The Archive
A collection of earlier writings on history, religion, and geopolitics. These pieces reflect my broader academic interests prior to focusing on fundamental analysis and investing.
What is Realpolitik?
I always looked up to Bismarck as the greatest statesman ever—a foreign policy genius who knew exactly what political moves to make, how to calculate each move, and how each move would play out. A part of me read the books in hopes that I would understand the “secret sauce” that made him such a foreign policy genius, and I found it.
Public domain cartoon of Bismarck and Pope Pius IX during the Kulturkampf
I always looked up to Bismarck as the greatest statesman ever—a foreign policy genius who knew exactly what political moves to make, how to calculate each move, and how each move would play out. A part of me read the books in hopes that I would understand the “secret sauce” that made him such a foreign policy genius, and I found it.
The reason why Bismarck was such a foreign policy genius was because he was a man who lacked political principles. As a matter of fact, Bismarck began his political career as a Prussian conservative. A conservative in the 1800s was one who believed in most of the following principles: first, in the obedience to the political authority of a monarch, second, in the opposition to individual rights or elected representatives for governments, third, that revolutions were a political evil, and fourth, that organized religion was crucial to order in society.
Public domain illustration of the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution
Bismarck believed in the first principle, in the political authority of King Frederick Wilhelm I. But later in his career, he did not care for the other three. It was he who introduced universal suffrage in Germany, it was he who separated church from state and replaced clerical supervision in all public and private schools with state supervision, and it he who went so far as to defend political revolution. Here is Bismarck in his own words:
How many existences are there in today’s political world that have no roots in revolutionary soil? Take Spain, Portugal, Brazil, all the American Republics, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and England which bases itself on the consciousness of the Glorious Revolution of 1688…. (Bismarck: A Life, pg. 132)
This lack of principles eventually caused many of his fellow conservatives to distance themselves from him toward the latter half of his career. And it’s this lack of principles that makes Realpolitik possible. Here is a perfect illustration of this:
When Bismarck served as Prussia's envoy to the German Confederation in Frankfurt, he wrote to his conservative friend Leopold von Gerlach that it should be in Prussia’s interest to ally with the revolutionary France of Napoleon III. For a conservative of the 1800s, an alliance with a revolutionary republic—with an “illegitimate” emperor such as Napoleon III—was nothing short of scandalous. Gerlach, representing the Prussian conservatism of the day, wrote the following to Bismarck:
My political principle is, and remains, the struggle against the Revolution. You will not convince Napoleon that he is not on the side of the Revolution. He has no desire either to be anywhere else…. You say yourself that people cannot rely upon us, and yet one cannot fail to recognize that he only is to be relied on who acts according to definite principles and not according to shifting notions of interests, and so forth. (Bismarck: A Life, pgs. 131-132)
Bismarck, being no true conservative as Gerlach hinted at above, did not make decisions by any conservative principles. As a matter of fact, allying with revolutionary France was nothing but a rational calculation, one possible chess move among many for Prussia’s rise to dominance over Austria. And in a game of chess, it’s important for the player to have as many moves open to him as possible. As Bismarck observed years later:
My entire life was spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money. I could never foresee exactly whether my plan would succeed…. Politics is a thankless job because everything depends on chance and conjecture. One has to reckon with a series of probabilities and improbabilities and base one’s plans upon this reckoning. (Bismarck: A Life, pg. 130)
This kind of cold, rational calculation lies at the heart of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, which has “nothing to do with good and evil, virtue and vice; it had to do with power and self-interest.” (Bismarck: A Life, pg. 130) The power of Prussia and the self-interest of Prussia is, in a nutshell, is how Bismarck conducted his foreign policy. And France was just one chess move among many to increase the power of Prussia and to destroy the power of Austria. As Bismarck wrote to Gerlach:
You begin with the assumption that I sacrifice my principles to an individual who impresses me. I reject both the first and the second phrase in that sentence. The man does not impress me at all…. France only interests me as it affects the situation of my Fatherland, and we can only make our policy with the France that exists…. Sympathies and antipathies with regard to foreign powers and persons I cannot reconcile with my concept of duty in the foreign service of my country, neither in myself nor in others…. As long as each of us believes that a part of the chess board is closed to us by our own choice or that we have an arm tied where others can use both arms to our disadvantage, they will make use of our kindness without fear and without thanks. (Bismarck: A Life, pg. 131)
This is Realpolitik. Whereas a conservative guided by conservative principles would not ally with France, thereby closing a space in a game of chess that would otherwise be open to him, a man who lacks principles has this space open as a possibility, thereby making him a more versatile and dangerous player in the international system.
Why the Marshall Islands Made the Right Vote on Gaza at the United Nations
In last two editions of the Marshall Islands Journal, many contributors have expressed their disappointment at the RMI government in voting against a UN Resolution for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Here, I make the case that the RMI made the right vote.
Damage in Gaza Strip during October 2023 (source via Wikimedia Commons)
This newspaper article was published in the Marshall Islands Journal on November 17, 2023. Below is the full article, along with the original clipping of the article from the newspaper:
In last two editions of the Marshall Islands Journal, many contributors have expressed their disappointment at the RMI government in voting against a UN Resolution for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. I want to make the case that the RMI made the right vote.
