Harlan K. Ullman - A Handful of Bullets: How the Murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Still Menaces the Peace

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

2014 by Harlan K. Ullman

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Ullman, Harlan.

A handful of bullets : how the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand still menaces the peace / Harlan K. Ullman.

1 online resource.

Includes index.

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ISBN 978-1-61251-792-6 (epdf)--ISBN 978-1-61251-792-6 (epub)--ISBN 978-1-61251-792-6 (mobi)--ISBN 978-1-61251-799-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. World politics--21st century. 2. World politics--20th century. 3. World War, 1914-1918--Influence. 4. United States--Politics and government. 5. United States--Foreign relations. 6. United States--Strategic aspects. 7. Strategy. I. Title. II. Title: How the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand still menaces the peace.

D863

327.1--dc23

2014043467

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First printing

Contents

W riting a foreword for A Handful of Bullets is a particular pleasure. First, this is a must-read book with highly provocative and captivating ideas, analyses, and recommendations. Second, and I shall return to this theme, the call for a twenty-first-century strategic mind-set is both a serious challenge and a necessity if the United States is to remain a global leader.

Harlan Ullman is well known as a sharp and clear-eyed observer of global events, and his work on shock and awe is widely regarded as fundamental to understanding twenty-first-century geopolitics. I have known and followed his work closely for several decades and am proud to pen a foreword to this fascinating volume.

The absolute necessity for a new strategic mind-set has been made clear over the course of a hundred years of history dating back to June 28, 1914, and the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on the back streets of Sarajevo at the hands of Gavrilo Princip that precipitated the First World War. The book argues that September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., have become the new June 28 and Osama bin Laden the twenty-first-century equivalent of Gavrilo Princip.

Harlan posits four new Horsemen of the Apocalypse as arising over the past century as the major dangers and threats to global peace, prosperity, and stability. I shall focus only on the most dangerous riderfailed and failing government, evident from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, with Brussels and Washington in between. And over the past years, I have had particularly close association with Afghanistan, Brussels, and Washington in my previous assignment as Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

The future of Afghanistan, and for that matter of most states, rests in the ability to govern. Nothing has been more difficult during our more than dozen years in Afghanistan than trying to help the Afghan people bring a system of fair, free, and open government to that war-torn country. And quite frankly, as I look at our own government and its failure to address some of the most fundamental issues we face economically, politically, and socially, as well as regarding our security and well-being, I find A Handful of Bullets a powerful diagnosis of what ails us and what needs to be done.

Not all of Harlans tough medicine will be easily swallowed, nor do I agree with it all. But this book offers some unconventional ideas that can spark a debate with authority, from the idea of mandatory voting to a Sarbanes-Oxleylike law for Congress.

Here you will find ideas about how to structure our national defense, demand accountability from national leaders, and structure U.S. foreign policy to achieve best advantage in a difficult and demanding international world. It offers ideas that challenge much of conventional thinking and in that sense serves us all best.

Adm. James Stavridis, USN (Ret.)

T he Great Waror, the war to end all wars, as promised by President Woodrow Wilsonwas neither great nor ultimately conclusive. Precipitated by the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, World War I demolished the order established by the Congress of Vienna, an order that had maintained the peace in Europe for almost a century. The ensuing carnage laid the foundations for a second world war and a cold war that followed.

World War I also left in its catastrophic wake three transformational legacies that remain largely unnoticed today. These legacies have provoked and will provoke massive and even tectonic change to the international order. But containing, mitigating, and preventing these disruptions from exploding into major crises will prove no less difficult a challenge than did restraining the forces that ignited the chaos and violence of the last century.

The first legacy would create an excess of potential archdukes and an abundance of bullets, any combination of which could detonate a regional or global crisis. The second began the unraveling of the Westphalian system of state-centric politics that had been in place since 1648. And the third was to seat Four New Horsemen of the Apocalypse as the major threats and challenges to global peace and prosperity. The four riders are failed or failing government; economic despair, disparity, and dislocation; radical ideologies; and environmental calamity.

In a sentence, these legacies would make Osama bin Laden into a modern-day version of Gavrilo Princip, the archdukes assassin, and turn September 11 into an event like June 28, 1914, but in many different and frightening ways. Instead of using a Beretta 9-mm pistol, bin Laden orchestrated the crashing of three airliners into New Yorks Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., starting a global war on terror.

This book tells this story.

Unfortunately, our current strategic mind-set in place to deal with the twenty-first century remains firmly anchored in the past. That mind-set must change if aspirations for peace and prosperity are to be met with decisive and effective actions.

Hope is not a strategy. But we must hope that politicians and publics will finally recognize that engaging mans better angels rests on thinking and not spending, talking, or politicking our way clear of dangera wish that will require more than divine intervention if a new mind-set is to have any chance of taking hold.

Harlan Ullman Washington, D.C. March 15, 2014

I deas for books spring from many sources and inspirations, even from serendipity. June 28, 2014, marked the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie in Sarajevo after his driver took a wrong turn. Of course, not all assassinations, even of heads of state or government, have equal impact.

The assassinations of three presidentsAbraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedydid not provoke wars or supercrises. Each death raised the question: Had the assassinations not taken place, what might have happened differently? Perhaps reconstruction of the South following the Civil War would have proceeded more compassionately. Perhaps McKinley would not have been as interventionist as his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was in settling the Russo-Japanese War of 19041905. And perhaps JFK would have kept America out of Vietnam.