This week CIMSEC is running an interview series on the U.S. Navy’s 1980s Maritime Strategy. Through discussions with those helped conceive and advocate for this historic strategy, important lessons on the maritime dimension of great power competition will emerge.
The 1980’s Maritime Strategy was published in unclassified form in January 1986, and had been widely briefed and discussed by the Navy’s leadership for several years prior. The strategy marked a sea change in the Navy, including from being a force that would have been primarily committed to continental resupply and defensive convoy escort in the event of World War III, to a force that would instead pursue a global, wide-ranging offensive against the flanks of the Soviet Union. The strategy also highlighted the value of the Navy in peacetime crisis response and the importance of ready forward presence. Among the things that make the strategy historic and unique, what is notable is how broadly it aligned naval leadership to how the Navy would be employed in peacetime and in conflict, and how it explicitly and unabashedly laid out a general scheme of offensive operations for how it would fight great power war.
There is a deeper story to the strategy that is also historic and goes beyond the unclassified publications and public pronouncements. The story of how the strategy came to be, of how the Navy’s strategist community assembled, debated, and embedded the strategy in the institution of the Navy is a story worthy of the utmost consideration.
CIMSEC interviewed select individuals to tell this story and capture valuable lessons for how the Navy can consider maritime strategy in the context of great power competition. We thank these individuals for their excellent contributions.
Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at [email protected].
Featured Image: February 2, 1986 – A port bow view of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-65) underway. (U.S. National Archive photo)
Dr. Chulanee Attanayake and Dr. Jivanta Schottli, editor and contributor to the book Maritime Sri Lanka, respectively, join the program. They discuss the increased importance of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka’s growing role in the region, the island’s strategic hedging strategy, and how it is balancing Indian, Chinese, and American influence.
“This is information war, and it’s official.” –”Maxim” (a former employee of the Internet Research Agency – a Russian troll factory – as reported in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media)
“No naval policy can be wise unless it takes into very careful account the tactics that ought to be used in war.”– Commander Bradley A. Fiske, USN, 1905
Great Information Power Competition
While the United States is not at war with Russia or China, the U.S. is in a persistent “shadow war” below armed conflict across the globe with these strategic adversaries.
Russia and China made the strategic choice to use information as an effective instrument in their effort to create strategic imbalance within great information power competition. Exponential growth in the information environment (IE) – and a convergence of technologies that rapidly distribute information at high-speeds across the planet – leveled the international playing field due to the low opportunity cost of competing in the marketplace of information versus spending on traditional military hardware. Russia and China leverage low barriers to entry of the IE to achieve their objectives by employing tactics that have the potential to influence citizens of all nations, expand societal cracks, and enable achievement of their objectives, if not necessarily the adoption their ideology or values.
“The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” said General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces.
Similarly, state-owned, and controlled media in China quells dissident voices through an Orwellian digital dictatorship that includes facial recognition and artificial intelligence while persistently delivering narratives supportive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“China maneuvers in the information space in a way that undermines everything we do, factually, informationally, everywhere…Throughout the region there is a China daily insert, which is Chinese propaganda appearing in newspapers, over more than half the population of the globe. It’s quite pernicious,” said the Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Adm. Philip S. Davidson.
History as a Guidepost
Navy leaders at all levels today intuitively understand they are not operating in the same information environment they served in when they joined.
“The character of modern warfare is changing to a multi-domain battlespace with significant emphasis on space, electronic, information and cyber domains. Consequently, the need to conduct increased and different missions in these domains drives a requirement to increase our associated skills,” said Adm. Michael M. Gilday in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee before his confirmation hearing to become the 32nd Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
Outside of a command social media page or Type Commander-hosted website, however, most commands employ systems and tactics that fall short of public affairs practices that evolved during IE expansion that combined digitized imagery, video, and graphics with high-speed connectivity. Rather, they compete using turn of the century public affairs (PA) / visual information (VI) manning levels, training, and equipment without codified doctrine and tactics to fight in all phases of war. Recent Navy-wide guidance titled “OPTASK VI,”updated and standardized reporting requirements, but generating 21st century, Information Age, PA requires a more deliberate approach.1
To seize the strategic information initiative, the Navy must invest in PA to compete effectively in an increasingly fast and complex battlefield of information. The time to include PA considerations holistically in the fleet readiness development cycle is now – and the Navy’s expansion of the Vietnam-era TOPGUN model to Warfighting Development Centers (WDC) is the way to do it.
