So, is DIMEFIL (diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law) competition really war at all? Should we be ignoring those fields of competition? The way we used to? Should we disregard efforts to foment revolution in our streets? Should we disregard buccaneering and transnationals that are capable of writing their own rules?
My own particular frame of reference on that is a very Canadian one and it centres on Acadia.
France has always portrayed itself as a Catholic country, even when it wasn't.
His Most Christian Majesty, the Parisian King of France, negotiated the supremacy of the king over the Papacy (in my view the UN of its day) with the 1438 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The 1516 Concordat of Bologna renegotiated the terms but still left the King of France in charge of the Church on his territory, and maintained the right of his Gallican Church to continue to use the brand "Catholic".
In the 1520s the Swedes, Danes, Swiss and Northern Germans caught up on the freedom front but had to give up the "Catholic" brand.
Henry Tudor in London followed suit in 1534.
France had a problem though. Paris, then and now, was not France. The regions were unruly and didn't follow direction well. Some remained tied to the Roman Church. Some foreswore the Church completely and followed Navarre in embracing Calvin's Huguenots. Some had never lost faith in the Avignon Papacy. These factions left room for independent economic interests, financial houses, to make a profit that was not available to the King. They simply had more purchasing power. Some of those set up offshore accounts in places like Geneva, Amsterdam and London. And financed competitors to the French crown.
The French crown responded with assymetrical warfare.
It offered letters of marque to "official" pirates to disrupt the trade of its competitors. It encouraged competing nations like the Ottomans to make life difficult. It turned a blind eye to freebooting unofficial pirates. It armed foreign competitors (like the Algonquin and the MicMac - choosing sides against the Iroquois, which in turn encouraged the Iroquois to seek assistance from the Dutch and the English). It created its own Missions, under the auspices of the Gallican Church, promoting the Recollets, the Sulpiciens and the Societe des Missions Etrangere in competition to the Hapsburg Vaticans Jesuits.
And then it sent those missionaries to Acadia.
Some of those missionaries should be better known now than they are. They used to be well known.
1609 - Champlain, working for merchants from the La Rochelle region, makes friends in Quebec by going to war with the Algonkian the Huron against the Finger Lakes Iroquois starting France's century of Beaver Wars with the Iroquois (1609 to 1701)
1628 - the French protestant capital of La Rochelle, support base for Quebec and Acadia, was seized by Gallican Cardinal Richelieu.
1629 - the Kirke's, French protestants of Dieppe, sailed under the British flag to take Quebec from Champlain who hailed from Brouage, next door to La Rochelle - the Kirkes were burned in effigy as French traitors.
1635 to 1654 - the French Gallicans of Richelieu's 100 Associates fought is out with the Rochellais Huguenots protestant company for control of Acadia. Britain was fighting its civil war against the Gallican allies, the Stewarts (Stuarts).
1642 - Montreal is established as a third way between the Gallicans and the Huguenots under the Sulpiciens of Port Royal (subsequently associated with the Jansenists - declared heretics)
1659 - Olier of the Sulpiciens and Laval of the Roman persuasion contest the Quebec diocese and Laval wins by declaring allegiance to both Rome and to France. Olier is contained to Montreal.
1663 - the College of Sorbonne solemnly declared that it admitted no authority of the pope over the king's temporal dominion, his superiority to a general council or infallibility apart from the Church's consent - separating France from Rome
1664 - Britain takes New Amsterdam from the Dutch and also takes over the Dutch trade with the Iroquois.
1665 - France responds with the Regiment Carignan-Salieres for a couple of years
1688 - Father Beaudoin of the Musketeers and Sulpiciens encourages the MikMaq with arms and cash to resist the British in Acadia
1694 - Father Rale of the Jesuits encourages the Abenaki with arms and cash to resist the British in Acadia
1713 - Treaty of Utrecht cedes Acadia to the British but Father Rale continues to encourage the locals
1715 - France under writes the anti-Hanoverian, pro-Jacobite risings in Britain and the failed Stuart invasion of Scotland
1722 to 1725 - Father Rale's War
1745 - France under writes the anti-Hanoverian, pro-Jacobite rising in support of the Stuarts that failed at Culloden
1749 - Abbe Le Loutre of the Sulpicien Societe des Missions Etrangeres encourages the MicMac with arms and cash to resist the British in Acadia
1749 to 1755 - Le Loutre's War.
1776 - France under writes the anti-Hanoverian rising in the US with cash, arms, training (LaFayette) and military forces (Engineers, Gunners and the Navy)
Underlying all of the above is the economic struggles of various Houses.
My point?
If war is about economics and Little Green Men then we are in for centuries of war.
If war is about battles fought and won. We may go centuries before we see another Plains of Abraham, much less a Waterloo.
jamestown.org
