By Conrad Black
Thursday, March 14, 2013
The disintegration of the Western Alliance was a
predictable response to the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of a
threat to the security of the entire democratic world. For most of the 20th
century, first an imperialist and then a rabidly nationalist and racist
Germany, and then Soviet Russia and international Communism, threatened the
West, led by the Americans, British, and French, as the premier democracies.
The United States provided the margin of victory at the end of World War I and
furnished emergency assistance to Great Britain to keep it in the war in
1940–41. Roosevelt compared unlimited assistance to Britain and Canada to
lending your garden hose to a neighbor fighting a fire, as he extended U.S.
territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles and ordered the U.S. Navy to
attack any German vessel on detection. (He declared most of the North Atlantic
“a neutrality zone,” but it was an odd definition of neutrality.) The only time
a U.S. president sought a third term, our civilization depended on his
receiving it.
Germany, allied to the USSR, Italy, and Japan, had
overrun France and crushed half of the shield, composed of the French army and
the British navy, that had been America’s front line of defense for most of the
previous century. The U.S. provided most of the war supplies of the Allies, and
most Western military capacity in World War II, although the Russians
serendipitously absorbed more than 90 percent of the casualties and physical
damage incurred subduing Germany, after their shameful alliance with the Nazis
blew up. And the U.S. was the overwhelmingly preeminent leader of the Western
Alliance that contained the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
When Stalin unleashed the Cold War, he committed the
third-greatest strategic error of the century, after Wilhelm II’s recourse to
indiscriminate submarine war against neutral American shipping in 1917 and the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. President Truman and his chief
advisers led the reconstruction of Europe with the Marshall Plan and the
protection of the West with the purely defensive North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, in which an attack upon one was an attack upon all. The Free
World was deemed to include Franco, Salazar, Syngman Rhee, the Shah, Saudi
Arabia, and the over-bemedalled Ruritanian juntas of Latin America, but almost
all of those countries became democracies in the course of the Cold War. There
were errors, most conspicuously Vietnam, but it must be said that American
strategic direction was masterly, from Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech in Chicago
in 1937 to the fall of the Berlin Wall (officially the “Anti-Fascist Defense
Barrier”) in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union like a soufflé.
There followed the brief shining moment when America, the
omnipotent superstate, bestrode the world as an unassuming, unaspiring
colossus. It had no strategy to execute such a role, and was under no
particular pressure to devise one. There has been no mortal threat. Of course
the terrorists and militant Islam generally are a terrible and often tragic
nuisance, but try as demographers might to conjure up the proliferation of
swaddled terrorists as an existential threat, the Islamic countries do not
remotely possess the ability to endanger the entire West and other more or less
civilized areas such as India and China, as Nazism and Soviet Communism did.
The post–Cold War United States made a few purposeful noises, such as George H.
W. Bush’s “new world order” (reviving a phrase of Hitler’s from the Thirties,
which Roosevelt dismissed with the comment that it “is not new and it is not
order”).
Unthreatened, though not unprovoked, like an athlete that
goes out of training and affronts the mayor of New York City’s dietary
restrictions, the United States quickly built up an $800 billion
current-account deficit, which in the last five years it has topped up with
$1.5 trillion annual federal budget deficits, and an explosion of debt that has
all the characteristics of deferred, vastly inflationary money-supply
increases. It accounts for 46 percent of world military spending, but
practically all of its conventional ground-forces military capacity was tied up
for a whole decade in the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, which do not now look
like they accomplished anything even slightly worthy of the 6,000 American dead
and the nearly $2 trillion that have been lost there.
George W. Bush abused the solidarity of the Western
Alliance and even the United Nations after the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, by ushering 48 countries into Afghanistan, and then largely decamping
to Iraq. The beneficiary of Western largesse in Afghanistan, the arch-thief and
ingrate Karzai, played footsie for a decade with terrorists financed by
Pakistan, to some degree with American aid, and now has the effrontery to
accuse the United States of fomenting Taliban aggression. No sane person mourns
the passing of Saddam Hussein, whom the senior Bush could easily have disposed
of in the Gulf War of 1990 (and who died with comparative dignity, his hanging
filmed on a cell phone, having been fished ignominiously by American soldiers
out of a hole in the ground). But almost nothing connected to the U.S. national
interest has been achieved by these exertions.
Now we have the demeaning spectacle of the
administration’s blundering into sequestration and claiming that budgetary
constraints prevent sending the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman to the Persian
Gulf, as Obama’s lassitude has practically ensured a nuclear-armed Iran. (It is
even claimed that school tours of the White House are now unaffordable.)
This administration has abdicated from world leadership,
and the “pivot to Asia” is really a retrenchment to America. The regions of the
world can and should resume the management of their own security. The only one
that is really a high-explosive area is the Middle East, and the U.S. has not
shown any aptitude to ameliorate political conditions there since the
Bush-Sharon agreement that accompanied the Israeli departure from Gaza in 2005.
The Middle East will probably become a nuclear-armed camp bristling with atomic
weapons in the hands of all the major local players, from Turkey to Pakistan. I
do not think this has been well thought out by the recent and current American
leadership, but the U.S. never promised to take care of the security needs of
the world permanently and most of its allies, all but the British, Canadians,
and Australians, were just hangers-on anyway.
This process of disintegration is evident in every
region. China is acting out the old playbook of bumptious new powers, like
Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and like Germany after Wilhelm II,
in a premonitory bout of insanity, dismissed Bismarck in 1890. The Chinese are
claiming the international waters around them as their “lake,” like Mussolini
describing the Mediterranean (before the British navy smashed his fleet). Latin
America is riven between the witless and larcenous populism of Argentina,
Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, and the countries that are actually
progressing toward or have arrived at mature government, led by Brazil, Mexico,
Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Africa and the Arab world are in convulsive turmoil.
The most startling realignment is in Europe. France, having
perpetrated one of the most astounding acts of contrariety in its modern
history by electing to the presidency the utterly unqualified François Hollande
on a platform of outright hostility to every economic activity except a sort of
fatuous arts-and-crafts communalism, and having been rewarded with the greatest
flight of capital since the Reign of Terror, has staged its greatest U-turn
since the Munich Conference with an incomprehensibly complicated system of
commercial-tax rebates that equals a 6 percent cut in unit-labor costs. It
won’t work. Britain is floundering, and Italy’s fate is now in the hands of the
ineffable Berlusconi and the even more astounding political figure Beppe
Grillo, a television comedian, who in 2007 convened a national “F*** You Rally”
that attracted 2 million people.
The real European leadership is in Germany, where
Chancellor Angela Merkel is now being outflanked on the right by German
Alternative, a group that wants to ditch Europe and the euro, and — like the UK
Independence party, which recently outpolled the Conservative government in a
by-election — is now cutting heavily into the governing party’s support.
Chancellor Merkel has so far clung to her former leader Helmut Kohl’s euro
policy, but she turned on a pfennig and abandoned her nuclear-energy policy
after the Fukushima meltdown, and will do the same on Europe. A Grosse
Deutschland that was the dream of Bismarck and less reputable German
nationalists is emerging, with Germany benignly conducting Austria, and the
Dutch, Scandinavians, Poles, and Czechs, to a powerful third position in world
economic power (and military power as well if there is any need for it) behind
the United States and China. A world of regional leaders in reasonable
relationships with one another is emerging. The United States need not fear
such a thing, but it will then be too late to lament that it isn’t the world’s
superstate anymore.
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