… PROBLEMATIC CHOICE OF KIPLINGESQUE INSPIRATION IN US MILITARY DOCTRINE
"Eleven years ago, Tatiana Gfoeller, then US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, found herself at brunch with several UK Foreign Office officials, major British investors, and a Canadian mine owner. Gfoeller's counterpart from Her Majesty's Government had invited her to brief the Duke of York, Prince Andrew—serving at the time as Britain's special representative for international trade and investment—on Kyrgyz political corruption and Western investment prospects, but the meeting soon took an unexpected turn. "The United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans too)," Prince Andrew remarked, were now "back in the thick of playing the Great Game . . . and this time we aim to win." Gfoeller, a reasonable career diplomat who occasionally taught Georgetown courses, judiciously distanced the American position from Prince Andrew's imperial nostalgia.
This could be written off as a sort of stereotypical public-school Englishman's antiquated worldview, in the same category as other occasional instances of framing geopolitics by channeling Kipling. Boris Johnson, for example, recently caused a minor scandal when he quoted lines from "Mandalay" on a visit to Myanmar. Nor is the Duke of York immune to the Kiplingesque, referencing the spy-versus-spy intrigues and imperial rivalries that Kipling popularized as "the Great Game" in his "boy's adventure" novel, Kim. There are less apt lenses, I suppose, for the absurd contradictions of the post–Cold War world, its "forever wars," "competition below armed conflict," the "gray zone" and other policy-circle commonplaces. Even so, I suspect that the Ambassador Gfoeller of eleven years past would be quite surprised to see Prince Andrew vindicated by the inclusion of the Great Game as an explicit analogue for future American strategic competition in Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, Competition Continuum…."
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