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.

 

A journalistic breakthrough

 This story from 60 Minutes found its way onto my youtube feed this morning  It may be the most important story they have ever done.  It is about Havana Syndrome, the mysterious neurological ailment that has struck a number of Americans working for the government both overseas and at home.  Don't miss it.

The Neocon President and the New World

 We awakened this morning to find that the United States has begun an unlimited war against the Iranian regime.  I use "unlimited" in the sense that I learned to use it in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College:  a war, in Clausewitz's words, "to overthrow the enemy--to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to accept any peace we please."  Woodenly reading his speech while wearing a baseball cap and forsaking a tie, the president promised death to any member of the Iranian security forces that resists the United States.  American forces reportedly already attempted to kill the regime's leaders.  This operation obviously will redefine the Trump presidency and may easily reshape the whole world, but like so much of what has happened under Trump, it has deep generational roots.   It vindicates his exact contemporary George W. Bush, resuming the policy and strategy which Bush announced and implemented in 2002-3, and which his successors never actually redefined or abandoned.

The Bush Administration featured neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney, who had drawn particular conclusions from the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Nothing, Wolfowitz had argued in an infamous memo during the first administration, should now stand in the way of the worldwide hegemony of the United States.  The USSR's fall had left hostile states like Iraq and North Korea without a patron, and the United States must now take the opportunity to remove their governments by force before a new peer competitor emerged to support them.  Wolfowitz's view never prevailed under Bush I, which wisely ended the first Gulf War without going to Baghdad, but the Bush II administration immediately embodied it in their National Security Strategy.  That document reserved a US right to overthrow any hostile regime that in our view threatened to acquire nuclear weapons.  The administration immediately implemented it when it went to war with Iraq, and a friend of mine once heard Bolton declare that it would deal similarly with Iran and North Korea when the Iraq war was over.  When that war turned out to be a fiasco, such plans went onto the back burner.  They have now been revived.  If my contemporary and friend Bill Strauss had lived to see this, I am sure that he would have said that this was where our  Boom generation had always been heading.

The Obama Administration never really decided whether it was adopting a different national security strategy or not.  It did temporarily end our involvement in Iraq, although it intervened there once again when ISIS took control of much of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adopted the neocon playbook when a Libyan revolt threatened Muhammar Qadaffi, using military force to remove him as well, and plunging yet another Middle Eastern nation into chaos.  Her successor John Kerry, however--like me, the son of a professional diplomat--took a different path on Iran, reaching an agreement that would keep its nuclear program within peaceful bounds.  Kerry and Obama did not however try to re-establish formal diplomatic relations with Iran or really sell the American people on a new policy. Prodded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire Republican Party lined up against the agreement, and Donald Trump denounced it during his first term.

Trump has now concluded an informal offensive and defensive alliance with the Israeli government and is waging joint war on Iran a second time, this time with the explicit goal of bringing down the government, just as the Bush II administration had hoped to do.  Trump's foreign policy consists of  using every economic, political and military asset at his disposal either to destroy regimes he deems hostile or make them submit to his will.  In Venezuela he believes that he has successfully intimidated a new political leader by kidnapping the old one and bringing him to the United States.  In Iran--a nation of 93 million people--he believes that a combination of bombs and an Iranian revolt can topple a well-organized totalitarian regime.  I don't think anyone really has any idea of what the outcome of this operation will be in Iran.  

Trump meanwhile has transformed the presidency into a foreign policy dictatorship.  He made no pretense of seeking authority for this big new war, and implicitly claimed a right to begin war against any nation that in his view threatens the United States.  Such a broad grant of authority was in fact built into the resolution the Congress passed after 9/11, that fateful day, which has never been repealed.  Trump is also indulging a fantasy that the US Air Force has been promoting for at least three decades, that targeted air strikes can bring down a whole modern regime.  He is discounting Iran's ability to retaliate against US assets in the Middle East, against our allies there, and even, possibly, within the United States itself. 

Most importantly of all, Trump is following in the footsteps of Vladimir Putin, overthrowing what is left of the twentieth century dream of a world ruled by law rather than force. In the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed on behalf of their governments, " 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."  Like some provisions of the US constitution, those noble words immediately began struggling with human ambition and greed, and the United States has honored them in both the observance and the breech many times in the last eight decades.  Now an American president claims the right to dispose of the government or sovereignty of any nation that he chooses.  And hanging over us now is the possibility of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.  According to press reports, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, warned the president that a war against Iran would leave us without the resources to meet our commitments elsewhere.  Our chances of saving Taiwan have been questionable for a long time, and now a very large portion of our navy is tied up in the Middle East.  Leaving behind the post-Second World War dream of a more peaceful world--a dream also nurtured by presidents like Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush--we are now on the verge of the world Orwell described in 1984, when three authoritarian regimes, Oceana, Eurasia, and East Asia, rule their own spheres.  That, apparently, is where history has been heading since the fall of Communism in 1989.                                                                                       