Deep Roots
What we now know as Navy PA traces its lineage to two previously separate career fields – PA and VI.2
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox established the Navy’s Office of Public Relations in 1941. The office changed names to the Office of Public Information in 1945, and again to its current name, the Office of Information, in 1950. Rear Adm. William Thompson became the first public affairs specialist to lead the office as the Chief of Information (CHINFO) in 1971.
The birth of the Navy’s VI community resulted from developments in naval aviation and in recognition of a need for photographic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The father of Navy photography is Lt. Walter L. Richardson – a prior-enlisted cook and hobby photographer aboard USS Mississippi (BB 23). Richardson’s imagery caught the eye of Capt. Henry C. Mustin in 1914. Mustin later placed Richardson in a full-time role as the Navy’s first photo officer in recognition of the value of the medium to communicate effectively.
Then-Lt. Arleigh Burke in action with a motion picture camera on board a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser, circa 1934-1935. He was then-Officer in Charge of the Battle Force Camera Party, which recorded gunnery practice results for later analysis. Collection of Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, USN (Retired). (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)
As technology advanced, the Navy increased its VI capacity and capability to address tactical and strategic challenges. In the 1930s, the officer in charge of Battle Force Camera Party –then-Lt. Arleigh Burke– leveraged motion picture technology to record and analyze shipboard weapons systems. During World War II, the Navy Combat Camera program began with the Combat Photography Section of the Office of Public Relations and the establishment of Combat Photographic Units #1 through #13.
Similarly, Academy Award-winning director and future Rear Adm. John Ford’s leadership and filmmaking expertise at Midway and D-Day had lasting domestic and international impact, directly supporting Allied victory through VI delivered from the front lines. In 1951, then-CNO Forrest P. Sherman established Combat Camera Group Pacific to “obtain still and motion picture photography in the Pacific Fleet, for public information, historical record, and intelligence purposes, and specific motion picture training film and stock footage requirements.”3
Capt. John Ford has coffee in the photo lab on board USS Philippine Sea (CV-47), during the filming his motion picture “This is Korea,” off the Korean coast on 8 January 1951. A professional film director in civilian life, he also made movies for and about the Navy while serving on active duty. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives)
The PA and VI communities merged in the mid-2000s when the Defense Department required a flag officer from each service to provide oversight to VI. In 2005, CHINFO assumed that responsibility – a logical choice given CHINFO’s role as the Navy’s chief communication officer and the reliance of the PA community on VI products.
One significant impact of the merger was the disestablishment of the photo limited duty officer (LDO) program. The 2009 disestablishment message said that future PAOs would have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to fill the “critical public affairs core capability [VI]” – a tall order for new fleet accessions without years of experience synchronizing VI from surface and air platforms to support communication capability.
Most photo LDOs were career photographer’s mates who earned commissions after spending a career honing the skills to capture, edit, and transmit VI products. They were also experts at creating requirements to maintain and improve the technical communication systems in conjunction with professionals at systems commands.
At approximately the same time as the community merger, the world’s information and data markets exploded. Recognizing the approaching tsunami of information and shifts in the IE, future CHINFO, then-Lt. Cmdr. John Kirby wrote, “Though it will always retain its traditional supporting roles – such as media escorting and internal information – public affairs today boasts new operational relevance as its impact on the conduct of military operations intensifies.” He was not wrong.
