Being an author can be a very cushy job once you’ve got a good reputation and money for research assistants.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Second Chance examines how three post-Cold War American Presidents handled America’s role as the world’s only superpower.  Brzezinski’s own policy prescriptions in the book are mostly vague and general; when they are specific they concern minor issues.  His analysis of the Presidents is good but I am jealous of how much money he is probably making just by doing what so many do for free, giving his two cents about politics.

One opinion was certainly a surprise coming from a Democrat who worked for Jimmy Carter: Brzezinski finds George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy generally superior to Clinton’s.  At one point (in what seems to me to be a condescending exersize) he assigns grades to each president, and Bush I’s “B” beats Clintons “C” (Bush II of course flunks out).  At another, Brzezinski ponders how the world might be a better place had Bush I been re-elected.

One strength of the book is Brzezinski’s ability to give the reader a sense of the choices available at every turn in foreign policy.  He is always wondering what might have been.  So many things were uncertain at the end of the Cold War; many current realities could have been very different.

Would East and West Germany be reunified?  Bush I successfully pushed for reunification over French and British objections.  Which Soviet client states around the world would fall?  Many regimes in Africa and Latin America were toppled, but those in Cuba and across the Middle East remained.   By 1989 it seemed likely that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was over.  But would newly liberated states like Poland and Romania become a neutral zone, or would they be free to join NATO and the EU?  Would the Soviet Union itself disintegrate?  Could the Israelis and Palestinians reach a peaceful accord (Brzezinski sees peace here as a continually missed opportunity)?

The answers to these questions seem obvious now but things really could have been different.  States like Ukraine and Belarus had been parts of the Russian Empire long before the Soviet Union existed.  One telling story of the other possibilities (but also of the the sometimes stunning ignorance of the State Department) comes from Brzezinski’s days in Government:

The idea that the Soviet Union had succeeded in shaping a Soviet national identity was particularly ingrained in the State Department bureaucracy.  As a presidential aide in the late 1970’s, having long been convinced that the multinational character of the Russian empire was its Achilles heel, I proposed a modest covert program designed to support the quest for independence by the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union.  In response, the State Department’s leading expert on Soviet affairs persuaded the secretary of state that there was now in fact a “Soviet nation,” a multiethnic mix much like America’s, and that such an effort would be counterproductive.”

As cynical Americans, we hardly expect our politicians to do in office what they promised to do on the campaign trail.  But many presidents end up doing just the opposite of what they promised, speeding away from their original platform like an Olympian diving off the 10 meter- though rarely with such purpose or grace.

Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”  Within five months, he was asking Congress to declare war against Germany.

Franklin Roosevelt called President Hoover a profligate spender and promised to balance the budget and reign in spending.  But once in office he quickly surpassed Hoover, increasing government spending and defecits to peacetime records.

On the campaign trail in 2000, then-Governor Bush criticized Clinton and Gore for their attempts at “nation-building”, and said he would never do such a thing.  Less than a year after he was elected, President Bush had decided to give nation-building a try in Afghanistan, soon followed by a larger and less necessary attempt in Iraq.

Were these men simply lying to get elected?  I don’t think its so simple; I suspect all of them, especially Bush, intended to follow through on their rhetoric.  They changed their minds in response to changing circumstances- like unrestricted German submarine warfare, a persistent depression, or the Sept 11th attacks.  There is a least a modicum of honesty and legitimacy in these actions.

But the fact remains that these men were given power by an electorate because of what they promised to do.  Some of those who voted for Bush in 2000 in hopes of a less activist foreign policy were deeply dissapointed with his change of heart; some Floridians especially must have been driven to despair knowing what their hand had helped to wreak.

But what can we do as voters?  How can we know what a presidential candidate would really do, when they may not even know themselves?  Given the history just cited, it almost seems as if the best bet is to vote for the candidate with the beliefs most nearly opposite one’s own.  But really, it is probably best to roll the dice given the information we have.  Looking at the records and speeches of Obama and McCain, we can gain a little information.  It may not cover everything; it may be contradictory already; it will almost certainly be contradicted later.  But voters too must take the plunge, and hope the pool we are aiming for turns out to be where we think it is.

