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Present at the Destruction
The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars, but there is only one important conflict in recent memory where we also won the peace. Fortunately, this singular victory occurred in conjunction with the largest of them all, World War II.
The postwar peace was the result of an extraordinary work of American statecraft. It occurred because a very serious and smart group of men realized that, if the fruits of the hard won victory were not to turn rotten again, the flaws in the world system that had led to the global conflagration needed to be corrected. So they created two critical institutions. The first was the Western alliance, later formalized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide for collective security of the democratic world, and thereby decisively deter any future totalitarian aggression. The second was a system of international free trade, formalized as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later renamed the World Trade Organization), to enable global economic recovery and prosperity, thereby ensuring the continued stability and growing strength of the democracies themselves.
These two pillars of the postwar order – NATO and GATT – lay the foundation of a world so much more peaceful and prosperous than the prior chaos that one its leading architects, Truman Administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson, entitled his memoir Present at the Creation.
The creators of the postwar order built on the basis of hard won knowledge. Free trade is necessary for economic prosperity for the same reason that long distance transport is. Everyone understands that advances like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad greatly accelerated American economic development by cheapening internal transportation costs. But imagine that the government put a tax on movement via such systems so that they cost more to deliver goods than previous methods of transportation. In that case, the great canals and railroads would be rendered as useless as if they had been physically destroyed, and US economic development would have been crippled. Similarly, international tariffs do as much harm to the world economy as would be done by a sinking all the most advanced merchant ships. Thus it was the trade war, initiated by the US Smoot-Hawley tariff bill and similar measures taken by foreign governments that made the Great Depression great.
The creators learned from this. Similarly, they also learned from the debacle of the 1930s what happens when democracies abandon their collective security arrangements and allow tyrants to start picking off their weaker members one at a time. So they put in place something that was called the Free World, within which enterprise and trade could prosper, without fear of either excessive intergovernmental interference or external attack. The result was the greatest period of economic growth that the world has ever seen. America was transformed from poverty-riddled depression America to suburbia America, with a vast middle class owning homes, cars, and televisions and sending their children to college. Europe and Japan were completely rebuilt, with South Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other previously undeveloped countries lifting themselves out of hunger and desperation as well. Furthermore, despite the continued existence of two very dangerous totalitarian potential adversaries, the general peace was preserved.
As a result of this profound success, whatever the differences between the two major parties may have been on other issues, these two fundamental bedrock principles underlying the creation and continuation of the post-1945 world order have remained uncontroversial among serious political leaders for the seven decades ever since.
Unfortunately, this has now changed. In both major parties, powerful figures have arisen who are challenging this long-held consensus. Among the Democrats, the chief usurper is the Marxian socialist Bernie Sanders. Among the Republicans, it is the national socialist Donald Trump. Both would gut the Western alliance. Both would wreck the system of global free trade. Both would cause a global depression. Both would unleash the dogs of war. While their rhetoric is quite different, on the central issue of defending or betraying the Pax Americana, the program of both is the same.
It is to be expected that a rabid left-wing socialist like Bernie Sanders would support such a program, and one must be thankful that the remaining Atlanticist forces within the Democratic Party appear to have him and his faction in check – at least for this election year. But what can one say of the Republicans and allegedly “right wing” radical Donald Trump? National Review founder William F. Buckley used to say that conservatives should support the most conservative electable candidate. Hillary Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s deleterious liberal policies for four more years. So she is certainly no conservative. But Donald Trump would destroy the Western alliance and the world economy. On the basis of that comparison, if the two were to face off in November, as incredible as it may seem, William F. Buckley would have no choice but to vote for Clinton. Surely we can do better.
Is the Pax Americana worth preserving? Do we prefer the world as it has been since 1945 to the world as it was before 1945? Will the Republican Party still fight to help preserve and improve that world? Or will its epitaph be Present at the Destruction?
Published in Foreign Policy
But the Pax Americana is actively failing, because it laid the seeds of the destruction of the west within it. The things you list as marvelous, actively destroy the social trust, and make a coherent nation and people impossible. Trump/Bernie exist because your underlying premise is just plain not true.
Everything touched by this consensus is burning to the ground. The Pax Americana never was, as such it cannot be destroyed.
So the United States did not win the Cold War? How curious. The US is still here and the Soviet Union no longer exists. When did the US lose it?
I’d say we won the peace on that one – at least through January 21, 2008. Thing is peace does not go on forever. It has to be constantly rewon.
(Admittedly, if the Soviet Union had managed to last until January 21, 1993 things might be different, but they did not. Funny that.)
Seawriter
Any facts or specific examples to back up your claim that peace created by American leadership is resulting in world destruction?
What was the alternative?
