Latest news with #Machiavelli
The Hindu
23-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
The reality of the changing dimensions of warfare
Machiavelli believed that in politics, one is guided solely by the harsh realities of political life, viz., a struggle for power and survival. Today, we are at a point in history when old rules that once governed international politics appear to be in terminal decline. Alongside this, the means to achieve dominance are undergoing fundamental changes. To today's power brokers, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (that sanctified the construct of a nation state), and the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 have little or no meaning. For most, new weapons are the be-all and end-all of modern politics. The year 2025 is also one that celebrates eight decades of seemingly relative peace following the end of the Second World War, though the years in between did see, and had seen, several conflicts, though not on the scale of the Second World War. For many, even more than the defeat and decline of Nazi Germany, it appeared that it was the apparent invincibility of the United States (wielding the mighty atom bomb — two of which were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945) — that seemed to usher in a new era of peace. Concepts such as a 'rules-based international order' also gained traction at this time. This was, however, at best an illusion of peace, and more of a 'riddle wrapped in an enigma' than the reality. A succession of wars of a lesser magnitude that continued to occur across the world — beginning with Korea, Vietnam and North Africa, not excluding parts of Europe itself — confirmed this. It reinforced a truth embedded in a seminal piece of advice often given to diplomats based in the United Kingdom, viz., 'do not believe anything anyone tells you unless you have checked it yourself'. Already by the 1990s, many of the fundamentals that prevailed had begun to be questioned. The end of the Cold War looked more like the beginning of a new era of conflict. Quite a few new conflicts had begun to emerge which had the potential to shatter any illusion that peace was at hand. Alongside this, it was increasingly becoming evident that a new era in global warfare was emerging. Few, however, admitted that the world was about to enter a new era of conflict. The impact of 9/11 One of the more widely read articles recently harps on the End of Modernity and talks of the current state of the world in some detail. It lists the year 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, as the beginning of a new era in global politics. For many others, however, it was September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers in New York were attacked by terrorists, that seemed to usher in a new beginning. Admittedly, the events of 9/11 did begin a new chapter in global affairs, but it was hardly the curtain-raiser, or even indicative, of the fundamental changes about to take place in the future. What 9/11, perhaps, did was to give the U.S. and certain other nations an opportunity to invade other states based on their perception of what was right and wrong. It was not yet obvious, however, whether the basic fundamentals of conflict would undergo any radical change, and the implications it could have for future generations. The evidence for this is only now beginning to unfold. Even so, the catastrophic consequences of the change are yet to be fully understood or comprehended. For this, perhaps, one needs to go to the early 1990s, and more specifically to 1991, to the impact which the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm caused at the time, and also its impact on future wars. It was in effect the first modern-era war which would mark a 'dramatic acceleration of warfare and the transformative synthesis of its operative, tactical and strategic elements', and possibly transforming the nature of war and battlefield doctrines itself. It was also, perhaps, the first instance of three-dimensional strikes on a 'preferred' enemy. Even then, it is only very recently that strategists and military planners have become aware of how transformative it was and the impact it would have in the years to come. Ukraine, West Asia and Operation Sindoor At the time, the world was only riveted on the unrivalled power, economic, political and military, of the U.S. It has taken the war (since 2022) between Russia and a Ukraine backed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to fundamentally revise the thinking of war planners and get them to realise how the nature of war itself had changed beyond anything seen in the past. The war in Ukraine and in West Asia have propounded many new doctrines that are very different from those seen previously in the annals of warfare. The very nature of war, it would seem, as also the conduct of warfare had changed, or is changing. Today's wars bear little resemblance to what was seen in the past. Automation has become an essential feature of modern conflicts. The extensive use of drones (with several variations such as drones to gather intelligence and conduct precision strikes; drones able to operate semi-autonomously employing image recognition algorithms to identify high-priority targets, together with 'loitering munitions') have altered the nature of warfare beyond recognition. The India-Pakistan conflict in May 2025 helped provide some glimpses of the fundamental changes seen in modern warfare. Unlike the earlier India-Pakistan conflicts, the conflict this time featured fixed wing and several other kinds of drones, together with 'loitering munitions'. Fighter aircraft were a critical element to ensure air superiority and carry out precision strikes. Also, seen were advanced 'air-to-air missiles', supplemented and complemented with highly accurate GPS-guided and laser-guided bombs. The BrahMos missile was in place and reportedly also used on at least one occasion. Pakistan, for its part, made use of China-supplied PL-15 missiles and also Turkish-supplied Songar drones. Modern warfare, however, entails much more than the mere use of highly sophisticated weaponry. It extends to tactics as well. Militaries are moving beyond traditional hierarchies, to advanced network-centric warfare. The advent of cyber and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen battlefields morph into complex multi-domain conflict zones, involving advanced technologies, AI and cyber warfare methodologies. The use of hypersonic weapons capable of travelling at speeds greater than Mach-5 also adds a further critical dimension to the current arms race and to the new forms of warfare. All told, digital strategies and autonomous systems are tending to make traditional concepts of how battles are won, viz., through use of overwhelming physical force, outdated. Future warfare is increasingly set to become digitally autonomous and interconnected. India needs to adapt Hence, the message is loud and clear — and should be to one and all. We are entering a new era of technological warfare. India must adapt rapidly to keep pace with the changes taking place. Incidentally, it also raises questions about India's existing and established military modernisation plans. These may need to be completely revised and revamped. Perhaps the relevance of many existing tenders for certain categories of weapons may require to be reconsidered. Overall, there is considerable room for a rethink about India's future defence procurement plans. China has already produced, and has in place, huge volumes of indigenously manufactured platforms (fighter jets, the J-10 and the J-20 as well as the fifth generation fighter). China is now poised to produce its sixth generation fighter. Available information suggests that India is putting its faith in existing indigenous manufacture and continuing to procure more Rafale fighter jets from France. Clearly, the indigenous development and manufacture of missiles and aircraft are way behind schedule. What is pertinent is that with the emergence of high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned aerial vehicles that are essential for modern warfare, there is an overwhelming need for India to rethink its defence modernisation plans. Diversification of India's military hardware has become critically important. This does have a direct impact on India's capability to fight future wars, including against Pakistan or China, or worse, a two-front war. M.K. Narayanan is a former Director, Intelligence Bureau, a former National Security Adviser, and a former Governor of West Bengal
National Post
24-06-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Anthony Koch: Sometimes, war is the answer
Article content The American Civil War was not the result of insufficient compromise. It was the inevitable clash between two incompatible moral orders. No committee could reconcile slavery with freedom. The matter had to be settled by force. Article content And the 20th century speaks even louder. The Second World War resulted from the failure to confront aggression when it was in its infancy. Peace in our time gave us war in our streets. Hitler was not appeased, he was emboldened. And when the reckoning finally came, it did not arrive through dialogue. It arrived through tanks, fleets and firebombs. It arrived because it had to. Article content Diplomacy, in truth, does not substitute for war. It follows it. Negotiation is not what ends conflict. Victory is. The treaties of Westphalia, Versailles and Camp David did not avert war, they formalized its outcome. Even today, peace agreements only work when enforced by the fear of what happens if they collapse. As Machiavelli warned, 'War cannot be avoided; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.' Article content Article content We may prefer the language of compromise, but the world often speaks another tongue. As Thucydides wrote, 'The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.' That is not an endorsement, it's a warning. Those who forget it do not abolish war, they only ensure that when it comes, it comes on someone else's terms. Article content Even now, the pattern repeats. The rise of revanchist powers — Russia, Iran, China — was not provoked by the West being too forceful. It was enabled by the West being too timid. Russia did not invade Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine because NATO expanded. It did so because the West shrank. Article content Iran did not radicalize because it was cornered, but because we left its ambitions unchecked. And China threatens Taiwan not because it's afraid of war, but because it no longer believes the West is willing to fight one. Article content Israel's recent campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah offers a current, unmistakable example. For years, western commentators wrung their hands about the risks of escalation. But a low-intensity, perpetual and asymmetric war was already being fought. Iran had been waging it with drones, rockets and proxies. Article content Article content It was only when Israel struck back with precision and force, eliminating key Iranian military leaders and humiliating Hezbollah's command structure, that the region began to shift. Article content Suddenly, even hostile actors started co-operating, allowing Israel to use their airspace and shooting down Iranian missiles, to contain further escalation. Why? Because war, judiciously applied, imposed clarity where diplomacy had only bought delay. Article content War, in such cases, is not madness. It is realism. It is not cruelty. It is consequence. And those who think it's obsolete are not pacifists — they are amateurs. Article content The anti-war camp today is full of high-minded rhetoric and low-grade intellect. Its adherents conflate comfort with virtue, safety with wisdom. But the iron law of history is simple: peace must be secured, not assumed. And where irreconcilable visions of power and order collide, war is not a detour, it is the road itself. Article content Article content Article content
