant. An introductory chapter defines terms and lays out the structure of the study. Chapters 2 and 3 divide works into two camps: (1) “neo-Kantian” for books that describe/prescribe a world heading for the peaceful spread of democratic governments (e.g., Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man), and (2) “neo-Hobbesian” for books that espouse a traditional realist view of the world (e.g., Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order). Chapter 4 deals with books that address the impact of the Internet and other aspects of technology on national security (e.g., Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century). Chapter 5 discusses books about US grand strategy, including Joseph Nye’s Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Chapter 6 addresses varying US defense strategies, including such works as Max Boot’s Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and Wesley Clark’s Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat. In the last chapter, which summarizes information from the previous six chapters, Binnendijk and Kugler put forth their own ideas for US national security policy and defense strategy, describing the national security elephant as they see it.
Finally, the range of titles selected for analysis—perhaps Seeing the Elephant’s most valuable asset—also sets this book apart. The authors, of course, have “rounded up the usual suspects,” examining works by Graham Allison, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Keohane, John Mearsheimer, and other well-known academics in the field of international security. However, Binnendijk and Kugler have broadened their work to include views and ideas from such nonacademics as Gen Tommy Franks, former commander of US Central Command; Atlantic Monthly magazine’s Robert Kaplan; and Newsweek correspondent Fareed Zakaria. Seeing the Elephant belongs in the library of anyone with an interest in international affairs. Those who have not been able to read the works reviewed in this book will get a firm foundation in recent thinking about national security studies, while experts can use Seeing the Elephant to refresh their memories on important ideas in the field.
Lt Col James J. McNally, USAF, Retired
Tampa, Florida
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