Interesting question, the existence of the cold war, its victory or loss, does not fundamentally prove the long term viability of the social architecture of the west. Except that the external threat may have propped it up.
Any specific facts are examples to back up your claims?
Note:
Please be civil.I am going to say this once. I ignore [redacted].
I will take that as a no. It’s hard to have a discussion when people are not willing to answer simple questions such as can you provide me an example of what you are arguing? I’m glad you think this is trolling, other people consider this rational discussion
Please reconcile these two mutually exclusive statements. I don’t think it can be done.
I would say it is you who is operating upon a set of untrue priors: Bernie clearly exists because the cyclical nature of politics has brought to the surface the latent socialist tendencies of the Democrat party, amplified by its clientelist leanings and the looming realization that Obama has been a miserable failure. They’re essentially calling the go route: one hail mary to see if turning the knob up to 11 would have a better effect than Obama did.
Trump exists because of… all of the reasons that we’ve discussed here for months. My personal favorite reason is that Trump is merely a reflection of the attitudes of the common slob (not universally) who normally doesn’t pay attention to politics except when a Kardashian-like figure is possibly at the head of the ticket. A lot of other people have themselves fooled into thinking that Trump is something more than this, but his inability to garner more than about 1/3 of the vote indicates that his support is at best, tepid.
Also an interesting question. I will be honest, I am not immediately sure. I am not sure that all of the things listed are in and of themselves inherently bad, or inherently good. There is some combination of interactive effects, or going to far with some things that is producing unfortunate effects which destroy the ability for a society to exist much less a limited constitutional republic with free enterprise. When the social trust collapses the circle of largest managable group shrinks. Which is fine if you are a european ethno-state. Its bad if you are the US without much geographic distinction between identities.
Sure, inartful use of language, and general laziness.
I believe both are a subcultural presentation of collapsing social trust, and are indicative of the US transitioning from a high trust society to a low trust society. Everything conservatives believe in, presupposes a high trust society.
Robert,
We must analyze what has transpired. When NATO & WTO were formed Europe and the rest of the entire world were economic basket cases. The USA was the economic world mono-power.
We took care of the security needs with NATO. Then with WTO, the Marshall Plan, Artificial High Dollars and prayers we set about the economic recovery or the world. Guess what happened? IT WORKED. Europe and Japan by the mid-1960s came back strong.
Then something happened. We didn’t change any of the policies. The Europeans and Japanese became wealthy (while we continued the security burden) and they also used their nationalized economies to target our heavy industries. Finally, Reagan fully responded and we pushed back onto at least a level playing field.
Next, the EU created a super economic trading block and China emerges. We continue to carry the security burden of the entire world. We leave our corporate tax rate at the highest in the world and our economy is the most highly regulated in the world as we unilaterally enforce irrational environmental standards.
Now a fat lazy EU won’t pay a nickel for the defense of its eastern frontier while it engages in a fetishistic social welfare fantasy about the migrants. Anyone might ask what happens when the next middle eastern country fails, and the next, and the next. The existence of the EU is in fact predicated on NATO completely performing its security duties for it.
This ends one of three ways. First, the EU wakes up and starts paying for NATO. Second, the EU breaks up completely and whatever happens happens. Three, Putin blitzes through the Baltics in a week.
Regards,
Jim
I’m not an expert on this and didn’t vote for Trump. However, I am wondering, like the military in the modern world, if some of the old rules that don’t work now need to be updated? Maybe it used to be an even playing field in trade, but things need corrected. Currency manipulation for example, has made it uneven.
I wonder if just going along and accepting the status quo has allowed for too much manipulation, and no accountability. Maybe some things (not all) need to be reviewed so the rules work better for everyone. We had wise heads back then as you describe – hopefully the best can be tapped (some even ran for president) today.
I see, at last you responded to my question. So based on your assertions in your last piece, Trump is a Nazi, sorry national socialist and Hillary, from the party that uses the IRS like the STASI or the NKVD, is your preferred alternative for National Security.
Sorry, Mr. Zubrin. We have your extrapolated assertions on one hand and the track record of the Clintons on another. I suggest you volunteer to be her Ambassador to the next hellhole she creates. Buy life insurance. And take her word for the security provided, she has experience , being part of the long tradition of establishment idiots who have abandoned victories and embraced defeat, despite the cost paid in blood and treasure.
The long held peace through American strength and mutual foreign policy ended with the fall of Saigon. Since then we have a party trying to avoid more loss and one that hates the United States with a passion.
I remind you , people with similar logic to yours tried to discredit Reagan who foolishly tried to win the cold war instead of just living with MAD. Your predecessors told us then that he would ruin the alliance and touch off a nuclear war.
