ParametersPub Date : 2017-12-22DOI: 10.1353/book62544
Rebecca R. Moore, D. Coletta, Nicholas Burns
{"title":"NATO's Return to Europe: Engaging Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond","authors":"Rebecca R. Moore, D. Coletta, Nicholas Burns","doi":"10.1353/book62544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/book62544","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"47 1","pages":"137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45961372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2016-12-22DOI: 10.4135/9781506335360
S. Gottlieb
{"title":"Debating Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Conflicting Perspectives on Causes, Contexts, and Responses-Second Edition","authors":"S. Gottlieb","doi":"10.4135/9781506335360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4135/9781506335360","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"46 1","pages":"132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70645709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2016-09-22DOI: 10.5860/choice.194676
P. W. Reynolds
{"title":"Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception","authors":"P. W. Reynolds","doi":"10.5860/choice.194676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194676","url":null,"abstract":"Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception By Brian Massumi Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015 320 pages $24.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Brian Massumi's latest addition to our understanding of power may be the most important addition to strategy since On War. To Massumi, an ontopower is power that is able to alter perception about a chain of effects, altering the future of the original (41). It is, as its Greek prefix would indicate, a living power. Massumi's protagonist is the idea of preemption as strategy, and he describes in his book the underlying assumptions on which preemption becomes the only response available to threats. Preemption, because it occurs before the threat emerges, must have as its ontological premise the ability to define a threat after its destruction has occurred. Preemption, in its truest sense, requires perceptions bent to fit the action. In other words, what could be a threat should be attacked because it could attack you. Preemption changes premise from fact to potential. What Massumi does very well is translate a philosophy of action into epistemological methods. He uses the word \"operationalization,\" familiar to military planners, to describe this process. This word means \"to make into an action.\" True to its assumptions, ontopower requires descriptions of the environmental system as full of threats. What may be surprising to some, the two dominant descriptive paradigms of modern life, neoconservatism and neoliberalism (43), synthesize a need for this power, one that benefits from an ability to reorganize the complexity of the environment. One militarizes the environment and the other benefits from the creative destruction of the capitalist order. It is in this way preemption, an ontology, becomes epistemology. To Massumi, the juxtopostion of deterrence and preemption creates a new era in security studies. Deterrence is policy; it is the rationalization of competition between peers who are against unitary actors. Preemption supposes there is no benefit for rationalizing. The Cold War was deterrence, but we have entered a new era where threats require responses faster than policy can provide. Massumi makes the point, if our actions create the enemy, then preemption only requires a threat because the threat could become an enemy. But, preemption disturbs equilibriums. It creates reactions that cannot be predicted, and uncertainty is a vague, uneasy threat, and so on. One does not preempt something you can deter, and you do not deter something that can be preempted. Preemption is the logical conclusion of the liberal state's inability to provide security, what Massumi calls the \"perception attack. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"9 1","pages":"125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71030239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2016-09-22DOI: 10.5860/choice.193565
J. Warren
{"title":"Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution","authors":"J. Warren","doi":"10.5860/choice.193565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193565","url":null,"abstract":"Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution By David L. Preston New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015 480 pages $29.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Reading terrain in relation to the adversary is often the key to tactical victory. It also makes for the beginnings of a first-rate military history, as David L. Preston demonstrates in his profound Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution. Preston paddled, hiked, and drove his way to an excellent analysis of the maneuver and decision-making of the French, Indians, British, and colonists during this epic campaign in the 1755 American wilderness. His on-the-ground treatment of events renders this study the definitive work of the first conventional British ground operation of the French and Indian War, and as Preston shows, with wide-ranging implications for Europe in the Seven Years' War, and eventually, the American Revolutionary War. Hesitant at first to purchase what I considered yet another treatment of this infamous engagement, Preston's excellent lecture at the Ohio Country Conference convinced me to rethink my impression. I was more than rewarded. Braddock's Defeat is one of the most thorough military history accounts of any topic, combining detailed strategic, operational, and tactical examinations with the