Correcting Coleman Hughes

 It was about five years ago, I think, that I discovered Coleman Hughes, a very heterodox Columbia graduate who was then podcasting independently.  In 2023 I was at one point booked to appear on his show to talk about States of the Union, but he apparently decided to take a break from podcasting and that never happened.  Coleman, who I believe will turn 29 or 30 this year, isn't afraid of anyone, sees pretty clearly, and in his public persona, at least, always stays on a very even keel.  Some time ago he started podcasting regularly on The Free Press.  I initially regarded him as an anti-woke center leftist like myself.  He is no Trump administration supporter, but he has moved significantly to the right, most notably regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Over the weekend I heard him interview a novelist named Lionel Shriver about her new novel, which deals with the issue of immigration.  She believes that we have gone on with open borders for too long and she also believes that we should limit immigration from some parts of the world--particularly Muslim parts.  I agree about open borders but I don't think I agree about Muslims, but that is another story.   I was brought up short when they began talking about the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution. Both of them agreed that it was put in solely because of slavery, and that it shouldn't be applicable to anyone who happens to be born here, whatever their legal status.  I was appalled to hear this, and I just went to The Free Press to try to explain why in a comment on the post. I found that the comments will be closed, so I am putting my comments here and hoping that Coleman, or a producer of his, has a google alert for his name that will bring this post to his attention.

The 14th Amendment was passed to deal with the aftermath of slavery, but it did not introduce the concept of birthright citizenship to American law.  Birthright citizenship was English common law and the American republic used it from the beginning.  To verify this--I had already looked into it--I asked one of the ultimate authorities, Google AI, "Didn't the US government recognize birthright citizenship before the 14th amendment was passed?"  Here is the answer.

Yes, birthright citizenship existed as an established legal principle in the United States well before the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The amendment primarily codified and protected a rule that had already prevailed in American law for decades. 

Recognition Prior to the 14th Amendment

Before 1868, the U.S. government recognized birthright citizenship through several mechanisms: 

English Common Law (Jus Soli): Early U.S. law adopted the British principle of jus soli ("right of the soil"), which held that anyone born within the nation's territory and allegiance was a citizen.

Judicial Rulings: In the 1844 case Lynch v. Clarke, a New York court ruled that a child born in the U.S. to temporary alien visitors was a natural-born citizen under the common law.

Federal Assumptions: Early Supreme Court cases, such as Murray v. The Charming Betsy (1804), assumed that persons born in the U.S. were citizens.

 They might have gone further than that.  The Constitution states that any "natural born citizen" is eligible to become president of the US.  English law had clearly defined "natural born subject." The great jurist Blackstone wrote, "Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England," as well as children of subjects born overseas.

Like Justice Scalia's Heller decision on gun control, a Supreme Court decision to redefine birthright citizenship would reverse precedents going back beyond the founding of our republic.  

The End of an Era

 My book American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War(2000) had two endings, a narrative ending and a much more reflective epilogue.  The narrative concluded with LBJ's press conference of July 28, 1965, in which he announced the beginning of increasing ground troop deployments to South Vietnam.  I then wrote these last paragraphs.

"In the same press conference, Johnson announced his choice of Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court.  Two days later, on July 30, he signed the Medicare Bill in Independence, Missouri, and presented former President Truman with Medicare Card no. 1. The Congress would soon pass the Voting Rights Act and a huge Education Bill.  Johnson had a 65 percent approval rating.  The Gemini program, the next step on the way to the moon, had just completed a spectacular mission, including a spacewalk.  The economy had been steadily expanding for four years and five months. Unemployment was 5 percent; annual inflation was less than one percent.  The deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1965 was $3.8 billion (less than $20 billion even in 1997 dollars).  One dollar bought four Deutschmarks and 360 Japanese yen.  The Interstate Highway System was well on its way to completion.  The Sound of Music was the most popular movie of the year. American colleges, with the sole exception of the University of California at Berkeley, were full of well-dressed, industrious, and obedient undergraduates, and in January, in a cover story on the Palisades, California high school class of 1965, Time had announced that American youth seemed to be on the verge of a new golden age.

"No one knew that a whole era of American history was over."

The era that came to an end had combined a series of extraordinary national achievements--such as the space program and the Interstate Highway System--with a remarkable expansion of the role of the federal government (Medicare) and decisive, unprecedented progress in civil rights (the  Voting Rights Act).  It was also an era of fiscal discipline, US industrial dominance, and careful macroeconomic planning, creating perhaps the most rapid broad-based economic progress in US history.  And it was a socially conservative era in which men, women, children and  young adults all knew their roles.  Within ten years, things had turned decisively in a different direction, and they have kept going in a different direction ever since.

 Two events last week, combined with other only slightly less recent ones, leave no doubt that we have left other aspects of earlier eras completely behind.

