Kissinger Chair Bradford Lee arrived at the Kluge Center this fall with an ambitious research question: were the results of one hundred years of American military interventions in foreign conflicts worth the costs of achieving them? He sat down with Jason Steinhauer to discuss his research, in particular his analysis of World War I, a focus of his tenure at the Library.
Brad, yours is a fascinating and complex project, to examine 100 years of American military intervention in foreign conflicts and assess the results. As a first question, perhaps you could tell us what led you to this research question.
The project was a convergence of different things. First, there were the withdrawals of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. We could be looking at very disappointing outcomes in both places. I was aware that in modern American history, after each period of major warfare, even after World War II, there had been a strong wave of disillusionment over the results that our efforts had produced. I saw an opportunity to reach well beyond an academic audience and address a much larger audience, providing a longer-term perspective on all the major military interventions from 1917 to 2017.
I was also aware of the major number 100. Many other historians, especially in Britain, wrote on 1914 in 2014. For Americans, of course, the big centennial will come in 2017, 100 years after U.S. entry into World War I.
You’ve said that this is an examination of decision makers making decisions in war, not a retelling of the wars themselves. Could you expound on that: what sources are you examining and which have you chosen to omit?
I’ll be drilling deeply into what I regard as the most important policy, strategy, and operational decisions made by American leaders in World War I, World War II, the Cold War (with Korea and Vietnam treated as theaters in the larger war), and the Wars of the Muslim Rimland (as I have dubbed the warfare from 1979 on). But, of course, all the decisions had a context rooted in the past and consequences playing out in the future, so there will be a broad narrative sweep to the book. I do not want to rehash the story of each war. I want not only to bring to bear my own intellectual experience of straddling the very different worlds of historians, theorists, and practitioners, but also to get as close as I can to what was on the minds of the key wartime decision makers of the past century.
What are some of the decisions made by American military leaders that you are re-examining?
For World War I, I hope to throw new light both on the role of Admiral William Sowden Sims (the U.S. naval commander in Europe) in the critically important Anglo-American decision to counter German U-boats by convoying merchant ships and on the startling objection by General John J. Pershing (commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France) to President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to negotiate an armistice with Germany in the fall of 1918.
For World War II, I will take a new look at the two-pronged offensives of 1943-1944 in both the Pacific (under General MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific and Admiral Nimitz in the Central Pacific) and Europe (in the Mediterranean and northern France). In particular, I’ll raise new questions about the decision to follow up the invasion of Sicily with an invasion of the Italian mainland and point out the merits of a more direct island-hopping route to southern France.
For Korea and Vietnam I have some fresh things to say about offensives that were undertaken in 1950 and 1965 and not un