Tell me Trump has worse instincts than Hillary on foreign policy. Her failures are well documented and point in the wrong direction every time. from Global warming to the Muslim Brotherhood.
One thing, we do know Hillary can be bought. Maybe that does not disturb you. Some people like a well established price menu for their foreign policy purchases.
Sorry how many people has the IRS had killed? Links would be helpful.
The best we can say about this period is that we won an uneasy peace in Europe.
The reality is that Stalin and FDR left the world in a horrific mess. The blame lies in their insufferable egos.
The seeds of the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War were sewn at Yalta. We abandoned Chiang Kai-shek to the tiny of island of Taiwan while Mao began the killing of somewhere between 49 and 78 million people on the Mainland. And we abandoned the Russian people to the likes of Stalin who is responsible for killing somewhere around 23 million people.
We arbitrarily divided up the world such that Yugoslavia was embroiled in an all-out war 40 years later.
And when we divided up the Middle East, we somehow forgot to carve out the Kurdistan country.
The best we can say of the post-World War II period was that America extricated itself from global conflicts so that American lives were saved. But in so doing, we left millions of people around the world to suffer persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death.
What happened afterward is certainly not our fault, but to call this a success story is a stretch.
There is a distinction between hard and soft tyranny. The 2nd Amendment is generally credited with keeping hard tyranny at bay in America.
Nothing is keeping the IRS at bay.
The only difference between hard and soft tyranny is the tactics employed to achieve the end. The end remains the same.
I think it is also worth mentioning that RUSSIA and RUSSIANS still exist, even after the collapse of their empire. AND they have an ax to grind.
I’m unclear on what constitutes high versus low trust, what metrics you base that determination upon and what outcomes are different on the basis of eroding “trust” in modern society vs. the allegedly halcyon past.
Sure, there are some measures of social cohesion which are going south in some segments of society – but such dysfunction is typically isolated within a certain socioeconomic cohort.
Even so, recent enforcement-driven increases aside, crime is at historic lows and teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are down. Such measures of “trust” are trending in a positive direction. If you want to see it going in the wrong direction you have to look at the illegitimacy rate in the hispanic and black communities – but on balance, it seems to me that such metrics of social cohesion don’t indicate that we’re flying off a cliff and have to resort to the extreme solution of, say, a mildly unhinged Trump.
Again, with the Nazi nonsense…
And I thought Republicans were for killing off governing agencies when their job is done? NATO was about containing the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, dead, and it’s not coming back. And Russia is not only not the Soviet Union, it’s nowhere near the existential threat the USSR was. There is no worldwide crusade to convert all to their system. Russia is just another nation with interests now, interests that happen to clash with ours at times. And yet our side still uses Russia to invoke not only NATO’s survival, but growth. Russia is not the threat in Europe now. Islam is. Cultural and national suicide is.
At what point does Europe grow up and mind it’s own business without our dollars or our troops? Or do you propose what is in effect endless imperial outposts on the old continent? What is conservative about that?
Like I said, transitioning. We can still be high trust-ish, but trending downward. We could also have pockets of both coexisting given social and economic separation and isolation.
I am not sure it lends itself to measurement. But here are a couple:
But to your point, the panera to go shelf is one the last remaining pure symbols of high social trust, but that is pretty class specific isn’t it. The places where paneras get built have high social trust.
This statement depends on the implicit assumption that the demilitarization of Europe wasn’t part of the US design for the post-WWII order.
This assumption can be, and very often is, challenged by many historians, researchers, and/or pundits.
e.g. Peter Hitchens
I mean, if you’re going to take everything super-literal this won’t be much fun. I guess there was that guy who rammed his plane into the IRS building? Pretty sure he’s dead now.
I know. I just find comparing the IRS’s actions to the NKVD to be a little dumb.
Yes and the Germans existed after the collapse of the Second Reich (and they had an axe to grind). The Third Reich is separate from the Second, and had different issues.
Similarly, Russia of 2016 is much different from the Soviet Union of 1990. Moreover, the real issue today’s Russia has with the US has to do more with a strong man seeking to keep power than it does with any perceived harm done to Russia by the US. Rather it is the perception the US is weak and can be rolled.
Putin is in a world of hurt at home. He is following the classic “stir up trouble abroad to distract attention from problems at home” strategy. This is not to say it cannot lead to war. That is what the Argentine Junta was attempting when they took the Falklands from the British.
But Russia really, really does not want a real war with NATO or the US. They are lucky to hold their own against the Ukraine, and are simply grabbing what they can.
Seawriter
Perhaps, but are the end goals that different?
I mean come on, the IRS totally put their stupid building in that guy’s way in order to kill him. See the violence inherent in the system?
Supreme executive power should be derived from a mandate from the masses not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Yes.
Really? How so?