From Statecraft, December 11, 2024:
"I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events"
Today's interviewee has been my white whale for a while.
John le Carré compared him to Machiavelli. David Samuels called him “a gadfly in the corridors of power.” Thomas Meaney called him “a skilled bricoleur of historical strategic insights.” Leon Wieseltier called him “the most bizarre humanist” he’d ever met.
Edward Luttwak was born in 1942, and since then he's lived a wilder life than anyone I know. From Chairman Mao's funeral to late nights drinking with Putin, Luttwak's seen it all.
It’s hard to capture his professional accomplishments in miniature, but I’ll try: Luttwak has written 20-odd books on grand strategy, military affairs, and security. A Romanian Jew, he served in the Mossad before moving to the United States, where he staffed Reagan’s transition team and consulted for the Pentagon (and still does). For a flavor of his consulting work, see the classic opening paragraph from Meaney’s profile:
Luttwak ranches cattle in Bolivia, but I managed to get ahold of him at his Maryland house. I hope you enjoy this episode as much I enjoyed recording it. [A note: if you’re on the fence between listening to or reading this episode, give it a listen.]
We discuss:
- How to stage a coup in the 21st century
- Why Luttwak is responsible for a global decline in coups
- Iran’s real goals in the Middle East
- Why the CIA can’t go undercover or recruit talent
- Working for a Kazakh dictator
- Staffing Reagan’s presidential transition team
- Why we need more waste at the Pentagon
- How the war in Ukraine will end
- China’s great military challenge
- Snorkeling in French Polynesia
[yeah, what else ya got?]
Your first book was called Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. I greatly enjoyed it. What do you make of the recent events in South Korea?
Well, it definitely was not a coup d'état, because the president made no attempt to recruit military chiefs to follow his orders or anything of the sort. He just abruptly had a moment of panic and realized that he proclaimed martial law.
Because there were neither secret nor non-secret events that justified it, as soon as he proclaimed it, basically none of the authorities moved to implement it. Then there was a parliamentary reaction, a popular reaction, and obviously, he will either resign or be resigned, one of the two.
I don't know what happened. It could have been a purely personal nervous breakdown. Now, it is a nervous breakdown in the context where the national capital is within rocket range of North Korea, and where there are supposedly preparations for national emergency and a provision for martial law in order to respond to a sudden North Korean attack. There have been North Korean attacks in the past, including one that penetrated the presidential Blue House complex and killed the wife of then-ruler Park Chung-hee.
So we don't know. It could be a private psychiatric event. It could be a piece of information that reached him directly without being filtered by professionals, and which he took upon himself to view as a warning of an imminent all-out attack.
In today's world, with incredibly quick dissemination of information, how have coups changed?
Well, I don't think they have changed at all. If you look carefully at the structure of recent events, you see that they haven't changed.
Every state has to have a security apparatus — military, non-military, police, security services. Those organizations are depicted in organizational charts as if they were machines. But they're not machines, they're run by people. Each of these organizations and sub-organizations has a chief. Now that chief may be a commanding figure, whose every word is implemented without question, or it could be simply the head who was appointed a week ago or something. Either way.
But it is evident that the coup d'état is a specific way of changing governance, and that is not to attack the state as a whole from the outside, not to attack the state from launching attacks on government ministries and palaces, as an enemy might do, but simply a process whereby these people who run the actual active elements of the state — which is, let's say, that armored brigade, which is close to the capital city, the police, the gendarmerie if there's a separate gendarmerie, everybody with guns in their hands — can intervene physically.
If you can coordinate them, then, mechanically speaking, you can take over the headquarters of the government: the presidential palace, the prime minister's office, whatever it is. You can do that. You can shut down the mass media. And you can stop the internet because the internet operates from specific physical facilities. You can just open a door, enter there, and switch it off.
You are now free to call in your media, or the media generally, and make your statement: because of the intolerable abuses and misbehavior of the previous ruler, we, the committee of national salvation, have taken over, and so on.