The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H.W. Brands purports to explain why LBJ-style liberalism no longer has any real influence on American governace.

He is right to note that its influence has faded away.  No matter how many times Bill Clinton is labelled a tax-and-spend liberal, the facts remain that he balanced the budget, reformed welfare, and introduced no major government programs.  The comparison to LBJ and even Nixon could hardly be more stark.

Brands’ main thesis is that liberalism is a political philosophy that puts enormous trust in the government, and that Americans are only willing to give that much trust to a government which is successfully prosecuting a war.

Most basically, Americans only tolerate the expansion of government power during wartime.  Brands tells the story of government expansion during and after each American war.  Each time the government takes on extraordinary powers; at the end of each conflict, the size and power of the government ebb- but never all the way back to prewar levels.

The Cold War allowed America to remain in a war mentality for decades, building a huge military and national security bureaucracy at the same time as it expanded domestic spending and policing abilities.

Vietnam and Watergate brought a loss of trust in the government, while detente meant a partial end to the Cold War.  By the time Nixon resigned, the liberal era was over.

Brands thesis is fine as far as it goes.  I get the sense that the heart of this book is about the wartime expansion of government power, in ways liberal or not; the title was probably chosen to sell more copies rather than to describe the contents.  His writting is clear and occassionally compelling.  He makes one prediction which is obvious in the abstract, but bracing given he timing: in a book published in early 2001, he states that the next major expansion of government would come only after a “national emergency.”  The emergency, and the expansion, of course followed swiftly.

This made me wonder how far the government’s size and power will ebb when Americans perceive the “War on Terror” to be over.  How many of us will outlive the Department of Homeland Security?  Or Federal security and shoe removal at airports?

Mostly I wonder what a President Obama would do.  His stated position of ending the war in Iraq, restoring many civil liberties, and also introducing major new government programs such as national health care, is impossible according to Brands.  Major new domestic powers can only come in wartime.  So will Obama continue the war in order to have a freer hand domestically?  Will he end the war along with his plans for major new initiatives like health care?  Or will he prove Brands wrong?

I’ve been delving into histories of the First World War. I recently finished two books by popular historians, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Niall Ferguson’s Pity Of War. Though the first covers only the first month of the war, and the second examines several topics over the time frame of the whole conflict, they try to answer many of the same questions.

With any war, but especially one so destructive and world-changing, we are naturally curious about the causes of the war and whether it could have been prevented. Ferguson begins by examining pre-war thriller novels, gauging the fears held by some of spies, plots, invasions. Tuchman begins with the funeral of the English king in 1910, the largest-ever gathering of royalty, the last time the Kaiser could be seen in England as a friend and a sympathetic figure.

Tuchman blames the war on Germans’ desire for power, paranoia about encirclement, and poor ability to win allies, as well as elaborate military planning that made major strategic decisions extremely difficult to change or reverse. War in the era of poor communications and precise railroad schedules meant that once an operation began, it had to be seen through for better or worse; path dependency doomed Germany, a single step into the Schlieffen Plan, to stay the course till the end.

Ferguson, a proponent of alternate history, tries to imagine how things could have worked out differently. Being Scottish, his book largely focuses on the war from the British perspective. He wonders what would have happened had Britain stayed out of the war- if Foreign Minister Grey and the Germans could have reached a diplomatic understanding in earlier years, if a definite commitment to France had dissuaded Germany from attacking, or if the cabinet had simply decided not to fight (as it very nearly did). He imagines that Germany would have quickly won the war, humiliated France, and begun to dominate central Europe. He argues that Britain should have stayed out; that a quick German victory would have been better for Britain than a war which brought so much death, the end of British domination of finance, and the beginning of the end for the British Empire. Furthermore, Bolshevism in Russia would have been delayed or avoided entirely; a shorter war would likely have left the government more stable, and Germany certainly would not have sent Lenin to Russia in 1917 had they not been in desperate straits themselves.