best of modern military history's cultural considerations. In so doing, Preston revives Braddock's reputation as a sensible military man, sensitive to the need to cultivate indigenous allies, while placating the infighting colonists. The Indians themselves become the main agent of victory for the battle, acting in conjunction with French officers and cadets in crushing the British flankers and pouring deadly enfilading volleys into Braddock's beleaguered column. Preston's uncovering of rare Indian voices in the record adds brilliantly to this analysis. Braddock's defeat was a matter of initial Indian success in an ambush, in a fashion similar to what I have discovered occurred repeatedly in the Great Narragansett War (traditionally King Philip's War). An initial accurate volley into a European column negotiating difficult terrain by a large number of concealed Indians usually led to a rapid and decisive Indian victory. Although it may have been more useful in the section about the battle itself, the counterfactual allusion to how Braddock might have reacted tactically is a critical piece of Preston's analysis (315-316). Subsequent Indian fighters, like Henry Bouquet, Robert Rogers, and \"Mad\" Anthony Wayne, employed such tactics against Native Americans, perhaps making good Braddock's supposed final words, \"We shall better know how to deal with them another time\" (273). As with many commands unprepared for the enemy, there was no next time for Braddock and many of his troops who were killed in action and mutilated in accord with Indian cultural affinities in war. Preston does not conclude with new consideration of Indian mater","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"20 1","pages":"135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71029485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2016-03-22DOI: 10.5860/choice.189192
da Cruz, J. Arimateia
{"title":"Iran's Strategic Penetration of Latin America","authors":"da Cruz, J. Arimateia","doi":"10.5860/choice.189192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189192","url":null,"abstract":"Iran's Strategic Penetration of Latin America Edited by Joseph M. Humire and Ilan Berman Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014 142 pages $75.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Iran's influence in Latin America and its national security implications have finally caught the attention of US policy makers in Washington. This greater interaction would go unnoticed were it not for the partnerships established between Iran and some of the Latin American countries. Ahmadinejad's political goal was to establish a policy toward Latin America that was anti-American. As he has publicly stated, \"Tehran is pursuing a strategy that promotes its own ideology and influence in Latin America at Washington's expense.\" This foreign policy posture creates what the late Hugo Chavez referred to as \"the axis of unity\" foreign policy against the United States' \"imperialist\" foreign policy. In one of Ahmadinejad's many trips to Latin America in 2009, Chavez referred to him as a \"gladiator of anti-imperialist struggles.\" In Iran's Strategic 'Penetration of Patin America, Joseph M. Humire and Ilan Berman call our attention to what they consider to be the most complex security challenge in the Western Hemisphere today, which is how deeply the Islamic Republic of Iran has penetrated the internal affairs of Latin America and what it means from a foreign policy perspective to the United States. The book is divided into fourteen chapters, each addressing Iran's relations with a specific country in Latin America. Within the book the authors focus on the organization known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) founded by the late Hugo Chavez. Humire and Berman argue Iran's expansion into areas not traditionally associated with its sphere of influence requires a global response since it represents an imminent threat to the rest of the world. America should play particular attention to Iran's expanding influence since most of Iran's diplomatic meddling is taking place in the US's backyard. Iran's Latin American partners are part of the so-called \"pink tide\" that came to power between the years of 1998 and 2009. The \"pink tide\" nations are united by their strong contempt of Washington's policies and anti-American sentiment. Despite the fact that the \"pink tide\" did not have a clear-cut ideology, they were united in opposition to the Washington Consensus, a laundry list of demands imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its economic policy toward the region. An alliance between the \"pink tide\" nations of Latin American and Iran represents an alternative to the United States and its intrusive foreign policy dictates. The book highlights how Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Colombia have become pawns in the Iranian chess game in its attempt to find an alternative to its economic and diplomatic isolation imposed by the United States resulting from the passage of the Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012. Berman","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"46 1","pages":"141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2015-12-22DOI: 10.5860/choice.194006
Ellen L. Haring
