By Tom Kando
I was just re-reading the history of World War One. It’s clear that from 1917 onward, the world took a new turn, due to America’s entry into that war.
Until then, history was largely the history of Big Power Politics. These were primarily European. the UK, France, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia - plus two newbies: the USA and Japan. Most other countries were either colonized, or otherwise less powerful.
For some reason, the Big Powers decided to commit collective suicide. It was largely Germany’s fault, but that’s irrelevant here.
For the next three years, the world experienced the greatest bloodbath in history. Single battles such as Verdun cost 800,000 lives - twice the total deaths of the entire American Civil War! This went on for no apparent gain to either side.
One Great Power kept its sanity - the US. America’s special position was clear to the combatants: for three years, both sides repeatedly appealed to President Wilson to please mediate and help put an end to the slaughter. In essence, they were begging America to save them.
They appealed to America because, coincidentally, that country had become a powerful giant which now dwarfed the other “Big Powers.” Only one country was (1) civilized and (2) powerful enough to save the world from itself.
Finally America acquiesced, reluctantly. It went about it by tipping the balance and putting an end to the stalemate and the bloodbath.
The Peace Treaties show the enormous influence of the US and of President Wilson. His 14 points, self-determination and the League of Nations were all his initiatives. The idea (alas not the reality) of world government and thus the end of war was born.
We all know what followed. Another, even bloodier war. Then a Cold War, with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Again, America did its best to save the rest of the world, for example through the Marshall Plan (which was even offered to Stalin, who turned it down) and by promoting European unification.
We are now approaching a century of American-led world order. It has been far from perfect, but better than the alternatives.
The world has avoided global conflict for two thirds of a century. The Cold War ended without conflagration. The idea (alas not the reality) of world government progressed, via the United Nations. Global capitalism has produced enormous inequities, but there has also been decolonialization and economic development. The primary beneficiary has been the Western world - the “core,” in World System Theory parlance. But others are also benefitting.
This has been the logic of world system development: bring more and more countries on board. First South Korea and the other Asian Tigers, now the B.R.I.C. countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), then others. (See for example Alice Amsden’s "The Rise of “The Rest”).
It is America who started this ball rolling. Its assistance and intervention were the sine qua non to rebuild Europe and Japan.
The entire “core” has reaped the rewards of the existing world system, but it is America which has done most of the heavy lifting to safeguard it. For nearly a century, it is primarily the US which has safeguarded the world order - flawed as it is.
Let me be provocative, and say that America has saved the world.
Saved it from what? You probably ask, horrified by my statement.
Simple: from the chaos which would have prevailed in the absence of a world cop. From even more mass suicides such as World Wars One and Two. What America did in the first World War, it did a fortiori in the second one: defeat the forces of international lawlessness.
You disagree?
Again, I offer the evidence of the absolute necessity of a world cop who is willing and able to intervene: No sooner were the 1919 Peace Treaties signed, than various regimes launched lawless rampages: Japan in Manchuria, Italy in Abyssinia, Franco in Spain, Stalin in Poland and Finland, Hitler everywhere. Within 5 years after World War Two, North Korea invaded its neighbor. Plus perennial aggression by smaller potatoes everywhere.
America was able to save the world - for a while - because (1) it is relatively civilized and because (2) of its economic might. There are many other very nicely civilized countries - wonderful little countries in places like Scandinavia. There may also be countries which will develop great economic might.
But the 20th century American one-two punch of power and wisdom was unique. This is scary. Will the world descend into greater chaos and lawlessness, as America becomes increasingly fallible and limited?
The ultimate goal is of course world federalism, peace and stability. President Wilson’s vision gave us the League of Nations and then an improved version - the United Nations. But without the backup of power, such institutions cannot play a meaningful role.
The American century may be coming to an end. The world may become “multi-polar” again. China? Who knows. Many rejoice at this, as many welcomed the fall of Rome. Be careful what you wish for.leave comment here
12 comments:
It's amazing how seductive your narrative of America, "world cops" is. It is the narrative I was reared on as a post-WWII child. Like so many mythic narratives carefully nurtured by powerful empires to justify their moral right to live at The Core, the American moral narrative is shot through with assumptions and contradictions to numerous to document here. The bottom line is that the narrative you relate points down a one way road to disaster. We cannot police ourselves out of the hole we have dug in our rapacious quest for self-fulfillment. Deeper understandings of our current situation and the moral imperatives of being human are needed. You are capable of doing much better.
Ha, Marc!
I was anticipating such comments.
For now, let me just say that I am thoroughly familiar with the opposite perspective. One of the innumerable versions of that narrative is British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech of the Prize in 2005 - a virulently anti-American diatribe, with all the familiar items characterizing the US as the rapacious hegemon.
My problem is that I see merit in the “post-WW II narrative” with which you and I grew up. Unlike you, I experienced it personally. I am one of the millions who were “saved” by America.
One’s experience determines one’s perspective. To be sure, one should transcend this, especially if one claims to be an intellectual.
But what if the initial perspective has merit? History does not always have to be re-written. Sometimes the initial version is fairly accurate.
This is not to say that I am not ambivalent about what has been accomplished - the whole crisis of modernity, etc. to which you allude.
Yes, I am sure that “I can do better” (a bit patronizing). We all can. I’ll revisit this as soon as time permits. I respect you too much to respond tersely.
I said "do better" not to patronize but because it is the only way I could think of to say in few words, that your narrative led to more problems than it solved.
