Strategic Insight

In October 1990, I’d gotten a preliminary hint that something might be amiss in my prior education. On October 3, communist East Germany — formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — ceased to exist and German reunification was officially secured. That very week, I accompanied a group of American military officers to the city of Jena in what had been the GDR. Our purpose was self-consciously educational — to study the famous battle of Jena-Auerstädt in which Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals had inflicted an epic defeat on Prussian forces commanded by the Duke of Brunswick. (The outcome of that 1806 battle inspired the philosopher Hegel, then residing in Jena, to declare that the ‘end of history’ was at hand. The conclusion of the Cold War had only recently elicited a similarly exuberant judgement from the American scholar Francis Fukuyama.)

On this trip, we did learn a lot about the conduct of that battle, although mainly inert facts possessing little real educational value. Inadvertently, we also gained insight into the reality of life on the far side of what Americans had habitually called the Iron Curtain, known in US military vernacular as ‘the trace’. In this regard, the trip proved nothing less than revelatory. The educational content of this excursion would — for me — be difficult to exaggerate. As soon as our bus crossed the old Inner German Border, we entered a time warp.… The roads — even the main highways — were narrow and visibly crumbling.

From “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War”