Wednesday, April 3, 2019

The Jungle Grows Back

America and Our Imperiled World
Robert Kagan

My poolside reading habits are getting to be a little strange.  My last three books by the pool were GRANT, THESE TRUTHS, and FREDERICK DOUGLAS.  They were all terrific, albeit cumbersome.  At least Robert Kagan's book is small, only 163 paper back sized pages.  I started it at the pool in Orlando, but only read about twenty pages.  I was too busy watching my grandchildren to concentrate.  I read the rest of it on the plane to Denver, finishing it somewhere over Brighton.

The world has enjoyed and prospered from some seven decades free from the horrors of world wars and global aggression.  That relative freedom is the result of the World Liberal Order spurred by the United States.  Prior to the great wars of the twentieth century, the power broker countries/regimes looked at the world as a kind of zero sum game.  If country A enjoyed a booming economy, that boom would be invested in arms and armies to both defend against the aggression of others and launch a few aggressions of its own.  Countries B, C, D, etc. would correspondingly build up their defenses/offenses.  Conquest and war was the name of the game.

That changed after World War II and its aftermath.  The USA helped rebuild Europe.  It made treaties insuring Germany would never arm again.  Implicit in all this rebuilding and treaty making, was the promise that the United States would use its might to give its allies the freedom to rebuild and at the same time would not use its might to gain advantage.

In other words, the USA laid the groundwork for the World Liberal Order, a belief in individual rights over nationalism, in free trade, and relatively peaceful cooperation between nations.  I said a belief in, not that those things were all happening.  But it is true, I think, that our nation and the democratic nations of Europe, govern themselves by those principles.

The problem with all this is that it is quite expensive, both in dollars and in lives, to insure that liberal order.  The United States, being in the best position geographical and economically, is more often than not left with the bill.  That's the price we pay for the world the way it is.

Conservatives will argue, Donald Trump does argue, even Obama kinda/sorta argued that we should not be left with that burden.  Countries should take care of their own problems.  We shouldn't do "stupid things."  The problem is that sometimes it is hard to recognize a stupid thing close up.  Maybe, even though it wasn't really our problem and should have been taken care of by other countries of the region, it was a "stupid thing" to stay out of Syria a few years ago.  Maybe if we had intervened, the refugee crisis in Europe would not be what it is today.  Who knows?

We kept the Liberal World Order in tact by getting bogged down in regional disputes, and "Conflicts" that fell short of the global conflicts of the mid twentieth century.  If you don't take into account that we have somehow stayed relatively insulated and safe, we have given more than we've received.

But the thing is that THE JUNGLE GROWS BACK.  Even though it might look "fair" to balk at doing the most to keep the jungle at bay, if we don't the whole world will suffer.  Who else but us?  It was hard for me to read the accurate criticism of Obama's foreign policy that seemed to be a retreat from our responsibility to the world, even though I can't imagine how Obama could have gotten enough cooperation from a paralyzed Congress to initiate any kind of action overseas.

Of course, the last part of the essay focuses on the world wide movement toward Authoritarianism and the Age of Trump.  The problems all the people like me are having accepting our President and the kind of thinking he represents, is that we all take it on faith that the ideals of the liberal order are the natural way of things, that the country and its thinking will just naturally evolve into the beliefs espoused in the Declaration and the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation and all those other icons of Democracy.

But that clearly isn't the case.  All those ideals had to be fought for and they had to be fought for again and again.  There was another force:  "From the beginning, liberalism inspired a virulent anti-liberalism.  Eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics . . . took aim in particular at the universalism of the liberal world-view, the elevation of the individual and individual's rights above nation, tribe, and family.  Such cosmopolitanism, they argued, uprooted tradition and culture and all that makes one most human.  They believed, as most people had always believed in a natural hierarchy of authority. . ."

We just assume it is given that people naturally desire freedom,  but there is an equal desire for the kind of security a strong leader would provide.  Those conflicting desires on all sorts of levels explain why the jungle keeps growing back.

"We would like to believe that, at the end of the day, the desire for freedom trumps all those other human impulses.  But there is no end of the day, and there are no final triumphs."

James Baldwin said that the world is held together by the love and determination of a very few individuals.  In the panoply of countries, the USA is one of those individuals.  We have to interject ourselves on the world stage.  Sometimes those interjections will be calamitous.  Sometimes they will be mistakes.  Sometimes they just might hold the world together.  "Whoever wants to retain his moral innocence must forsake action altogether." (Hans Morgenthau).

And the main thing we have to do is stop looking at things like trade in terms of winners and losers.  Real estate might be a zero sum game.  I don't think international relations should be.

Lots of people, myself included, protested the war in Vietnam.  I would be there protesting again if it happened today.  But if we hadn't gone into Vietnam, what would Southeast Asia look like today?  If we hadn't gone to Korea, how would the Pacific Rim be different?  I have no idea and neither does anyone else, but the questions have given me pause.

I firmly believe--always have--that the history of the world tells the story of good triumphing over evil.  The triumphs were hard fought and there was lots of backsliding along the way, but they were triumphs nonetheless.  This book hasn't made me change that opinion, but it sure has challenged it.

This is a great book.