I do not agree the intellect should, or even can, transcend circumstance and life history. I did experience the events you covered personally. I simply experienced them from my world center.
According to my parents, kin I never knew disappeared in Europe's camps, that were bypassed by Allied troops for the practical purpose of winning the race to Berlin--a political expedient in the war behind the War--the great battle between Capitalism and Socialism already underway around the turn of the 20th Century.
Growing up I thought little of the fact that my family was excluded from certain clubs or that I was beaten as a dirty Jew. America was still great despite such abhorrent behavior. The first cracks in my belief formed under a school desk--ducking-n-covering from mutually assured destruction. This terror pact made no sense, even to my child mind. Fins on American cars made no sense. The exclusion of blacks from buying property in my neighborhood made no sense. School adults who beat disobedient kids who rankled at being tested, ranked and sorted, alerted me to anomalies in the Great American story of winners and losers. The struggle to be winners destroyed my family.
As a foolish teenager I drove my 56' Chevy through Watt's L.A. during the height of the riots. I saw people forced by race to live in squalor, beaten down by troops riding in tanks. Then came the Vietnam War. I was classified 1A and good to go to die fighting people who did nothing to America, half a world away because we were told, they were thinking like "Commies". I was reclassified unfit, but many of my schoolmates died but their numbers paled in comparison to the Asian lives destroyed.
My lesson plan for the first class I taught in Sociology featured President Nixon's impeachment, LIVE! Then came the oil embargo. That made prefect sense. I traveled around the world by backpack. I learned how the Ottoman Empire was divided by the West and watched the Savak of America's Shah of Iran beat people in the street. When it came, the Iranian revolution made perfect sense. I saw a lack of gas guzzling cars with fins in Afghanistan, Pakistan India and Africa. In Central America I was routed around hot spot wars instigated and funded by American special ops, against socialist insurgencies that made perfect sense.
At home I watched the Iraq Wars on TV narrated like Roman games--people dying from shock and awe so that we could entertain ourselves with more of everything. And throughout it all, I struggled in fear to make a living--to prove my worth---knowing that should I slip and fall, I could very well be crushed for want of "merit" despite being white, educated, and wealthy enough. Even today, that makes no sense.
I have drawn some conclusions about a more useful narrative, based in part on a lifetime of personal experience. When the richest nation on earth claims its moral rightness comes from an invisible hand born of the amoral free markets it relies, it is running a con game. That it "polices" the planet with its unchallenged military might in defense of its invisible hand's prerogatives, makes perfect sense.
The story of the morality of amorality needs to be changed.
Wow!
Two narratives, yours and mine, each constructed to make sense of our life experiences. We have reported the facts as we have experienced them yet the truth of one relative to the other is tough to rank. Now add to that the umpteen narratives of other humans doing their best to make sense of their life experiences.
It is true that some narratives are made up of outright lies. The Republican's war on the Left is providing a fine example, but even the sincerest of narrators cannot produce a "true" story. The best she can do is try to make sense of the world going forward.
Since truth cannot serve as an absolute measure of narrative merit the best we can do is examine a narrative and ask ourselves, Where does it lead?"
Given the future we want to make real, which narratives will help us in practice, to move forward toward a better world?
American Exceptionalism! I love it! Welcome to the darkside, Tom!
Haha,
some people might say that I vacillate, being often so "liberal,"(in the American sense of "Left"), but then again a "jingoist" in this case...
I prefer to see myself as reasonable.
While many of my pieces are quite liberal, I cannot be bound to write pieces which fit just one political mould.
What I wrote in this piece, I believe to be true.
Tom, The "great powers" represent the end of a world dominated by states that see themselves as the controllers of society, with government as the "head" and everyone else falling in line. These powers represented that attitude combined with the modern impersonal instruments of rational bureaucracy that had the ratio goal of pursuing states' interests, humanitarianism or economic be damned.
The United States was a power built on different foundations, with a constitution that deliberately checked state power and provided freedoms that allowed great economic growth in the private sector. However, in the U.S. particularly in the last half of the 19th century, economic interests overtook the government. Therefore it was J.P. Morgan and banks that helped push the U.S. into the war, not to pursue U.S. national interest, but to use the U.S. government to enter the war to guarantee bank loans from European governments. Thus, we sought to stop the squabble to protect economic interests.
So what we have today is a world where banks and financial interests push governments around. In the U.S. they have overpowered the Constitution and worked over the system so that government is the result of economic lobby groups, right and left. In Europe, you have banks appointing presidents of Greece, and Italy.
What we lack is an integral view of society where culture, government, and economy are interrelated in a way that each perform their limited roles without gaining absolute power that puts whatever is deemed as the state interest above the idea that individuals have the right to pursue their own life, liberty, and happiness; not whoever controls the organs of the state.
Tom:
Love the Captain America cover, and the analysis.
I thank Gordon and Scott for their comments.
Gordon:
My, it's difficult to peg you, politically. Here I assign noble motives to America for coming to Europe's rescue in 1917, and you see more cynical motives.
Not that what you say doesn't make sense. There are always many factors.
Scott:
I agree, the cartoon is by far the best part of this post!
Tom, For more information on the bankers pushing the US into war, you can read "House of Morgan" by Ron Chernow, or go back to newspaper headlines in 1916.
Thanks, Gordon.
Just a quick note: While I have not read Chernow (and I plan to check it out), the issue is not unknown to me.
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