By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 31, 2013
War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly
pops up on iron after a storm.
Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes
be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated — usually through a balance
of power, alliances, and deterrence rather than supranational collective
agencies. But it never seems to go away entirely.
Just as otherwise lawful suburbanites might slug it out
over silly driveway boundaries, or trivial road rage can escalate into shooting
violence, so nations and factions can whip themselves up to go to war —
consider 1861, 1914, or 1939. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not
real shortages of land, food, or fuel, but rather perceptions — like fear,
honor, and perceived self-interest.
To the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Plato,
war was the father of us all, while peace was a brief parenthesis in the human
experience. In the past, Americans of both parties seemed to accept that tragic
fact.
After the Second World War, the United States, at great
expense in blood and treasure, and often at existential danger, took on the
role of protecting the free world from global Communism. After the collapse of
the Soviet Union, both Democratic and Republican administrations ensured the free
commerce, travel, and communications essential for the globalization boom.
Such peacekeeping assumed that there would always pop up
a Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden who
would threaten the regional or international order. In response, the United
States — often clumsily, with mixed results, and to international criticism —
would either contain or eliminate the threat. Names changed, but evil remained
— and as a result of U.S. vigilance the world largely prospered.
This bipartisan activist policy is coming to a close with
the new “lead from behind” policy of the Obama administration. Perhaps America
now believes that the United Nations has a better record of preventing or
stopping wars — or that the history of the United States suggests we have more
often caused rather than solved problems, or that with pressing social needs at
home we can no longer afford an activist profile abroad at a time of near
financial insolvency.
Yet the reasons for our new isolationism, analogous to
early 1914 or 1939, do not matter; all that matters is the reality that lots of
bad actors now believe that the United States cannot or will not impede their
agendas — and that no one else will in our absence. Americans are rightly tired
of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet we left no monitoring force in Iraq and are
winding down precipitately in Afghanistan, and thus have no guarantees that our
decade-long struggle for postwar consensual government will survive in either
place.
Much of North Africa is beginning to resemble Somalia.
Our tag-along strategy in Libya resulted in sheer chaos, with an American
ambassador and three others killed in Benghazi. The Muslim Brotherhood, headed
by anti-Semite Mohamed Morsi, has turned Egypt into a failed state. Islamists
killed dozens of Western hostages in Algeria. The French are unilaterally
trying to prevent an Islamist takeover of Mali. Meanwhile, 60,000 died in
Syria, with thousands more fatalities to come.
The common theme? Middle East authoritarians and Islamists
expect that the United States will probably lecture a lot about peace and do
very little about war.
China and Japan appear to be on the verge of a shooting
incident over unimportant disputed islands that nonetheless seem very important
in terms of national prestige. A more muscular government in Tokyo and an
expanding Japanese navy suggest that the Japanese are running out of patience
with Chinese bullying.
Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan all have
the wealth and expertise to become nuclear to deter Chinese aggression, but so
far they have not — only because of their reliance on a previously engaged and
militarily omnipotent United States.
A near-starving North Korea, when not threatening South
Korea, periodically announces that it is pointing a test missile at Japan or
the United States. Few believe that the present sanctions will stop Iran’s
trajectory toward a nuclear bomb. The more the Argentine economy tanks, the
more its government talks about the “Malvinas” — replaying the preliminaries
that led to the 1982 Falklands Islands war.
In the last four years, tired of Iraq and Afghanistan,
and facing crushing debt, we have outsourced collective action, deterrence, and
peacekeeping to the Arab League, the French, the British, the Afghan and Iraqi
security forces, and the United Nations. Does America now believe that our
weaker allies, polite outreach, occasional obeisance and apology, euphemism,
good intentions — or simple neglect — will defuse tensions that seem to be
leading to conflict the world over?
Perhaps, but there is no evidence in either human nature
or our recorded past to believe such a rosy prognosis.
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