Not to get faux-erudite; Tocqueville was required reading when I was in school, and a blessed requirement that was. I returned to the famous concluding peroration after reading about the negotiations the president views as the necessary end to the Russo-Ukraine war. Rightly so, because the alternative is for one side to accept terms of surrender as dictated by the other, and we’ve seen the newsreels: the French telling the Germans to sign in a train car at Compiegne, twenty two years later the same thing in the same place, with roles reversed. As to whether negotiations go well of end badly, that is another matter and we’d do well to hold off applause or dismay until they take place, maybe better still, ’till we know the outcome.
Here is the famous envoi on the last page of De la democratie en Amerique:
There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.
All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
There you still have it. Freedom our lodestar and while we strive to deal with the world as it is and seek only to engage in beneficial commerce, we know tyrants of other races and nations view us as a threat by simple force of example, and they can see their own subjects seek to escape from the traps of their conditions and build lives anew among us, insuring the happiness and prosperity of their families forever while bringing new arms brains heart to the shining land they choose to call home.
The president uses an unorthodox diplomatic style … and sometimes your own side gives you more trouble than the enemy.
I never asked him but I suspect this may be why Irving Kristol used to quip that immigration is the only enduring American foreign policy — and arguably its only successful one. For those who know neither literature nor history nor the back issues of TAS, let alone those of Commentary, the Public Interest, Encounter, or Partisan Review, Irving Kristol was the original neo-conservative (a term rather stupidly bandied about now to refer to dullards and stupes whose thinking Irving would politely (and wittily) disapprove).
This is pertinent to our present moment because both the false neos and the flatheads who call their adversaries neos are simply confusing young minds and leading our public discourse deeper ever into the realm of incoherence wherein we cannot even agree on factual evidence.
Case in point, the recent Oval Office meeting between presidents D. Trump and V. Zelenskyy for the purpose of designing terms of negotiation to end the Russian war in Ukraine: if you read any two accounts side by side you have to believe the chroniclers are either omitting or inventing or simply fabulating.
One view, instead of examining what such negotiations can reasonably achieve, simply applauded the American president’s leadership (fair enough), while treating him with a degree of obsequious flattery which is completely besides the point at issue and which ill becomes citizens of our free and democratic Republic, and which, anyway, Donald Trump scarcely needs.
The other side, without waiting to see any specifics in the diplomatic initiative, says he sandbagged the Ukrainian president by design because he is “Moscow’s man” (this was a headline in a conservative French newspaper! but it is the line many in this country are taking) who wants to pull off a Munich or a Molotov-Ribbentrop, then split what remains of Ukraine’s wealth with the Russian leader, V. Putin, and, as a plus, get the latter on our side against China, i.e. pull a Nixon in reverse.
This is disconcerting and partakes of the decline of American journalism. I am not worried about the decline of civilization, but I will say this, we need a faith revival in this country or we’re out of the competition and civilization will not even be on the list of possible come-backs.
Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, on the subject of war and peace, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” It is either apocryphal or the wording he used is different, but it is apt because he obviously meant that negotiations are better, when you can engage in them, than continuing a fight bringing more death and damage.
I think Churchill may have been referring to whether or not to hold to the precarious truce in Korea, even though American casualties were mounting even as the talks got stuck on preliminaries such as the kind of table that should be used. Churchill, and America’s allies in Europe more generally, appreciated the effort the U.S., was making in Korea. We were acting under a U.N. mandate but under its own command hierarchy (Truman-Eisenhower-MacArthur-Ridgway), and we had some not inconsiderable help from Britain, France, Australia-New Zealand, and smaller contingents from quite a few others.
Churchill and the Euros were getting nervous about the degree to which the stretched U.S. forces left a gap in central Europe through which Stalin — international communism, which had substantial fifth columns in France and Italy and fellow-traveling peace-at-all-cost contingents elsewhere — might be tempted to punch through all the way to the Channel. Indeed they feared he might not even need go that far, if he occupied West Germany he would be in a position to “Finlandize” the whole place.
It was a difficult spot for the liberal democracies. Harry Truman’s popularity sank and he knew he would not be renominated by the Democrats in ’52. There were doubts about who was for what exactly and just what we were doing about our enemies domestic and foreign. Irving Kristol, noticing the uncertainty of our higher elites over our priorities, noted, during the brouhaha when Senator Joe McCarthy called (with the use of some admittedly theatrical rhetoric) for heightened attention to inside-the-government disloyalty, “the American people know that Senator McCarthy is concerned about the menace of communism; of the elites’ concern, they are not so sure.” (full disclosure, this is a paraphrase from memory.)