Even if it is only one individual who runs everything, he never presents himself: “I took over.” It’s “The National Salvation Committee, of which I'm the humble secretary,” or chairman or whatever. Then you denounce the previous government and announce wonderful useful reform measures that people have been calling for.
You stop all flights, you control the airport. And then you say, “In order to ensure everybody's safety, there are checkpoints: please don't cross the checkpoints unless you're willing to present yourself and say you have to take a child to hospital and things of that sort.”
And you stabilize the situation. While everything is stabilized, you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you: all the ones that might stand up and speak in front of a group of people or a camera or microphone. You arrest them and you just physically detain them, perhaps to be liberated in a day or so with apologies, perhaps to be killed on the spot — anything in between. Those mechanics of the coup have not changed.
I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events. I wrote my book in '67, published in '68. My book was a response to a great number of coups in Africa, which followed inevitably from the fact that African states became independent in the early 1960s. By 1965, they were ready for military coups, and in the Middle East there were lots of coups. I was tracking events there because at that time I was employed by Walter J. Levy of London, the chief political advisor of big oil companies like Shell [In World War II, Levy led the petroleum section of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.]
I was reading about coups. What I did is I tried to distill the mechanics of the coup. All coups are different, but they're all the same, because all of them depend on taking hold, not of the nation, but simply of the repressive machinery of the state.
So I wrote a description of how to do that. My first words are “Overthrowing governments is not easy,” and I tell you how to do it step by step.
Now for the megalomaniac explanation for what happened next, which was a very rapid decline in the number of coups. Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped. The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. I think what happened is that people learned to reverse engineer.
So, you have an armored mobile force, which is near the capital. I say, “Make sure either you move it 400 kilometers away, as far away as you can, or else make sure that it's commanded by your son or nephew or something like that.” So they did that, they put their nephews in charge of any mobile force. My book caused a decline of coups.
For example, King Hassan II of Morocco was the victim of a coup. His airplane was to be shot down coming back from Paris, but he landed and became very energetic, took control of the airbase, and then eventually tracked down the organizer of the coup, who was the minister of the interior, General Mohamed Oufkir. [According to King Hassan’s New York Times obituary, “When pilots of his air force attacked his Boeing 727 jetliner, the King, himself a pilot, seized the radio and shouted, ‘Stop firing! The tyrant is dead!’ — fooling the rebels into breaking off their attack.”]
Now, there is a Hamletic, Shakespearean turn in this, because Oufkir was in fact a devoted, devoted servant of the royal house, who had served the previous king, the heroic Mohammed V, heroically and most deservedly. Hassan II became a reckless and open playboy who in fact was flying back from Paris from another couple of weeks cavorting with the elegant ladies who take money for their services. Oufkir wanted to kill Hassan so that another member of the royal family would come in, someone who was not a playboy and would be serious and determined and courageous and all these other things.
Ironically, when Hassan landed after the attempt to have his plane shot down, he proved exactly that. He immediately went and got a few people, rounded up the pilots, and then came to town and did everything that Oufkir had wanted the heir of the throne to do. But he, of course, entered Oufkir's office and shot him. Oufkir bled to death, and he did so over a copy of my book.
The minister of the interior, Dlimi was his name, promised to give me this copy of the book, which I really needed, obviously. But then what happened is that he tried a coup, and before he could deliver the book to me — because evidently he read the book — instead, before he could deliver it to me, he was killed as well. After that, there was great tranquility over the Moroccan throne to this day. [Officially, Minister Dlimi died in a car crash. However, allegations have been made that he was assassinated.]
But the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad definitely did everything that you would have done if you understood coups and you knew how to reverse-engineer them.
Now, what happened is that reverse engineering also is beginning to fail, because they came up with reverse engineering to protect against my depiction of coups, and then they didn't change it. Then came change, all manner of things change, so the reverse engineering is beginning to fail....
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