From 2000 to 2016, the number of worldwide internet users increased from 413 million to 3.4 billion.According to Pew Research,from 2005 to 2019 the percentage of Americans who use at least one social media site exploded from 5% to 72%. Further, the average American adult user’s use of digital media increased from 2.7 hours per day in 2008 to 6.3 hours per day in 2018. PAOs raced to keep pace with the expanding IE. Even so, the Navy PA community’s overall manning to support institutional engagement in the information environment (active duty enlisted, officer, and civilian) remained steady at around 3,000 from FY02 to date, though end strength dipped to just over 2,000 in FY15.
67 years after the establishment of the Combat Photography Section and Pacific Fleet Combat Camera Group – and one year after the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs codified informationas the seventh Joint Function on par with command-and-control, intelligence, fires, movement-and-maneuver, protection, and sustainment – Fleet Combat Camera units shuttered their doors as a “budget- saving initiative to eliminate billets that do not directly contribute to improving warfighting capability.”
PA ‘Tactical Excellence by Design’
CHINFO is the leader of the Navy’s PA community, which includes the Navy’s VI Program. Like developing Mine Warfare capability across aviation, surface, subsurface, expeditionary, and special warfare communities, a maze of C2, alignment, authorities, and budget submitting offices make proponing Fleet-wide PA force generation difficult. Therefore, to support CHINFO, Fleet Commander, and TYCOM efforts to develop Fleet-wide PA/VI warfighting capability, PAOs and mass communication specialists should serve at each of the Navy’s five WDCs to develop PA warfighting capability and align tactics across the readiness generation cycle with the Afloat Training Groups in the basic phase of training, and Carrier Strike Groups 4 and 15 in the integrated phase.
In 2014, almost fifty-years after then-CNO Adm. Thomas H. Moorer ordered the Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review and its resulting Ault Report led to the establishment of TOPGUN, the Navy expanded the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center (NAWDC) model, where TOPGUN now resides, across all major warfighting communities. WDCs in aviation, surface, undersea, information, and expeditionary warfare directly support Type Commander (TYCOM) readiness generation – the Fleet leads for man, train, and equip functions – by sharpening the Navy’s warfighting edge. The WDCs also maintain the Navy’s doctrine and tactics library through Navy Warfighting Development Command (NWDC).
WDC alignment and synchronization of PA tied to the fleet’s readiness generation cycle stands in stark contrast to current models primarily focused on pre-deployment, integrated phase certification exercises. This updated method also moves communication to the center of organizational behavior, leadership decision making, training, and planning – a recognized hallmark of excellent, high-performing organizations.
Most importantly, this construct operationalizes PA so that the seed-corn of the Navy’s most senior leader ranks – O-5 commanding officers – gain relevant support and experience with PA/VI and deploy with greater levels of competence and confidence, long before future assignment as flag officers.
Developing Maritime Strategic Communication Superiority
Operationalization of PA already started at one of the WDCs – Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC). While the command focuses on developing surface warfighting competency along four lines of effort, as the only one of the five WDCs with a full-time PAO supporting their commander in a traditional PA role, their PAO also supports development of PA readiness.
They accomplish this along three of the command’s four lines of effort – (1) advanced tactical training, (2) doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), and (3) capability assessments, experimentation, and future requirements development. This relatively new concept is yielding results and is exemplary of how limited investment in PA/VI alongside inside of fleet operations positively impacts fleet warfighting and messaging capability.
Advanced Tactical Training
The fleet has long clamored for standardized equipment lists for PA. However, technology and gear alone will not resolve the challenge of delivering results, unless personnel can capture the action, edit the imagery, and transmit it such a way that it is quality, timely, and relevant. A material only solution also leaves commanding officers who often have limited tactical PA experience to either find independent or non-standard ways to execute the mission set in phase 0 and phase 1 operations – not a great position for any commander in the South China Sea or the Mediterranean when OSD wants imagery of the PLAN destroyer who just crossed your bow or the jet that just buzzed your ship’s mast.4 An AEL is a needed start, as was OPTASK VI, but neither independently nor together holistically support longterm development of these critical warfighting skills without the rigor that a WDC can deliver.
