Farewell to another era

 In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace.  Addressing the European powers, he warned prophetically that an imposed peace "forced upon the loser" would rest "as only upon quicksand."  The world needed "not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." The United States, he said optimistically, would gladly take part in a new international organization designed to create a peaceful world.  These, he said, were the principles and policies "of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.  They are the principles of mankind and must prevail." The victorious powers did create a League of Nations at Versailles, but the United States Senate refused to ratify it after an ill Wilson refused to question any of its conditions.

Twenty years later, in October 1937, Franklin Roosevelt spoke in Chicago about the frightening world situation, including the Spanish civil war, in which Hitler and Mussolini were assisting General Franco, and the brutal Sino-Japanese war, which had just broken out. "The present reign of terror and lawlessness," he said, seriously threatened "the vey foundations of civilization. . . .Let no one imagine that America will escape.  There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all.  International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace."  After the European war broke out in September 1939 he secured authorization to sell arms to France and Britain for similar reasons, and after France fell he asked for unlimited aid to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act.  And in August 1941 he met with Winston Churchill and issued the Atlantic Charter, which included two critical provisions:

"Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

"Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."

Four months later, those principles, and a new commitment to form and join an international organization, became the US war aims in the Second  World War.

According to a quote which I have not been able to confirm, FDR--a man of extraordinary historical perspective--remarked late in the Second World War to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a staunch ally, that the new world they were helping to build would last for as long as anyone who had already been born was still alive.  That prediction has now come true, and the United States has taken the lead in the repudiation of the world that Wilson and FDR called for.  

Donald Trump and his administration are completing that destructive work, but it did not begin with them.  We took one big step in that direction, as it turned out, during the Vietnam War.  Having spent an entire decade writing a book on the origins of that war, I believe that our government undertook it in a sincere attempt to apply Wilson and FDR's principles as they had come to understand them, but the war itself rapidly appeared as a betrayal of those principles.  That in turn persuaded many members of two younger generations--who for generational reasons didn't need much persuading--that those principles had never been anything but a sham designed to conceal the real history of the United States, a history of genocide, slavery, and imperialism.  I was forcibly reminded of this yesterday listening to Glenn Loury's podcast, on which a Millennial historian, Daniel Bessner, echoed those views verbatim.  Equally importantly, under the George W. Bush administration, Boomer bureaucrats and politicians defined and implemented a new national security strategy based almost entirely on force, claiming the right forcibly to remove any hostile foreign government that sought to develop dangerous weapons or that oppressed its peoples.  That view was also very bluntly stated on the very same podcast by Larry Kotlikoff, an economist.  Only Andrew Day, a conservative Republican, argued that a lawless world would not be a safer one for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

The critics of a vision of a world ruled by impartial legal principles--like the many critics of the United States Constitution, about whom I will have more to say in a later post--have failed to understand human nature, and the role that ideals can play in the world.  The ideals both of the United Nations and the US Constitution are too just for real human beings consistently to live up to them, and cynics will always easily find debating points with which to discredit them. Similar feelings led Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, to decide by 1938 that British democracy was a sham and that a war between Britain and Germany would not be worth fighting.  But when that war broke out Orwell had a change of heart, which led him in 1941 to recast the whole question of ideals versus reality in his pamphlet, "The Lion and the Unicorn," in a passage referring to a key aspect of English political life.

"Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

"It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. , . . Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

"An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. . . .The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape."

The whole enterprise of civilization, as Sigmund Freud realized, is a continuing struggle between different parts of the human brain, one of which can understand and seek to apply impartial principles to a nation or a world, and another simply dominated by primal emotions.  That it can never be entirely successful does not mean that we should give it up.  

The United States is now joining Russia as a danger to world civilization because our head of government has no respect for law and believes only in power.  He told the New York Times a few weeks ago that he is restrained only by "my own morality, my own mind," and they give him an unlimited right to reward friends and punish enemies, both at home and abroad. He appears to view the US military as his own personal force, which he can turn on any person whom he deems punishable with death.  He bragged about killing an Iranian general in his first term, and he is bragging about killing now. " We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time," he posted yesterday.  "Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!"  No American president has ever used remotely comparable language in any previous war.

How has this happened?  Perhaps FDR's purported remark to Mackenzie King--which I still would like to confirm--tells us.  The two world wars persuaded the world of the need for international organizations to enforce international law, and for rules limiting war to self-defense.  The strategy and architecture of the Cold War as waged by the US was based upon defense, not offense, and the government cited deterrence, not destruction for its own sake, as the rationale for nuclear weapons.  Those generations of leaders had seen the consequences of full-scale international lawlessness.  The generations that have grown up since 1945 have not.  In in the United States, first under George W. Bush and now under Trump, and in Russia under Putin, they have arrogated to themselves the right to begin wars at their pleasure, counting on the superior militaries they built up during the Cold War to prevail.  China may do the same at any moment around Taiwan.  This is a terrible setback for civilization, but which seems to be part of the inevitable rhythm of history.