{"title":"Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth That Women Can't Fight","authors":"Ellen L. Haring","doi":"10.5860/choice.194006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194006","url":null,"abstract":"Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can't Fight By Megan MacKenzie Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 200 pages, $28.000 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mr. Megan MacKenzie's newest book, Beyond the Band of Brothers, argues the exclusion of women from combat positions is rooted in ideas of male essentialism that are based on a myth. She convincingly debunks the notion \"the precious and indefinable band of brothers effect so essential to winning in close combat would be irreparably compromised within mixed-gender infantry squads.\" According to MacKenzie, when General Scales asserts that all of \"our senior ground-force leaders, as well as generations of former close combat veterans from all of our previous wars, are virtually united on one point,\" namely, that combat units would be \"irreparably compromised\" by women, what he is admitting is they have all been duped by a myth of their own making. MacKenzie begins with a historical analysis of the establishment of the \"band of brothers\" myth. Originally a literary creation of Shakespeare subsequently perpetuated by Darwin and Freud (though Freud admitted it was not intended to be taken seriously), it became a commonly accepted, rarely questioned, \"truth\" about the nature of male-only bonding. MacKenzie shows how this myth subsequently informed and sustained laws and later military policies regarding servicewomen's suitability for combat positions. Ultimately, women's exclusion had nothing to do with women's actual ability to fight; rather, it had everything to do with men protecting their position as exceptional, essential, and elite. She begins by chronicling the path to how we arrived at such a policy, and how it was sustained, even as evidence mounted showing women could, and were indeed successfully integrating in fighting units. MacKenzie details the depth of the self-deception the US military engaged in, most obviously after 9/11 as it prosecuted two wars with a growing number of women in ever-expanding roles. What made the exclusion policy increasingly untenable was the way military commanders themselves circumvented the policy to accomplish their missions. For example, co-location restrictions were violated almost from the outset, while the practice of \"attaching,\" (in order to avoid rules that forbade \"assigning\") women to direct ground combat units became commonplace. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71029960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ParametersPub Date : 2015-06-22DOI: 10.5860/choice.185067
W. Terrill
{"title":"The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century's First Muslim Power","authors":"W. Terrill","doi":"10.5860/choice.185067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185067","url":null,"abstract":"The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century's First Muslim Power By Soner Cagaptay Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2014, 168 pages $25.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Soner Cagaptay's study on Turkey delivers significantly more than the title implies. While the author unquestionably addresses Turkey's rising global role and vastly strengthened economy, he also provides insightful analysis of Turkish social and political transformation since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002. This transformation centers on what the author describes as the end of Kemalism as the Turkish guiding ideology. Kemalism is the vision of Turkey's modern founder, Kemal Ataturk, for his country's social and political future. It is best described as a European-oriented, top-down Westernization and secularization approach, which also includes a special domestic role for the military in protecting secular democracy. According to Cagaptay, the AKP has now moved Turkey into a post-Kemalist phase as Ataturk's political vision is increasingly set aside, and the government establishes a greater role for Islam in the public sphere. He describes some of the new AKP policies as government-imposed social conservatism and top-down social engineering. To illustrate this point, the author notes government institutions now openly discriminate against secular Turks in hiring and promotions, and this situation is particularly problematic for women who choose not to wear the headscarf. The architect of this vastly changed Turkey is Tayyip Erdogan, who served as prime minister for 11 years and then became Turkey's first elected president in August 2014. Erdogan and his party have been able win a series of consecutive national elections by drawing on the strong support of voters from struggling low income neighborhoods, where religion is often taken very seriously. Many residents of these neighborhoods find Erdogan an appealing figure due to both his policy positions and his childhood in Kasimpasa, a tough, low income, Istanbul neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, many AKP supporters also resent their country's secular and Westernized elites epitomized by the Republican People's Party (CHP). Moreover, the increased strength of the economy allows the AKP government to invest in education, health care, and other social programs that benefit the poor, thereby consolidating the loyalties of many low income voters. In this environment, Erdogan is poised to remain the dominant figure in Turkish politics despite his decision to change offices in response to internal AKP rules on term limits for prime minister. As prime minister, Erdogan, like Ataturk, used the force of his personality to impose his worldview on Turkish society. He has also governed in an increasingly authoritarian manner, and the AKP leadership has targeted some of its most assertive critics including media figures and court officials for whatever punishment it can direct at them. Steep fines have been leveled at the inde","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"120-123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71024552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}