First, there seems to be this strange idea going around on social media and even in the press that the state of Israel is “occupying” or “colonizing” the Palestinians on their rightful land. But, historically speaking, that is not true.
Map of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 (source via Wikimedia Commons)
The territory of Palestine in the early 1900s belonged to the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottomans were defeated in the First World War, the victors—Great Britain and France—governed the former Ottoman territories with supervision from the newly created League of Nations. These European nations then created the states of the Middle East that we know today, including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The Arabs of these territories didn’t even identify with these newly created borders drawn up by Europeans—the only thing they had in common was that they were all Arabs who were formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
League of Nations mandates after World War I (source via Wikimedia Commons)
But by 1917, one year before the end of the First World War, Britain’s Balfour Declaration stated its intention to support a national home for the Jews. And it was this declaration that drew the Jews to Palestine. Many Jews who were persecuted in Nazi Germany then fled to Palestine—and who could blame them? By 1939, there were already 450,000 Jews in Palestine. And after the Second World War, the world began to learn about the Holocaust: Hitler’s deliberate extermination of six million Jews by execution squads and death camps. This sympathy for the Jewish plight led the United Nations to divide Palestine into both the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab state of Palestine in 1948.
The Balfour Declaration (1917) (source via Wikimedia Commons)
Knowing all of this, how can anyone say that the Jews are occupiers or colonizers? They simply took advantage of a situation where the governors of their biblical holy land offered them refuge and the opportunity to settle in the region to have own nation—and they took full advantage of it.
Second, this war is not between Israel and Palestine; it is between Israel and Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and their main goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with one Islamic Palestinian state. They are supplied with a large number of weapons and money from Iran, whose president in 2005 described Israel as a “disgraceful blot” that “must be wiped off the map.”
Iran’s views have since not changed. After Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, a day for the Jewish Sabbath and a Jewish High Holiday, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: “We support Palestine and its struggles… This attack is the work of the Palestinians themselves, and we salute and honor the planners of this attack.”
And Hamas is to blame for why the United Nations is having such a hard time delivering aid. Israel knows that Hamas will take that aid, especially the petrol, for its military instead of using it on hospitals and water desalinization.
Since taking power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas has shown that it cares nothing for the Palestinian people. In the last 16 years, they have done nothing to alleviate the Palestinians from high levels of poverty and unemployment, and they knew that it would only be a matter of time before they were discredited by their political rival: The Palestinian Authority. The only way Hamas could gain points over their rival was to do something to make it seem as if they were making some sort of progress, and the method they chose was to attack Israel. The result is the ongoing war that has destroyed the lives of innocent civilians on both sides. But that did not seem to matter to Hamas because, to them, political power is more important than the lives of their own people.
Since Hamas cares nothing for the Palestinians, it makes no sense to send them aid in hopes that, somehow, they will use it responsibly; if anything, it sounds like wishful thinking.
Published in the Marshall Islands Journal, November 17, 2023
Review of The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
Pillsbury concludes the book discussing what a China led world order would look like in the year 2049, assuming China is successful at supplanting the USA as the world’s leading superpower—a future where internet censorship is normal, a future with significant air pollution and contamination, not to mention cancer villages, and a future where China proliferates weapons to America’s enemies for profit.
Photo by Alexander I. Velasquez (author’s copy)
Book Details
Category: Non-fiction, history, international diplomacy, national & international security
Page Count: 244 (Paperback Edition)
Year of Publication: 2015
Rating: 5/5
10-Word Summary: China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower.
About The Hundred-Year Marathon
Everything you think you know about China is probably a lie; they are a foe—not a friend. That previous sentence captures the tone as laid throughout Michael Pillsbury’s book.
For background, Pillsbury is the director of the Center for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute and has served in eight presidential administrations. He has also held senior positions in the Defense Department and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. So it’s no surprise that in the opening pages, Pillsbury notes that the CIA, the FBI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and an agency of the Defense Department reviewed the book prior to publication to ensure that no classified information would be leaked to the public. In sum, Pillsbury knows what he’s talking about when he writes about China.
The book opens up with a chapter on the false assumptions people have about China, such as that China is on the road to democracy, that China wants to be like the USA, and that China hawks are weak. He reinforces this point in the following chapter by describing the Chinese strategy during the Warring States period, lessons that include inducing complacency to avoid alerting your opponent, manipulating your opponents’ advisors, being patient and waiting decades or longer to achieve victory, avoiding being encircled by others, and never losing sight of shi: a Chinese concept that roughly means “the alignment of forces” so as to take advantage of the timing of events for the opportunity to strike or to take advantage of the enemy.
Every chapter that follows these first two chapters highlights China’s strategic use of the above strategies from its opening up with the USA beginning with Mao Zedong until the present day. Pillsbury argues that the USA is merely a tool for China, China’s ba, roughly equivalent to the word “tyrant,” that China will use to wipe out its rivals until eventually it, too, will be wiped out like the tyrants of the Warring States period. The most reliable intelligence gained from Chinese spies confirm this suspicion. As a matter of fact, Chinese history is being rewritten to cast the USA as China’s archvillain. Abraham Lincoln was nothing but an imperialist, and Saddam Hussein was, in reality, the voice of reason—or so goes the narrative portrayed by China’s government.
