Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today

Abstract

PROCONSULS: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today By Carnes Lord Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 254 pages $30.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] First, understand that this is a book about a unique form of leadership at the strategic level, in the words of the author a "generic political phenomenon seemingly never to have been systematically studied and which remains a neglected--indeed, virtually an unrecognized--topic of scholarly investigation and analysis." Thus, as the title states, the author's attempt is to provide such a systematic inquiry into the role of our "proconsuls." Skirting scholarly debates about an American empire while using their language, he further defines: "the core of the proconsular function is political-military leadership. . .that in the best of cases rises to statesmanship; its chief challenge is the coordination of civil and military authority in the periphery and the alignment with political-military leadership at the center." Few authors could attempt such a broad inquiry into uncharted scholarship, but Professor Lord is imminently qualified to do so, and as we shall see, does so with remarkably fine results. With two earned doctorates (Yale-classics; Cornell-political science), over a decade in the national-security policy arena in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s (National Security Council; Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs; Distinguished Fellow at the National Defense University), and three previous books in the field, he was uniquely qualified for such an inquiry. While the background is drawn from Rome, the focus of the book is clearly on America as a modern democracy and great power--"an effort has been made to include at least some discussion of all of the most important figures who can plausibly be identified as proconsuls in the properly functional sense of the term, from Spanish-American War to the present [2012]." The most prominent among them are General Leonard Wood and William Howard Taft in Cuba and the Philippines in the early twentieth century; MacArthur in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea from 1936-1951; General Lucius Clay in Germany in the late 1940's; the intelligence operative Edward Lansdale in the Philippines and Vietnam in the early 1950s; Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Maxwell Taylor in Vietnam in the early 1960s; General Creighton Abrams, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby in Vietnam in the late 1960 and early 1970s; General Wesley Clark in the Balkans in the late 1990s; Ambassador L. Paul Bremer in Iraq in 2003-04; and General David Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 [to 2011], Each era, along with its American proconsuls, is presented in the richly documented detail expected from an eminent scholar and practitioner of our national security affairs. But to this reader it is not the individual analyses that are most informative for our work today and into the future. Rather, it is the synthesis that Professor Lord brings in the final chapters) when he gets to the "so what?" question: "Is proconsular leadership a good thing?" His main conclusion is unremarkable in its barest statement--" ... that delegated political-military leadership had been a significant independent variable in American national security decision-making from the end of the nineteenth century to the present; or more simply stated, that it has made a strategic difference. …