U.S. Navy photo showing a confrontation between the USS Decatur (left) and PRC Warship 170 (right) in the South China Sea on Sunday, September 30, 2018. (U.S. Navy Photo obtained by gCaptain)
Fleet leaders have surmised that that rapid proliferation of VI in technology (every Sailor’s smartphone is also a camera, for example) assuages the need for rigor in fleet PA training. However, smartphone technology has not transformed every individual with an iPhone into a studio quality photographer or videographer capable of capturing high-quality products in a high-intensity, strategically relevant tactical engagement. Further, the trusting relationships between PAOs with reporters and outlets will continue to be important to deliver VI and provide clarity and context as needed. Increased focus on training can and will improve PA professional skill levels in support of commanders who need them to lead and fight effectively.
Operational PA development through the WDCs will serve as an aligning function across the readiness generation cycle beginning with unit training and culminating in integrated phase training exercises. In practice, this also means that commanding officers, warfare commanders, and strike group commanders all receive consistent PA training and manpower throughout the training cycle instead of just during Composite Unit Training exercises. This ensures that ships and squadrons can match PA doctrine and policy to harness the imagery from electro-optical and weapons systems required to communicate with myriad audiences faster than our strategic competitors.
Doctrine and TTP Development
Continuous training aligned to the readiness generation cycle would also provide opportunities for PA instructors at the WDCs to develop and implement joint and fleet policy and guidance in the training cycle. Important considerations remain to implement principles from the recent Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment. Similarly, Fleet Forces Command published the VI Concept of Operations in 2014 includes items ripe for implementation still today – something WDCs can support.5
Advanced training at the WDCs would also provide opportunities to develop, test, break, or validate doctrine and TTPs for PA/VI, helping align Fleet standards of excellence. At SMWDC, for example, this means that ships across the fleet have standardized and constantly re-evaluated standards for warfighting areas such as anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. Rapid investments in capabilities and emerging technology will accomplish the same for PA across all domains.
PA doctrine development will also codify relationships between PA, VI, military information support operations, and other information related capabilities within the service – all in the constellation of Information Operations within Joint Doctrine. This area of concern is a familiar bogeyman and subject of discussion for anyone with relevant fleet experience. Codifying relationships will serve both commanders and tacticians well, removing unneeded ambiguity during real-world operations.
Capability assessments, experimentation, and future requirements
The sunsetting of Navy’s most robust PA operational capability development cadre – the photo LDO community – took place at the same time as rapid advancements in digital imagery and technology. Although the Navy’s PA community harnessed advances in technology, particularly in web-based apps and platforms, it is nearly impossible to keep pace. This is exacerbated by shipboard communication systems that are not always compatible or conducive to 21st century media engagement. To turn the tide, PA instructors at WDCs tied to the Fleet and working closely with systems commands, operational analysts, and the technical community will provide CHINFO and the Navy with tactically astute experts who can inform annual OPNAV budget submissions.
Shoal Water
Close alignment without deliberate and clear relationships between PA and information warfare communities is a relevant concern for traditional public affairs officers and senior military leaders who must diligently protect and maintain the trust they have with those they serve.
The most prevalent concern often cited is a PAO’s professional, ethical obligation to maintain trust with media outlets and by extension the American people. This results in a strong aversion to proximity to psychological operations, military deception, or similar capabilities. Blurring lines between public affairs – which maintains a professional commitment to providing accurate, timely, relevant, and truthful information – and those capabilities can lead to damaging misperceptions and erode trust with reporters and the American people if a PAO is or is perceived as fulfilling multiple roles simultaneously. Quite simply, they cannot afford to risk the hard-earned trust they strive to maintain. History is rife with examples of the consequences of the breaking of trust between the military and the people they serve, and the Navy’s public affairs community is wise to draw clear boundaries to prevent similar missteps in the future.
CHINFO maintaining position in the approval chain for Fleet PA doctrine and TTPs prior to incorporation into the Navy’s warfighting library will mitigate these concerns. Additionally, instructors at WDCs will be intimately familiar with the relevant Defense Department PA governing documents, which lay out clear guidelines to ensure important legal lines such as the Hatch Act or ethical lines such as violations of the Navy’s Canon of Ethics for Public Affairs and VI practitioners are not crossed. While doctrine and TTPs to codify relationships will not prevent mistakes from happening in the future, not codifying them deliberately also increases risk for commanders and the institution.
