[quote]Varqanir wrote:
And if you want to be President of the United States, you have to have first risen to the rank of at least Lieutenant Colonel, through the enlisted ranks, in a combat MOS, and have proven combat experience.
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I do agree that the executive and legislative branches are overly represented by Ivy League trained lawyers, but I would broaden your Lieutenant Colonel requirement to include the diplomatic, intelligence, and national security communities. So at least GS-12 or FS-03. I believe that limiting POTUS eligibility to former field grade combat arms officers would needlessly narrow the talent pool, to the detriment of overall statecraft. The techniques of statecraft in the realm of foreign policy include propaganda, diplomacy, economic statecraft, military statecraft, and intelligence. Statesmen should be well-versed in the fundamentals of all this techniques, and be a subject matter expert in at least one.
To view statecraft purely in military terms or as a dichotomy between war and diplomacy is a fundamental error. The next section is an example of the hazards of emphasizing military statecraft (and its practitioners) in the pursuit of a state’s grand strategy. The most famous treatise on statecraft is arguably Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. In view of the mercantalists’ emphasis on power and the national interest, one might expect Machiavelli to have embraced their views. Not so. Machiavelli seems to have had little interest in economic statecraft of any kind. Shortly before writing “The Prince”, he wrote as follows to a friend:
“Fortune has decreed that, as I do not know know how to reason either about the art of silk or the art of wool, either about profits or about losses, it befits me to reason about the state.”
Albert Hirschman interprets this comment as revealing “the complete failure of Machiavelli to perceive any connection between economics and politics.” The content of “The Prince” lends support to Hirshman’s view of Machiavelli. Machiavelli may have been the first political scientist, but he certainty wasn’t the first political economist.
In considering how the strength of states should be measured, the discussion is cast in military terms. In considering the duties of a prince, he advises him to “have no other aim or thought . . . but war and its organization and discipline, for that is the only art that is necessary to one that commands.” Clearly, military techniques of statecraft dominate Machiavelli’s thought. In my opinion, his parochial treatment of statecraft, as learned and influential as it was and remains, represents the most salient flaw of his work.
In the “Discourses” Machiavelli attacks the widely held mercantalist view that “money is the sinews of war”, a position that is widely accepted among international relations theorists today. Five hundred years later from Machiavelli’s time, the role of economic statecraft has become even more important in the foreign policies of states.
If the position of POTUS is limited to field grade combat arms officers, I believe that the United States will unnecessarily limit the pool of talent that could serve the nation competently, to the detriment of the overall statecraft of the United States.