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Israel's war against Iran is a gamble - and to pay off it can't afford to miss
"You come at the king, you best not miss," says Omar Little, channelling Machiavelli, in the US crime series The Wire. But the same principle applies to Israel's decision to attack Iran. Its war is a gamble - to pay off, it must be entirely successful. It cannot afford to miss. That may seem a strange thing to say as things stand. seems to be hitting its targets with devastating accuracy. Live updates: Trump says Iran 'want to talk' Take the stunning campaign of decapitation: Israeli intelligence correspondent Ronen Bergman reports that Israel has developed the ability to monitor 's top officials "in real time". That fearsome power is being wielded with awesome effect. Iran's military and intelligence commanders are being traced and eliminated one by one - 20 of them in the first night alone. The destruction of Iran's air defences is also on the mark. It has left Iran's skies open to Israeli jets to destroy target after target with pinpoint accuracy. The mission is to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, but also it seems the regime's means of repression and control. Read more: To be absolutely sure of success, Israel needs the regime to fall. It must destroy both Iran's ability to develop the bomb, but more importantly, its will to do so. Fail on either front, and Iran's leaders will prioritise building a nuclear weapon. They will have to, so they can defend themselves better next time. Their ability to build the bomb will be impossible to destroy completely, however massive the munitions Israel puts into the centrifuge halls of Natanz and Fordow. The Iranian nuclear programme is too far developed. They have the knowledge and expertise. For as many nuclear scientists Israel kills, there are their students to replace them. And the technology is in their favour. As one western source told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper over the weekend: "They have knowledge about the plant centrifuges. "They don't need as many centrifuges as they used to. They can build a small plant somewhere, heavily fortified underground, maybe even in less than three years." At some point, the Israelis will need to end their campaign. The Iranians' desire to build the bomb will then be redoubled among what's left of their regime. The capacity to do so will have been degraded, but the know-how will remain. Toppling the regime will be the surest way of achieving Israel's aims if it ushers in a replacement not determined to go nuclear. Israel knows that and has been going after people and places essential to the regime's apparatus of internal control and repression. Read more: It has been attacking energy infrastructure, too, knowing soaring energy prices may fuel social unrest and dissent. Expect those efforts to bring down the ayatollahs to intensify - Israel has come for the king and cannot afford to miss.
Sky News
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Israel's war against Iran is a gamble - and to pay off it can't afford to miss
"You come at the king, you best not miss," says Omar Little, channelling Machiavelli, in the US crime series The Wire. But the same principle applies to Israel's decision to attack Iran. It's war is a gamble - to pay off, it must be entirely successful. It cannot afford to miss. That may seem a strange thing to say as things stand. Israel seems to be hitting its targets with devastating accuracy. Take the stunning campaign of decapitation: Israeli intelligence correspondent Ronen Bergman reports that Israel has developed the ability to monitor Iran 's top officials "in real time". That fearsome power is being wielded with awesome effect. Iran's military and intelligence commanders are being traced and eliminated one by one - 20 of them in the first night alone. The destruction of Iran's air defences is also on the mark. It has left Iran's skies open to Israeli jets to destroy target after target with pinpoint accuracy. The mission is to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, but also it seems the regime's means of repression and control. 3:47 To be absolutely sure of success, Israel needs the regime to fall. It must destroy both Iran's ability to develop the bomb, but more importantly, its will to do so. Fail on either front, and Iran's leaders will prioritise building a nuclear weapon. They will have to, so they can defend themselves better next time. 2:12 Their ability to build the bomb will be impossible to destroy completely, however massive the munitions Israel puts into the centrifuge halls of Natanz and Fordow. The Iranian nuclear programme is too far developed. They have the knowledge and expertise. For as many nuclear scientists Israel kills, there are their students to replace them. 0:24 And the technology is in their favour. As one western source told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper over the weekend: "They have knowledge about the plant centrifuges. "They don't need as many centrifuges as they used to. They can build a small plant somewhere, heavily fortified underground, maybe even in less than three years." 1:36 At some point, the Israelis will need to end their campaign. The Iranians' desire to build the bomb will then be redoubled among what's left of their regime. The capacity to do so will have been degraded, but the know-how will remain. Toppling the regime will be the surest way of achieving Israel's aims if it ushers in a replacement not determined to go nuclear. Israel knows that and has been going after people and places essential to the regime's apparatus of internal control and repression. It has been attacking energy infrastructure, too, knowing soaring energy prices may fuel social unrest and dissent.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, , is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word 'astutia' — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