The Chinese government is also hard at work to prevent foreign journalists from covering any news that would be unfavorable to China in the international community, and Chinese journalists are hard at work doing their best to establish pro-China views overseas. China is also building their military strategy, what Pillsbury calls the “Assassin’s Mace,” to defeat the superior American military. This strategy includes the strengthening of cyber warfare, supporting the use of biological warfare, and building up the equipment used to destroy American satellites. Given that the USA still holds the military superiority in terms of technology and strength, China needs every asymmetrical advantage to win a hypothetical war between the two superpowers.
Pillsbury concludes the book discussing what a China led world order would look like in the year 2049, assuming China is successful at supplanting the USA as the world’s leading superpower—a future where internet censorship is normal, a future with significant air pollution and contamination, not to mention cancer villages, and a future where China proliferates weapons to America’s enemies for profit. It’s a grim thought experiment that, quite frankly, is upsetting to people such as myself who take advantage of free speech daily by simply logging on to the internet and browsing its contents without worrying that the government is keeping me from reading or watching things that go against their narrative.
What I Liked
What was striking to me was how much I couldn’t help but believe the author. Michael Pillsbury himself claims, on more than one page, that he too wanted to believe in China. Here is Pillsbury in his own words:
“Like many working in the U. S. government, I had heard the democracy story for decades. I read about it in countless books and articles. I believed in it. I wanted to believe in it. My faith was shaken in 1997, when I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of “democratic” elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no public assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue…. Violations of these rules were treated as crimes.” (Pages 8-9)
There were also more shocking revelations made by Pillsbury, claims such as top colonels in the PLA who were promoted shortly after publishing a manuscript titled Unrestricted Warfare advocating for the use of biological and chemical weapons to defeat stronger nations such as the USA. Keep in mind that The Hundred-Year Marathon was published five years before the outbreak of COVID-19, so there’s some food for thought.
Should You Read The Hundred-Year Marathon?
The ideal reader for this book is someone who is becoming skeptical about the future of Sino-American relations but is not quite over the hump. This book may just push you over edge and into the anti-China camp.
Why the Marshall Islands Should Start Thinking About World War III
Could Vladimir Putin trigger the next Great War in the Pacific? Or is Putin simply testing the West in his latest invasion?
U.S. Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
This article was published in the Marshall Islands Journal on November 11, 2022. Below is the full article, along with the original clipping of the article from the newspaper:
As the world history instructor at the College of the Marshall Islands, my students often laugh when I mention that world leaders tried to make peace with Adolf Hitler. In 1936, Hitler had marched his German troops into the Rhineland, which had then belonged to France, to take the land back after having lost it post-World War I. And the world did nothing to stop him.
Two years later in 1938, Hitler had marched his troops into Austria and annexed it as part of his Nazi empire. And again, the world did nothing to stop him.
Six months later, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland – a German populated area south of Germany in the country of Czechoslovakia. This worried world leaders, and they finally sat down with Hitler to make peace. They gave Hitler permission to take the Sudetenland, and in exchange Hitler promised peace.
But Hitler’s promises meant nothing, and the following year Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Six months later he took the western half of Poland. Just like that, Hitler had successfully swallowed up nearly half of the European map – and the world did nothing to stop him. What did this European affair mean for the Marshall Islands?
Japan’s alliance with Hitler emboldened them to bomb the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in hopes of destroying the American fleet in the Pacific. The USA declared war, and the Marshall Islands would now be involved in the battle for the Pacific.
Two atolls suffered the most during the years 1943–1944: Mile and Jaluit. Of the 185 days of recorded bombing activity in the Marshall Islands, Mile and Jaluit were bombed 51% of those days, with Jaluit being bombed every single day from March to May of 1944.
Maloelap was bombed 43% of those days and suffered the worst survival rate out of all the atolls with only 34% of the garrison surviving – counting both Japanese and Marshallese – while Wotje was bombed 35% of those days and had the second worst survival rate at 37%.
All of this war and suffering started with one man in Europe having the vision of conquering the world for his Nazi regime. So let’s learn from history and not make the mistake of thinking that what is happening in Europe cannot spill over into the Pacific.
Vladimir Putin has been swallowing up the European map: he took Chechnya in 2000, he annexed Crimea in 2014, and now he wants Ukraine. He also has a growing alliance with China and North Korea.
My honest belief is that Putin is invading Ukraine to test the West, and he is not bluffing when he threatens to use nuclear weapons. If the West doesn’t respond with strength, then this may embolden Russia even further and embolden China to invade Taiwan, sowing the seeds for World War III.
RiṂajeḷ should start planning now what they would do in the case of a new global war taking place in the Pacific. As for me, I would probably enlist in the military to join the fight, as I don’t think I would be able to teach with a sound mind while the world is at war. I believe the world faces the most dangerous decade since the 1940s, and only time will tell if the world can remain at peace for much longer.
Published in the Marshall Islands Journal (Nov. 11, 2022)