Tuchman also imagines another war. She describes how narrowly the Ottoman Empire entered the war, how Britain would never have fought with such unity and intensity, or even at all, had the Germans not chosen to invade through Belgium. She focuses heavily on how the abilities and personalities of those who happen to be in the right place at the right time have enormous impacts on the course of the war and on world history: a King of Belgium willing, perhaps irrationally, to stand up to a much more powerful enemy; a stunningly corrupt and incompetent Russian Minister of Defense; a cowardly leader of the British Expeditionary Force; the last-minute appointment of a French general who vowed to make a stand at Paris even as the government fled to Bordeaux. These were the people on whom suddenly so much would depend. With every change in command and in plans, Tuchman wonders what else might have been.

Ferguson likes to incorporate the thoughts of people who at the time were marginal figures, but would later become important. He quotes Wittgenstein- who hoped the war would bring him a “variety of religious experience to turn him into a different person” but worried that “the English- the best race in the world- cannot lose. We, however, can lose, and will lose, if not this year than the next. The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me tremendously.” He quotes Churchill (who was important in the Admiralty, but whose greatest hours lay ahead), “I think a curse should rest on me- because I love this war. I know its smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment- and yet- I can’t help it- I enjoy every second of it.” He continually refers back to Hitler, who in the post-war economic chaos said “I’ll see to it that prices remain stable… that’s what my stormtroopers are for.” Ferguson paints a very unflattering portrait of a young John Maynard Keynes. He sees Keynes as a man who badly misunderstood war finance, regurgitated German propoganda in The Economic Consequences of the Peace and in his other essays on the topic. Ferguson appears to blame Keynes’ poor judgement on his homosexuality, saying “it may be that Keynes’ subsequent declaration that he ‘got to love’ Melchior[a German represenative] during the armistice negotiations at Trier and Spa obliquely alluded to a sexual attraction. As we have seen, Keynes was an active homosexual at this time.” Ferguson seems to have almost a vendetta against Keynes, who appears to be consistently wrong throughout the 30-odd pages he occupies. He also refers often to homosexuality, usually in even less relevant situations, though sometimes quite amusingly; a caption of a photo from the Eastern Front of naked German soldiers on horseback reads “Homo-erotic connotations should probably be ignored.”

Tuchman is something of a British partisan, genuinely offended the large-scale killing of civilians in Belgium and France, and appalled at the German destruction of the library at Louvain and the cathedral at Rheims.  She maintains the absolute moral superiority of the allies, even as her tactical criticisms fall most harshly upon them.  Ferguson, himself Scottish, thinks the Germans have been judged too harshly in almost every field, maintaining that their morals, diplomacy, and wartime economy were not all that bad, while their tactics and manouvers were vastly superior for at least the first three years of the war.

Both are quality books; Pity of War is more balanced and comprehensive, Guns of August a more gripping narrative.

Both raise important questions about the meaning of the war and its political implications that I plan to address in a future post.

The man remembered for Sherlock Holmes was not only a novelist, but a contemporary historian as well.

Searching for a good history of WWI in the Widener Library, I stumbled across his 5-volume his of the war. I decided to see whether his writing ability carried over to this new field.

One might expect that a man famous as a novelist would deliver a gripping narrative full of beautiful prose, but one lacking in historical accuracy and a thorough understanding of the political situation and military tactics.

One would, however, be wrong on all counts.

Conan Doyle wrote 1914 like a traditional historian. His prose mostly consists of precise descriptions of military actions- X unit attacked Y place on D date for R reason, and sustained ABC casualties. But he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of tactics, strategy and politics.

1914 was written and published in 1916, while the war still raged. Conan Doyle admits that his narrative is handicapped by a lack of information about the enemy and the allies. For this reason, his focus is on the British Expeditionary Force.

For a book written during an ongoing war, it is surprisingly fair. The author continually praises the courage of the German forces. He admits that “Germany was grievously handicapped at sea, and that she deserves the more credit for whatever she accomplished.” The book is not exactly wartime propoganda. His criticisms of Germany are restricted to the same sort impartial people made in hindsight- that invading a small, neutral country, sinking civilian ships, and wearing enemy uniforms are not good things to do. When he does editorialize, however, his words are passionate:

“The German representative at Brussels was perjuring his soul”

“The long-meditated crime had been done, and, with loud appeals to God, Germany began her fateful campaignby deliberate perjury and arrogant disdain for treaties. God accepted the appeal, and swiftly showed how the weakest State with absolute right upon its side may bring to naught all the crafty plottings of the strong.”

