Descending into anarchy

I am giving a broad lecture on the Second World War this week, and as always that sets me thinking about the world that war created, the way my entire (and subsequent) generations have benefited from it, and the issue of whether its legacy might finally be lost along with the generation that lived through it with young adults. As I have noted here before, the 2000s are looking more and more like the late 1920s and early 1930s in many respects, and two small, relatively unnoticed events this week have set off some alarm bells in my unconscious.

The extraordinary achievement of the Second World War, in retrospect, was to bring nearly the entirely industrialized world into a single community led (but not really dominated) by the United States. After a century without a general war (1815-1914), nationalism and imperialism had wreaked havoc in Europe and Asia and had drawn in the United States for the next thirty years. True, the war ended with another totalitarian movement, Soviet Communism, controlling Europe westward to central Germany, and a Communist revolution in China soon followed. The East-West confrontation generated tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, huge armed alliances, two medium sized Asian wars, and countless smaller conflicts and civil wars, but the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, who remembered the tens of millions who had died during their youth, ultimately kept the peace. That more than anything else allowed my generation in its youth to focus upon other areas of life—especially, in the U.S., after the end of the Vietnam War—and to improve its quality, if not its politics.

In the 1920s Europe and the world were reeling from the First World War and truly attempting to lay the foundation for a lasting peace. A host of theoretically democratic states emerged from the ruins of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Thanks in part to Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles Treaty specified that the disarmament of Germany and its allies was only the first step towards general disarmament, and the British in particular wanted to carry that mandate out. The major naval powers signed naval limitation treaties in 1922 and 1930, and, after unfortunate delays, started working on land and air disarmament as well in Geneva in 1932. By that time, however, the Depression was putting increasing pressure on elected governments, especially in Germany. Hitler took power in 1933 and the disarmament talks collapsed a year later when the French government refused to allow the Germans to increase their army from 100,000 men to 300,000. One democratic government after another fell to some form of authoritarian rule, beginning with Italy in 1922 and continuing through Germany in 1933 and nearly all of eastern Europe by the late 1930s. On the other side of the globe, Japan, which since 1867 had carefully watched its relations with the major western powers, seized Manchuria in 1931 and left the League of Nations a year later. Hitler finally tossed away the Versailles Treaty in 1935 and 1936, building an air force (heretofore prohibited) and remilitarizing the Rhineland. He then set about dismantling the postwar settlement in Eastern Europe as a first step towards the conquest of the Soviet Union.

Disarmament was once again an official priority of the victorious coalition in the Second World War, and both the United States and the Soviets demobilized most or much of their armies in the years after that conflict. The United States also proposed the international control and eventual abolition of atomic weapons, but Stalin preferred to build his own. After the Korean War both sides built up again in preparation for the war in Central Europe that never came, and the nuclear arms race began. But the 1963 Test Ban Treaty was a serious step to control atomic weapons, and the 1969 non-proliferation treaty followed. As I have noted many times, that treaty commits those signatories who do not have nuclear weapons not to seek them, and commits the nuclear powers eventually to get rid of them.

The first SALT Treaty followed only three years later but immediately became a principal target of the emerging neoconservative movement. Arms control, to them, implied that we could trust the Soviets not to unleash a general war—a view that both ideologues like Richard Perle and politicians like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush totally rejected. Only superiority and the willingness to use it if necessary, they believed, could guarantee our superiority. But when Gorbachev gave clear evidence of a new direction in Soviet policy, Reagan (led by George Schultz) resumed arms control, at least in Europe. We have forgotten—and Arthur Schlesinger’s journals provide us with a reminder—how many neoconservatives opposed that change right up until 1991, when Gorbachev barely survived a coup attempt.

The post-cold war era of the 1990s looks a lot like the 1920s now, even though it was a much more prosperous economic era. Every major power drastically cut back its military forces. The United Nations in 1990-1 actually did what it was meant to do, undoing Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. Russia seemed ready to join the western family of nations. But neoconservatives—a presence in the first Bush Administration, and increasingly the dominant foreign policy element in the Republican Party during the 1990s—had no faith or interest in a world ruled by law and general agreement among nation states. The United States, Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1992, should take advantage of this moment to establish complete, permanent military supremacy and establish its will all over the world. It should also continue the development of missile defense, even at the cost of the ABM Treaty of 1972, the work of those unreliable détentistes, Nixon and Kissinger.

The selection of George W. Bush by the Supreme Court and 9/11 gave the neocons—of whom the President was now clearly one—their chance. Only the naked application of American power in defiance of any restraints, they believed, could solve this new problem (even though no sane person could possibly compare the threat of Islamic terrorists to those posed by the Nazis, the Japanese in the 1930s, or the Soviet and Chinese Communists.) In 2003 the United States defied the majority of the United Nations, which we had so proudly created, and invaded Iraq. That invasion now reminds me more and more of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria. First, both powers claimed, in effect, to be restoring order to a troubled region (and both made false claims.) Secondly, both defied the existing world organization and world opinion. And last but hardly least, both conflicts had the power to trigger broader ones. Manchuria lead six years later to the Sino-Japanese war, while our presence in Iraq, which the Administration now wants to make permanent, threatens to lead to war with Iran.

So what were the two events of last week that brought this whole pattern into sharper focus? First, Russian President Putin—who has restored authoritarian rule to Russia and is publicly rehabilitating the Soviet period—signed a law allowing him to disregard the Conventional Forces Treaty of 1990, which had assured all Europe against a new war.. He did so in response to the Administration’s denunciation of the ABM Treaty and its insistence upon putting missile defense installations in Eastern Europe. In the short run this has no particular significance—Russia’s army today probably isn’t all that much stronger than Hitler’s in 1936. But as another step away from the dream of a secure Europe in which all respect one another’s interests, it may loom much larger in years to come. Belarus is already very close to resuming its status as a Soviet satellite, and the Russians have intervened frequently in the politics of Ukraine. We cannot tell where all this will end, but we must note that another major power has joined the United States in tearing down the structure of peace that the two sides worked so hard to create.

And on the same day—Friday—it emerged that China has now rejected two U.S. requests to have naval vessels make port calls in Hong Kong, as they have frequently done in recent years. The Chinese made no public announcement, but “sources” say they are unhappy about the American government’s decision to honor the Dalai Lama (the kind of slap in the face to foreign governments that neocons always love) and unspecified arms sales to Taiwan. Dana Perino at the White House got a question about this in a briefing yesterday. Here is her response:

“No, I -- what I'm expressing is what the President believes, which is that we have lots of different areas of cooperation with China. We have a complicated relationship in some regards. We're two big countries. We have lots of issues regarding trade; we're working with them on a variety of issues at the U.N., including the issues regarding Iran; we have military-to-military exchanges that we're working towards. And this relationship is growing and maturing, and this is something that two nations should be able to work through, and I don't think escalating it everyday is necessary. We've asked for a clarification and we have a -- we are communicating with them both from here and also at DOD; they're talking to their counterparts as well.”

She got no question about the Russian move.

Historically, world order (and often, domestic order) has often been established with the help of a massive exertion of force. (That is simply another way of restating the idea of a crisis every 80 years—even though some such crises do not involve widespread violence.) Those explosions put an end to anarchy and can create as many as six decades of stability. That is what the Second World War did; but it also proved (especially at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that the world could not afford to go through another conflict like that one. I am very concerned at how little of the American political class seems to understand this, and appalled that this time, my own government has taken the lead in tearing down the structures that our parents bequeathed to us.