Some may also take the recommendation to operationalize PA holistically as an invitation or recommendation for PA to fully merge with the information warfare community. That would be an overreach, and likely lead to the blurred lines and misperceptions noted above.
While operationalization of PA is critical when competing against informationally savvy state actors as part of Great Information Power Competition, it is equally as important that the Navy not lose traditional PA expertise in the process of increasing operational relevance. Developing a cadre of professional communicators who are widely respected and trusted by civilian and uniformed leaders within the government – as well as with the press – took time and treasure that is not easily replaced. The Navy is a recognized PA leader within the DoD in more traditional public affairs practices that continue to serve the Navy well. To eschew core competencies of strategic advisement, media operations, social media, and community outreach would be an oversimplification. This proposal is a both/and, not an either/or; further investment is needed to increase information power.
Conclusion
Aligning much needed investment in PA through the WDCs is a historically sound method that will deliver high return on investment at low opportunity cost. Similarly, contemporary books such as Singer’s LikeWar and literature on the development and growth of AI paint a picture of the opportunities available to nations who actively engage – and the challenges on the horizon for those that do not. Victory in the shadow wars will be won through aligned and synchronized use of information supplemented by technology and maneuver.
In today’s information environment, PA/VI practitioners must simultaneously be information warfighters, readiness generators, special advisers to commanders, and staff officers. Modest investments in PA/VI through an existing WDC construct will deliver peak value for commanders and the nation.
America’s competitors have taken a proactive posture on the battlefield of information, and commanders are right to invest in the Navy’s ability to deliver PA/VI capability and products at sea today. The information environment is a critical domain in all phases of warfare, and maritime PA capabilities can lead to non-kinetic victories. There is a path to achieve maritime information superiority – all that is left to do is to take it.
Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Stroup, APR+M is a prior-enlisted Naval officer with more than 14 years in service. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Notes
1. Message, 271025Z MAR 12, COMUSFLTFORCOM NORFOLK VA. subject: NAVY WIDE OPTASK VISUAL INFORMATION.
2. Since the Navy’s PA and Visual Information (VI) communities merged under PA in 2005, the use of the term PA community in this article includes both PA and VI.
3. Sherman, Forrest P. (1951). Pacific Fleet Combat Camera Group; establishment of (Op- 553C/aa, Serial: 298P553) [Memorandum].
5. U.S. Department the of Navy, COMUSFLTFORCOM Concept of Operations, “Fleet Visual Information” (2015 July 2).
Featured image: BALTIC SEA – A Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft makes a low altitude pass by the USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) April 12, 2016. Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, forward deployed to Rota, Spain is conducting a routine patrol in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe. (U.S. Navy photo/Released)
The U.S. military spends quite a bit of money and time educating a segment of its personnel on foreign cultures. Too much or not nearly enough, depending on who you ask and at what moment you ask them. Recall the relatively short run of the Afghanistan/Pakistan Hands Program. As a colleague at the U.S. Naval Academy who is the director of the Center for Experiential Leadership Development program, which arranges for various cultural immersion programs for midshipmen, relayed to me recently, in the era of renewed great power competition the emphasis on “cultural education” is waning in favor of more traditional technical warfighting knowledge.
The Army and the Marine Corps will probably continue to prioritize foreign culture knowledge without much debate, for obvious reasons. The Navy, however, may not. This is a service that tried and failed to establish a several times in the past half century before finally succeeding in the late 2000s. The Navy’s FAO debate was emblematic of the service’s larger struggle with determining what learning to emphasize in addition to technical knowledge, if anything at all. At the start of my career in the mid-1980s, the prevailing consensus regarding Navy officer education, as I recall it, was that understanding foreign cultures is a luxury. Not bad to have, but not terribly important for the vast majority. We may be drifting back to that place, and that would be a mistake.