The author, like so many others, struggled to understand why the war started, and especially what could have brought English and Germans to fight each other.

“Up to the year 1896 there was a great deal of sympathy and of respect in Great Britain for the German Empire. It was felt that of all Continental Powers she was the one which was most nearly allied to Britain in blood, religion and character.”

He expressed continued consternation that two branches of the German race should be warring against one another, that the Saxons who went upriver should, after only 1500 years, be so different from those who went across the sea. He notes how English regiments would find on the corpses of their Hanoverian enemies insignia matching their own, from campaigns when they had served together.

He lays the blame for the English-German estrangement on the Kaiser, the construction of a massive German navy- and on the most dangerous people of all, fellow writers.

“a number of writers, of whom Nietzsche and Treitschke are the best known, had inoculated the German spirit with a most mischievous philosophy, which grew the more rapidly as it was dropped into the favourable soil of Prussian militarism. Nietzsche’s doctrines were a mere general defence of might as against right, and of violent brutality against everything which we associate with Christianity and Civilization….. The typical brute whom he exalted was blond, but a brute of any other tint would presumably suffice. It was different in the case of Treitschke….. he taught the rising generation of Germans that their special task was to have a reckoning with England and to destroy the British Empire, which for some reason he imagined to be degenerate and corrupt.”

Writing often exerts a power of the minds of men. With such power comes the potential for great danger. Why is it that the German writers of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Trietschke, and Marx, could sow so much sorrow in the twentieth? Will books of such power, for good or evil, ever again be written?

Moving back to more definite matters. As he wrote this book in 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle could still speak unashamedly of war in terms of honor and chivalry. He constantly praises self-sacrificing courage on the part of the troops. He refers hundreds of times to “gallant” officers, even as the absurdly high casualty rate meant that most references were to their deaths. Modern war, with its accurate rifles and its machine guns, did not permit many people to survive long enough for a real narrative to coalesce around them. But the author tries his best to see purpose and courage and avoid the words like “pointless”, “futile”, and “stupid”, to which men would soon turn. He could still speak of

“the days when the high gods of virility would smile as they looked down upon the chosen children of Odin, the English and the Germans, locked in the joy of battle.”

My last post was a lengthy attempt to explain how the two World Wars changed Europeans’ philosophy, making another major European war unlikely.

In this post I will propose a shorter, simpler explanation.

It’s all about technology.

Before World War One, the logistics of transportation and supply did not allow for large armies to take the field. From the First World War on, each major combatant was able to send millions to war, greatly expanding the amount of casualties possible. Combined with new weapons like poison gas and machine guns, this meant war killed more soldiers, faster than ever before.

People had second thoughts about going to war.

World War Two brought the carnage home with massive fleets of powerful bombers. Going to war meant not only risking the lives of millions of young men, but also the entire infrastructure, economy, government, indeed the entire civilian population- every man, woman and child was in danger of the rain of steel and fire.

The benefits of winning a war have stayed relatively constant over history; indeed, they have diminished as the structure of the economy makes plunder relatively less lucrative. But the cost of losing, and the cost of fighting at all no matter the outcome, have risen dramatically.

“Total” war, where everyone is a target, means war isn’t a very good deal. People really started to look for other ways to solve problems.

Then came the Cold War, when both sides had large nuclear arsenals. Now not only were soldiers bound to be killed, not only were the civilians of the combatants afraid of being bombed; now those who would start a war were forced to consider the possibility that they might annihilate the entire human race.

Major European wars, where both sides possessed weapons of such power, became really bad ideas.

People changed their philosophies, morals, and world-views as necessary to ensure their continued survival.

Now Europeans sort out political issues by arguing in Brussels, and reserve their aggression for soccer riots.

The atomic world is a bright one after all.

The memory of the Great European War, of millions of young men fighting and dying to win a few yards of shell-pocked mud, was enough to convince many that war was an ugly, irrational, pointless endeavor which civilized nations should have the good sense to avoid in perpetuity.  They hoped that something good could emerge from the mass of suffering, that this worst of all wars would also be the last.

