This coming Monday, August 4 at 5 pm Eastern Time we will be joined for a Casual Conversation with Dartmouth Professor William C. Wohlforth who will discuss the new book he co-authored with independent scholar Professor Jill Kastner (whose PhD is from Harvard University): A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford University Press 2025).
Professor Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government, who received his doctorate from Yale and taught at Georgetown University and Princeton before coming to Dartmouth 25 years ago. His faculty directory listing may be found here, with links to his rather stunning cv (who knew he had so much writing in him?): https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/william-c-wohlforth .
The directory listing also links to his personal website from which the following is an excerpt:
I am the author or editor of nine books and some 60 articles and chapters on topics ranging from the Cold War to contemporary U.S. grand strategy. I teach courses in international politics, Russian foreign policy, leadership and grand strategy, violence & security and decision-making. My curriculum vitae has all the details.
At Dartmouth, I’ve served as chair of the Government Department, on the Committee Advisory to the President, the Committee on Instruction, on many College level search committees, and as the inaugural Faculty Director of the Initiative for Global Security at the Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Beyond Dartmouth, I’ve held fellowships at the Institute of Strategic Studies at Yale, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and the Hoover Institution. For six years I served as associate editor and then editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies.
Professor Kastner is an independent scholar and historian based in London and currently a visiting research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She focuses on international relations from the Cld War to the present, with an emphasis on intelligence and subversive activities both covert and overt. She discusses her book in this 36 minute interview.
I discovered their new book from a laudatory review in the Wall Street Journal by Arthur Herman (January 15, 2025): “‘A Measure Short of War’ Review: The Geopolitics of Lying’[:]
Governments reach into the domestic politics of rival countries to subvert them and alter their policies with propaganda and disinformation.” Mr. Herman states that Professors Kastner's and Wohlforth's book “give[s]a well-researched account of the many ways in which nation-states have conducted information warfare aimed at ‘subversion’—with lessons for democracies in our current, war-raging moment.”
Their book is of real value in understanding the nature of subversion, providing a careful and intellectually rigorous discussion of what subversion, not war, is and how it has been used by great and not-so-great powers over the years to effect “a change in policy or a general weakening of the target state (either of which, in extremis, might entail a change of its regime).” At 6. The first chapter provides the framework of subversion and the remaining chapters detail how subversion has been employed over the millennia, from the Greek city states to the present uses by Putin. This history puts paid the notion that what happened in 2016 was novel: “[I]f by claiming the 2016 operation was ‘historically unprecedented’ and the ‘boldest yet in the US,’ the U.S. intelligence community . . . meant any history before 1991, its claim falls flat.” At 172. It has and will always be with us, and the “’primary problem in major strategic surprises [like Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and 2016] is not intelligence warning but political disbelief’” (at 168, quoting Richard Betts): “[S]ubversion is opportunistic and ever-present, a perennial tool of statecraft to supplement diplomacy, economic pressures, and war as governments seek to achieve their foreign policy goals.” At 206.
From the review by Arthur Herman:
Though the authors correct the wilder versions of the theory that the Russians “stole” the 2016 election for Donald Trump, they remind us that the Russians did indeed launch a campaign to muddy the presidential waters with cyber hacks and social-media troll farms. The authors also debunk the claim that the Russian interference in 2016 was “historically unprecedented.” They point out that the KGB’s campaign against Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984 went even further in direct interference, with the KGB working to establish working assets on the staffs of rival candidates and launching a propaganda campaign through front groups to portray Reagan as a corrupt war hawk bent on nuclear confrontation with the U.S.S.R.
This Casual Conversation is essential if you wish to obtain a clear-eyed view of conflict short of war. The examples given by Professors Kastner and Wohlforth achieve three principal goals. First, they demonstrate that subversion has been always with us (and, thus, always will be). Second, they offer each reader the chance to pick an example that will draw him or her into the analysis, with my favorite, as a passionate fan of Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, being the discussion of the conflict among countries and between religions in Early Modern Europe. (And the book’s discussions of the past are a remarkable achievement in their conciseness.) Finally, these examples over the years become the proof of the theory, how subversion repeats itself again and again.
Join us and feel smarter. Join us and let the scales fall from your eyes. Join us and be better prepared for a tomorrow much like today where only the names have been changed to advance the not-so-innocent.
Let me know by this Saturday is you plan to join us on Monday, August 4 at 5 pm Eastern, by sending me an email at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson