In defense of a rules-based world
Robert Kagan’s “lesson for all time” is that peace – as in the absence of war among nations – is most often squandered when threats to the peace “are not obvious and the need to do something is not obvious.”
This, it seems obvious to say, makes keeping the peace extremely difficult. Politicians, short-term creatures that they are, are rarely so talented that they can see through the fog of the present to spot dangers lurking even in the near future.
It was not glaringly obvious in the middle of the 1930s, for instance, that Adolf Hitler would soon became the greatest villain of all time. Few suspected that Hitler harbored such murderous impulses that in a few short years he would turn the world on its head, and in the process, undertake the slaughter of millions.
For that matter, Russian president Vladimir Putin, while difficult, was not viewed until very recently as a man capable of launching a full-scale invasion of a neighboring state and, in the process, threaten to destabilize Europe and focus the world’s attention on the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.
Kagan, a Brookings Institution scholar, is the author of “The Ghost at the Feast,” a riveting survey of U.S. foreign policy from 1900 to 1941, a range of years spanning our war with Spain over Cuba and American involvement in World War II.
The subtitle of his recent book is “America and the Collapse of the World Order.”
In a recent online interview, Kagan has nice things to say about Woodrow Wilson, which is a real change of pace, inasmuch as Wilson has recently been widely reviled by both the right and left. Wilson was a dud while in the White House, according to recent critics.
America’s World War I president, Wilson has tumbled from the pantheon of presidential greats to the lowly depths occupied by the likes of Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan.
Kagan, thank you, gives Wilson his just due.
Wilson was a hardheaded realist, not a pie-in-the-sky idealist, as he is frequently tagged, Kagan said. The League of Nations, conceived by Wilson as a means to keep the peace after the ghastly bloodletting of the Great War, was just what the world, and America, needed, according to Kagan.
The fact that U.S. engagement in the League was turpedoed by Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge’s wily opposition was a low point for the U.S. and the world.
The bitter dispute between the Democrat Wilson and the Republican Lodge, Kagan told podcaster Bill Kristol, had little, if anything, to do with doctrines or grand ideas. Wilson’s postwar positioning had been Lodge’s before party politics got in the way, he points out.
“Domestic politics is the driving force in foreign policy,” Kagan told Kristol.
Accordingly, it’s important to pay as much attention to members of Congress and opposition political leaders as it is to presidents when both assessing and anticipating American involvement on the world stage.
That seems like really pertinent advice now in regard to the U.S. and Ukraine. Slowly, as the months have passed since the first Russian boots struck Ukrainian soil, there has been been a slight but definite change in public support for U.S. aid to Ukraine, based on party affiliation: with President Joe Biden in charge of a robust U.S. response, Democrats have remained steadfast, while Republicans, while overall supportive, have grown a bit wobbly.
Kagan has interesting takes on both world wars. As the author points out, most historians are dismissive of the First World War as a colossal blunder. Kagan argues the war was the necessary counter to militant German expansionism.
As for the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. failure occurred early. The French invasion of the Ruhr Valley in 1923 devastated German politics, Kagan argues, and “sowed the seeds” for the ascendancy of the Nazis.
Reeling but largely untouched by the horrors of the Great War, the U.S. was uniquely positioned to place a roadblock on the slide to an even more calamitous war. By 1932, with Hitler in power, the point of no return had come and gone.
For Kagan, the U.S. is the lynchpin in the developing evolution of a democracy-centered, rules-based world order. He points to “liberal hegemony” as the reason we fought both world wars and engaged in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
In Ukraine in 2023, he told Kristol, the issue is the same.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins @gmail.com.