The right answer is that Navy officers need both technical and cultural knowledge to compete against a sophisticated adversary in both peace and war. China will be the dominant threat concern for new officers during their entire careers. Officers in particular should strive for much more than a superficial understanding of Chinese culture as it pertains to matters of politics and warfare.
Malraux and Eastern Thought
For those that have little or no background on Chinese culture, a book with which to start is one recommended to me long ago when working on a graduate degree in Asian studies—André Malraux’s slender epistolary The Temptation of the West (La Tentation de l’Occident), published in 1926 but remarkably durable in capturing the differences in Western and Chinese thought. Two characters, the young Frenchman A.D. and Chinese student Ling-W.-Y., correspond about art and culture, specifically about a decaying European culture and how it, in turn, has infected Chinese culture. This is a conversation that had been playing out in Malraux’s mind for some time, at least from the point he first came to “the Orient” in 1923 to search for (in actuality probably to pilfer for sale) ancient Khmerian sculptures along the Royal Road in Cambodia (an adventure that landed him a three-year prison sentence by French colonial authorities, subsequently suspended).
Born in 1901 into a seafaring family in Dunkirk, Malraux took an interest in art and archaeology at an early age. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and later at the Ecole des Langues Orientales. He ventured to Cambodia with his young wife, Clara Goldschmidt. From his humiliating arrest in Cambodia, to his return to Indochina (Vietnam) in 1925 (after briefly having returned to France), and later political activities in China supporting both nationalist and communist movements, the facts of what exactly he did, with whom, and when are shrouded in myth, mystery, and conjecture—an opaqueness he did little to clear up later in life. What we can know for certain is that by the mid-1920s, while running a newspaper in Hanoi, Malraux was writing prolifically. He published his first full-length novel, The Conquerors, in 1928, followed by The Royal Way in 1930, and Man’s Fate in 1933, a story set against the failed 1927 communist uprising in Shanghai (written before Malraux ever set foot in Shanghai) that won the Goncourt prize.
That Malraux was at least a communist sympathizer into his 30s is without question. Yet even in the most fervent years of his left-wing political activities, Malraux was more interested in examining the human condition through art and culture than in political doctrines. In fact, according to early Malraux chronicler and late Harvard professor of French literature W. M. Frohock, Man’s Fate was viewed with some suspicion by orthodox communist hardliners. “Did Malraux have a party card? The legend holds that he did not. And on his trip to the 1934 Writers’ Congress in Moscow . . . he was billed on the program as a ‘Marxist humanist’ and, according to reports, placed his emphasis much more on the human than on Marx.” Malraux was always searching and never comfortable with the doctrinaire. His politics shifted continually over the course of his life. In the Second World War he served in the French Army and later the French Resistance, and after the war as Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Information (1945–46) and France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs (1958–69).
Reading The Temptation of the West today, nearly 100 years after it appeared, reminds us of the hold culture retains on our thinking, even in an age of hyper-globalization. Malraux was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical critique of Western culture. In his introduction to the 1961 edition, Robert Hollander notes, “In Nietzsche, with his analysis of Western decadence, Malraux found an exalted precursor, more important for showing the way toward developing cultural generalizations than for shaping specific concepts.” Malraux also admired Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782), widely considered the best epistolary novel ever written in the French language. Nietzsche provided the philosophical foundation and de Laclos the form for Malraux to carry the critique further in the context of the West’s interaction with Chinese culture. The demise of a culture is not something one can truly appreciate from a distance. It is not an abstraction, of interest only to anthropologists and historians. It is personal and we must feel it—and we do through the letters of A.D. and Ling. We feel how they are inextricably caught in this crisis, how the uncertain future is their future.
One can forgive a young Malraux for so harshly dismissing a European culture he worked so hard in his later years to preserve. What could Europe but seem in the years immediately following the Great War? Europe was still convulsing, the old order still gasping, while vile political extremism was gaining currency. The center was never more than tenuous, and of course it collapsed like a house of sand by the end of the 1920s. In 1927 Malraux published the essay “D’une Jeunesse Europeenne” (“From a European Youth”) in Les Cahiers Verts in which he “proclaimed a personal alienation from European culture to match the one expressed by the focal character in La Tentation.”