Modern minds, in the knowledge that this war would only be the First to earn the dubious honor of being a “world war”, have looked back on the inter-war idealism as hopelessly naive.  I myself have ridiculed their dream, and still do feel safe predicting that wars will be with us for some time yet.

But in some sense, the dreamers and pacifists were right.  World War One did not instantly bring perpetual peace.  But it was the beginning of the end for European war.

In the ninety years since World War One, only a single inter-state war has erupted in Western or Central Europe, and the prospect of another seems quite unlikely.  The length of the peace and the current absence of plausible threats to it marks a major departure from millenia of European history, a history often remembered as one war after another.

There remained only one detour on the road to peace.  World War Two would wrest from the First World War the grim title of deadliest war of all time.  New technology and extreme mobility meant that the Second World War would be fought very differently.  But while the how of the war was very different, the why was largely the same.  The unification of Germany fundamentally changed the geopolitical balance of Europe.  The Germans thought that their newfound strength deserved recognition.  The spirit of the age was one of imperialism and social Darwinism.  German philosophers had spent a century glorifying the will to power and dismissing morality as born of slavery and meant for the weak.

Before each World War, the geopolitical situation of a rising Germany able to dominate its neighbors combined with a philosophical and ideological situation which made Germans willing to invade their neighbors.  Just as with previous attempts by the Hapsburgs and the French to establish European hegemony, Germany’s naked desire to dominate the Continent inspired her neighbors, individually less powerful that her, to form coalitions able to defeat her.  Geopolitics functioned as always.  Fundamental change came not when the European map was redrawn for the thousandth time, but when the hearts and minds of Europeans were realigned.

Human beings are naturally aggressive, and tend to cluster into groups distrustful of outsiders.  A disposition toward war is bred into our very beings.  It is there in babies jealous for food, there in children fighting in streets and in playgrounds.  This tendency from our nature requires a strong dose of “nurture” if it is to be overcome.  Instead many children of the time learned from parents and teachers that war was honorable and glorious and that other countries were untrustworthy and must be taught respect.  Nurture, rather than fighting the worst tendencies of nature, reinforced them.

World War One drove people to deeply question the beliefs that allowed such a war to take place.  Germany had sent a generation to die on French soil and gained nothing.  Germans questioned their beliefs, but in the end elected a man who give their beliefs one more try, saying in essence- we had the right idea, we just didn’t try hard enough.  So they did try harder, they even succeeded in conquering France.  But a second defeat, this time with Germany not only bled dry but also bombed out and occupied, finally convinced them.  They didn’t need to fight harder, or come up with a better plan of invasion; they needed a total gestalt shift.  They needed to look at their neighbors and see people like themselves, people who could be lived with.

You put you hand into a fire and it gets burned.  You might wonder if your technique of fire-touching was incorrect.  The more scientifically minded way wonder if fire caused pain or was only sometimes correlated with it.  But if you get burned again, and worse than the first time, you learn your lesson, and stop touching the flame, lest it consume you.  It took two World Wars, but Germany and Europe along with them learned their lesson.  The next geopolitical imbalance, pitting the U.S. and Western Europe against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, lasted forty years, but saw no no major war.  The Americans and the Russians had learned along with Europe, and saw major wars in Europe as a very last resort.  Gone were the days when a European nation would dare to, or even desire to invade their neighbor.

How the pilgrims stopped being communists and embraced the power of private property and markets.

I’ve heard this story before, in Rush Limbaugh’s book. It makes for a great tale, especially since in some ways we look to the pilgrims as models for how our nation should behave. But as I have never heard the story told except by people with an ideological point to prove, I’m curious as to how well it really squares with the available historical evidence.

Update: I decided to actually to the research and pretty quickly found a link to Governor William Bradford’s Diary on the website of a respected university.  If anything, Bradford’s condemnation of collectivism is even stronger than Limbaugh and Stossel describe it as.  But this does not mean it is resoundingly capitalist; because the end result was that the land was divided up evenly to families based on their size.  Today we would call this land redistribution; during the Cold War I believe we treated the advocates of land redistribution in, say, Latin America as proto-communists to which strongman dictators were preferred.  The Puritans, it appears, proved the follies of communist-style collectivism; but they remained radical egalitarians, and in fact demonstrated a real example of an oft-discussed “third way”.