Welcome to Battle Hymns
A newsletter about history, politics, foreign policy, and the people who make them.
We live in a fraught time, defined by clashes between armies, ideas, and competing versions of reality that sit along deep fault lines.
Battle Hymns is a newsletter that seeks to make sense of the world by probing the gnashing tectonic plates of conflict: wars in Europe and the Middle East, fierce competition in the Indo-Pacific region, political clashes in an era of rapid technological and social change, conflicting visions of American identity, and how we think about all of the foregoing through history, literature, and public commentary.
If you’re interested in everything from the connections between the Russo-Japanese War and the Russo-Ukrainian War to what Trollope and Dickens can tell us about effective altruism and the collapse of FTX to the evolution of the Republican Party to debates in the U.S. defense community over how to best deter the People’s Republic of China to historical controversies over Woodrow Wilson and the dropping of the atomic bomb, Battle Hymns — named after abolitionist Julia Ward Howe’s famous patriotic tune — is for you.
Who Are You?
When faced with this question, I’m often tempted to jokingly quote P.T. Anderson’s The Master: “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher… But above all, I am a man — a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.” I haven’t worn quite as many hats as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, but I have worn a few — all of which I’ll draw upon for this project.
Over the course of my career in New York and Washington, I’ve worked as a policy advisor, institution builder, and scholar of American politics, national security, and international relations:
Most notably, I served as a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee for Chairman John McCain. In that capacity, I wrote and negotiated provisions in annual National Defense Authorization Act, conducted oversight of the Department of Defense, and traveled extensively in the Middle East, Europe, and North America through 2018. Those experiences have been complemented by writing policy analysis in a variety of venues, including for the RAND Corporation where I have served as an adjunct researcher since 2020.
In my current work at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), I have two positions. The first is that of a researcher: I am working on my doctoral dissertation — really, a 400-page book — on the history of U.S. foreign policy towards Russia and what it can tell us about American statecraft. Rather than delving into the Cold War, my work has taken me backward to the period between 1900 and 1933 which is often forgotten but has many similarities to the current moment and perhaps even more to teach us.
I’m also serving as the inaugural Deputy Director and Research Fellow of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy. AJI is a consortium of research centers at SAIS, King’s College London, the University of Cambridge, and the Stockholm School of Economics that funds historically informed research, supports emerging scholars, and hosts Track 1.5 dialogues on topics ranging from the impact of emerging technology on world order to the discipline of policy planning to Europe’s role in Sino-American competition and the future of NATO.
Mostly, I consider myself to be a close observer of politics and letters with more books and experiences on hand than time to fully process them. But as Martin Luther supposedly said about how he needed to spend even more time in prayer when he was busy, sometimes my days are so full that spending more time writing is a necessity.
What Can I Expect from Battle Hymns?
I plan to use this space for analytical essays and reflections that are more eclectic and freewheeling than the publications I occasionally write for allow.
My aspiration with Battle Hymns is to publish posts in a few different lengths and formats:
First and foremost, I aim to write standalone essays (provisionally titled “Broadsides”) every two weeks which will focus on history, foreign policy, politics, and literature with occasional forays into other subjects.
Second, I plan to pull together a weekly roundup of what I’ve read, watched, and listened to called “Conspicuous Consumption” with brief capsule reviews and curated links.
Third, to share some of my work and provide some insight into the craft of historical research, interpretation, and writing with an eye on present, I’ll periodically put out brief “Footnotes,” which might feature a document I’ve found in the archives or comment on an issue I’ve been chewing on amid other current projects.
If Battle Hymns takes off, I do plan to monetize it at some point at an affordable rate — perhaps the cost of a cup of coffee a month (which should give me some leeway in an era of high inflation) — but the most important thing is to get started.
The Adventure of Thinking Out Loud
To that end, a short mission statement of sorts is in order.
Writing, whether in the form of a journal entry, a letter, a lengthy e-mail, a memo, or even the ubiquitous Twitter thread, has typically been the surest path for me to not only refine my views but to discover them in the first place. Amid all of the fevered speculation about the potential for AI tools such as ChatGPT to replace the human writer, I return to the basic fact that writing is a process of discovery and rigorous thinking as much as it is a product or a destination.
It’s also an adventure. To that end, I’ll close with a poem by the great Greek poet C.P. Cafavy (through his translator Edmund Keeley) that captures the spirit of what I hope to accomplish with this newsletter in his poetic tribute to Odysseus’ journey home:
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
I can hardly promise anyone their Ithaka in my posts here, but hopefully the journey will be interesting — and upward towards the light.