An Enduring Epistolary
Only 18 letters comprise the book, and 12 are from Ling in Europe to A.D. in Asia. In the brief forward we learn A.D. is 25 years old and Ling 23. We never learn how Ling and A.D. know each other or why they correspond in the way they do. We are told at the end of the forward that the letters have been “selected and edited” and are intended to evoke in readers “some arresting thoughts on the seemingly unusual sensuous and spiritual lives of these two men.” Who selected and edited them? We have no idea. With this device Malraux seems to want us to know the bare minimum of background, as too much detail will unduly influence our interpretation and understanding of the subtle and finely wrought conversation.
The opening letter is from A.D., written from the liner Chambord as it carries him to China. We are not sure where Chambord is, only that A.D. has “seen savages suddenly appear and offer seafarers horn-shaped fruits from primitive trays. . .” He goes on to describe a wondrous flow of exotic sensations. Before leaving Europe, he experienced the rest of the world only through books and the gathered cultural treasures and animals one finds in museums and zoos. “Man, capturing living forms one by one and locking them up in books, has prepared the present condition of my mind.” A.D. is embarking on an adventure to a strange world. He is a colonial man—not the incurious or rapacious variant, but also not above indulging in the luxuries on offer. Asia is a place for the taking. The culture must be protected, not for its own sake, but rather because it is interesting to the Western man.
Ling is already in France, and he’s unimpressed. He writes his first letter from Marseilles. From the opening line we see that Ling has ventured to Europe with much suspicion—“Europe calls forth few beautiful ghosts, and I have come to her with hostile curiosity.” He is curious to know how Europe is so strong that it could colonize peoples around the world, including parts of China. China in the 1920s is sick, and Ling believes Europe the source of the disease. The remaining letters from Ling are sent from Paris, although he does make mention of visiting other European cities.
What transpires from the third letter onward is an inquiry into the European and Chinese minds—how each character thinks and sees the world. Religion, art, architecture, myth, literature, philosophy, even dreams—these are the methods of cultural expression Malraux examines. Ling studies and inquires, but also compares and explains. He is on a mission to understand how something he longs to preserve is slipping away. A.D. is less didactic. He is not determined to defend European culture. He is a product of it and all its excesses and tragedies, and that has convinced him that life is ultimately absurd. Searching for meaning is a fool’s errand. The existential concept “the absurd”—the realization that man’s attempt to understand and order the world is a fruitless exercise because no such order exists—is a Malraux motif. It is no wonder he influenced Sartre, Camus, and other French existentialists.
Malraux’s observations of both Chinese and European culture—East and West—rush at us in exquisite blossoms of language. When A.D. surfaces, such as in letters 8 and 12, he seems in implicit agreement with Ling on many points, as we see him explaining Europe rather than defending it. In letter 8, A.D. writes, “The excessive importance we have been led to give to ‘our’ reality is doubtless just one of the means the mind employs to defend itself … The absurd, the beautiful absurd, linked with us like the serpent to the tree of Good and Evil, is never completely hidden …” And in letter 12, “Europeans are weary of themselves, of their crumbling individualism, of their exaltation. What sustains them is less a thought than a delicate framework of negation.”
The denouement occurs in letter 17. Ling responds to A.D.’s description in the previous letter of his long discussion with the ex-politician Wang-Loh, whom he met in Shanghai. Wang-Loh pronounces the traditional culture of China dead. He pours scorn on young Chinese who have been infected with Western ideas. Ling is in sorrowful agreement with Wang-Loh, and the tone of the letter resonates a deep sadness. “He believes China is going to die. I believe it too.” For thousands of years, a propriety where elders are held in high esteem and revered for wisdom was being upended by a Western-educated youth—the “new elite.” But the new elite are not entirely happy to adopt European culture and shed their native culture. They believe they can have both. They are “tortured souls.” This is the tragedy unfolding in China. Ling sees it and is helpless to stop it. His countrymen thought they could absorb Europe like “learning a foreign language,” with no adverse repercussions to their own culture and identity. “How can I express the feelings of a disintegrating soul? All the letters I receive come from young men as desperate as Wang-Loh or myself, barren of their own culture, disgusted with yours…”
In a preface to the 1992 University of Chicago edition, noted China historian Jonathan D. Spence wrote, “It is never safe, and often folly, to call any writing ‘prophetic,’ but the closing two pages of this last letter of Ling’s read now as if they had been designed as an epilogue and benediction to the hopes and fears of China’s long revolution, and to the millions who died for the future…” What to make of The Temptation of the West today, nearly 30 years after Spence wrote those words? Like Malraux himself, the book refuses to be neatly distilled. It is heartbreaking to read about a culture dying, but we do not get the sense that it was ever avoidable. It seems a fate, a destiny, and not the result of a chosen direction that existed aside other paths just as easily taken. Ling comes closer to A.D. in concluding that all human existence lies in the “metallic realms of the absurd.” What awaits them both is only a “naked horizon and the mirror of solitude’s old master, despair.”
Culture Still Matters
When I first read this book in the early 1990s, a debate was raging on what the world was becoming in the post-Cold War era. Francis Fukuyama had recently published the article “The End of History?” in The National Interest. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before the Soviet Union formally dissolved, Fukuyama resurfaced an argument first coherently offered by the German philosopher George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in the early 1800s that history—meaning the trajectory of man as a political and social creature, and not the academic subject—is not haphazard, but rather evolves with purpose and will have an end. The purpose, according to Hegel, is man’s quest for freedom and the end is a political system that fulfills this quest in all its citizens. In the 1930s, the Russian-French philosopher Alexander Kojeve gave a series of lectures incorporating Hegel’s concepts into 20th-century European democratic political theory. Fukuyama essentially reargued Kojeve’s thesis (and openly credited Kojeve) in his subsequent book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992.
Fukuyama has since had a legion of critics, some who I am convinced still misunderstand his argument, but also some very learned and distinguished. In his 1993 book, Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida dismissed Fukuyama’s book as “Western triumphalism and Christian eschatology.” For the American defense establishment, however, the Fukuyama critic more widely and warmly read was Samuel Huntington, whose essay “The Clash of Civilizations” appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1993. For Huntingdon, the end of the Cold War signaled not the affirmation of a political ideology, but the loss of a transcendent ideology’s hold on the more ancient and deeply held drivers of human conflict. At least one lid had come off a boiling pot. Both communism and liberal democracy always struggled to tame the forces of cultural identity in the service of universal principles, and now that at least one of the ideologies proved a failure, vast swaths of humanity will more likely find purchase in their civilizational identity than in the principles of liberal democracy. Huntingdon predicted a new wave of conflict in the 21st century, the fault lines of which will be between ancient civilizations.
It has been more than a quarter century since the ideas of Fukuyama and Huntingdon captivated so many of us, and in that time plenty of evidence has surfaced to support both viewpoints. Fukuyama has since revisited and moderated his position to account for group identity as a more potent political force than he had anticipated. But what is hard, if not impossible, to deny is that culture still matters. Listen carefully, for example, to the speeches of Chinese President Xi Jinping. He regularly appeals to Chinese culture to help justify the party’s legitimacy. The Hong Kong Chinese in the streets defending the city’s democratic structures are traitors not to the communist party, but to China—to being Chinese. At its core, Beijing’s great-power restoration project is much about the primacy of Chinese culture. Xi aims to restore what the fictional Wang-Loh thought was dead.
Given that reality, how much should young Navy officers educate themselves on Chinese culture? Quite a lot, in my view. China, with its highly capable, modernizing navy and its grand ambitions, is the great problem of their careers. The letters of Ling and A.D. add an interesting and different way to help do that.
Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain and deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.
Featured Image: French President Emmanuel Macron, left, and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping attend a wreath laying ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe monument in Paris, March 25, 2019. (AP Photo)