The first such event was the end of the START  treaty, the last of a series of agreements between the US and the USSR--later replaced by Russia--to contain their nuclear arsenals within recognized limits.  The two nations had always struggled to keep that effort alive, and it suffered a major blow when the George W. Bush Administration denounced the treaty banning anti-ballistic missiles so as to pursue Star Wars.  It had allowed both the US and Russia to make huge reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but both sides have continued to upgrade some of their capabilities, and now they can do so without limit.  President Trump claims to want a new agreement including China, but such a pact surely would have been easier to bring about if Russia and the United States had stuck to the old one.  Meanwhile, Trump's obvious aversion to the NATO alliance is forcing other NATO nations to think about developing new nuclear capabilities of their own.  The generations that lived through the invention and detonation of nuclear weapons recognized an obligation to try to get that genie back into the bottle. Today's leaders, who grew up in the relatively secure world that our parents left us, do not.

The second equally striking example was the president's announcement that the EPA is withdrawing the finding that greenhouse gasses threaten public health, thus invalidating the basis on which the agency has tried to regulate the use of fossil fuels.  Even fuel economy standards for cars are going to lapse, and Trump is waging a war on alternative energy sources, which now threaten the fossil fuel industry because they have become cheaper.  That looks to me like the end of attempts to combine science and the power of the federal government to regulate the economy for the common good.  Once again, a clear-eyed look finds evidence that no administration had ever established a clear legal basis for regulating the burning of petroleum and coal.  The original Clean  Air Act did not mention them, and Congress apparently has never passed a law defining climate change as a threat.  Now it looks as if climate change is simply something that we shall have to live with, because industry has won a decisive victory over attempts to regulate it for the common good.  We have already lost the same battle with respect to the financial sector, going back to the 1980s.  

And last but not least, our political climate has changed beyond recognition.  The founders of our nation believed that only a virtuous citizenry could make a republic work.  They believed that our heads must rule our hearts--a problem movingly addressed in private by one of their most distinguished members, Thomas Jefferson, in a love letter to a married woman.  These beliefs later led Jefferson, who took office at a moment of partisan conflict every bit as intense as our own, one that had nearly brought the young republic down, to announce in his first inaugural, "We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans."  Now instead we have a president without any emotional restraint of any kind, who explicitly denies any restraints upon his own behavior, and who--along with the rest of his administration--treats the entire opposition party as treacherous, dangerous, worthless scum, whose power must be eliminated by any means necessary.  One would search the archives in vain for another cabinet member's appearance before a congressional committee that would rival Attorney General Bondi's display before the House last week.  It made a mockery of the oversight process that is one of the foundations of our government.  In the meantime, she has joyfully embraced her assigned mission of making criminal cases, however weak, against anyone who has offended her boss.  So far federal judges and a grand jury have managed to stand in the way. There will be more tests. 

And unfortunately, the same spirit of partisanship and a similar disregard for facts has infected the opposition as well as the government.  Again and again I have read that the administration's attempts to place new restrictions on voting are illegal because the Constitution gives all power over the administration of elections to the states.  That is not true.  The relevant clause of the Constitution, which everyone seems too lazy to search for on google, states, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chasing Senators."  The ultimate authority rests with Congress. That of course, isn't enough to satisfy President Trump, who won't wait for Congress.  He has just announced that he will issue an executive order changing the rules for voting.  I also believe that the Democratic Party's knee-jerk opposition to any new voter ID laws is a mistake, both politically and on the merits.  Polls show that very large majorities of Americans support them, and there is no reason to oppose them so long as they are coupled with provisions that make the necessary IDs easy enough to get.  Indeed, it is noteworthy that despite  endless hand-wringing among Democrats about "voter suppression," I am not aware of any accusations of Republicans having actually stopped anyone from voting in the election of 2024.   The real problem is to prevent the current administration from getting control of counting the votes.  The Justice Department has seized all the 2020 ballots from Fulton County in Georgia and may use them to make a fraudulent case for voter fraud there.

Perhaps the most striking feature of our new era is the eclipse of the printed word.  The invention of radio does not seem to have hurt the printed word, perhaps because it simply read from scripts.  But the invention of television, which did provoke some alarm when it first appeared, has been a completely different matter. Images began to replace words as means of communication, and now we all have exactly the images we want to see at the touch of a fingertip.  The whole habit of reading, thinking, and concluding, which made the formation of our nation possible, has been lost among most of our citizens.  

I must again remind my valued readers of why I write these posts.  I do not do so because I think I or any of my readers can do anything to stop these trends in the world at large.  The trends are too big, and great historians, as I often say, do not argue with history.  Yet there are those among us who still enjoy using our brains to put things in context, and to use history and commentary for the purpose Dr. Johnson ascribed to literature: better to enjoy life, and better to endure it.  And to paraphrase my other mentor Orwell, the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the ideologues nor the bureaucrats will ever be able to stop it.  Their time shall pass.