Maybe Churchill said it on another occasion, but he would have made the same point. He was trying to justify negotiations even as fighting continued, and not surprisingly Americans were confused: win or not win? If not win why stay? Korea, liberated from Japanese rule at the end of World War Two was divided in Soviet-oriented and Free World-oriented zones, and the South was recognized by the U.S. as a vital interest that had to be fought for — but only after Secretary of State Dean Acheson blundered by suggesting it was “outside the perimeter of American interests.”
He apologized, but this gave the wrong idea to the communist-led North. Acheson’s slip was not entirely analogous to, but not that different either, from Pres. Biden’s dismissal of the dangers of a Russian invasion of Ukraine some 70 years later. However, Acheson apologized.
Korea cost 150,000 American casualties (killed and wounded), devastated Korea — half a million Koreans killed in action, a million civilians died of collateral damages including malnutrition and disease. I mention this terrible war because it continued even as negotiations got under way. Negotiations are necessary to end a war, but they are not in themselves the end sought by either side, nor do they automatically secure lasting security and peace.
The strategic lesson the Korean war instilled in U.S. international security policy, while certainly not immoral or stupid, was in the light of later conflicts seen to be inadequate. The lesson was that we found ourselves in a world characterized by a global defensive line. The democratic nations, led by the United States, stood watch on it. There would have to be truces that allowed our side to catch its breath and reconsider which fights to choose, which to refuse or withdraw from.
The tactics of “graduated response,” the strategic objective of fighting not to lose instead of in pursuit of unconditional surrender of the enemy, grew out of the realization that winning entailed risking total annihilation in exchanges of nuclear weapons. The strategy of containment, with armed peace, incomplete victories, tense and uncertain negotiations to regulate armaments, irked Americans who did not see the point of “endless wars.” “Pundits” in the press who increasingly were taking the place of newsmen (and women, such as the legendary Maggie Higgins) blamed “neoconservatives” who were more like “neoWilsonians,” which is something else altogether.
Churchill may have erred on Korea; there has been a long and valuable argument among American historians over the questions raised by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s public dispute with President Harry Truman’s decision to seek an armistice.
The first question is fairly clear, namely should a soldier on active duty criticize a superior in public. In this case it was the commander in the theater and the commander in chief, so it was a clear Constitutional issue, and it was resolved by MacArthur’s honorable reluctance to challenge Truman for the presidency, as many urged him to do, after he was relieved of command for insubordination.
But the strategic issue was never resolved, because it required an answer to an impossible dilemma: might an aggressive attack on Red China’s forces (supporting and reinforcing the North Koreans), including in their mainland sanctuaries, have won the war? With the South Korean forces occupying the North, a unified free Korea would become an even mightier ally than South Korea has been? The risk was: the bomb.
Something along these lines must be in the minds of Israel’s leaders: should we maintain a truce before we destroy our sworn enemies’ ability to fight? And who is to say this very thought is not in the minds of our elected leaders as well? Distract attention from the Middle East, neutralize the threats there, consolidate with “deals” and the Arabs will stop being the bankers of jihad movements around the world.
Wild stuff, speculative nonsense; though sometimes it helps to rethink alternatives to what happened long ago in order to think outside the textbooks to think about what is happening in the present, as well as to ponder future strategy; in other words, creative “what-if’s” prepare soldiers to think about battlefield situations they may encounter, and at broader levels, they may help war planners avoid the fallacies inherent in “fighting the last war.”
Well worth reading — this is not a placement ad — is a very well done piece of science-history-fiction, The Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove, which in some ways reveals its originality better in these times of national disunity than it did when published in 1992.
However, we should know that negotiations, like politics, ain’t beanbag, and the hysterics of both the president’s cheerleaders and his detractors is to render, in their hyperventilations, that there remains a problem, namely peace in that imaginary Harold Mackinderland beloved by Robert Kaplan (an acquaintance not a cousin) and Francis Sempa (a co-contributor to these pages not an acquaintance) known in the real world as Eurasia. Not to get facetious, but why not Fantasia? Since it is suggested we can trust V. Putin?
The president uses an unorthodox diplomatic style, borrowed from his experience in business, but it is diplomacy, and sometimes your own side gives you more trouble than the enemy, although afterwards you come to realize the enemy was just biding his time until you and your side give up and then he gives you both more trouble than ever. Korea and Vietnam are prime examples. As old hands at this used to say of the commies, “Their way of negotiating (making deals in the current idiom) is to come to the table and say, “What’s ours is ours and what’s yours is up for grabs.”
And with that I say, give peace a chance, keep your powder dry — and read Tocqueville.
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