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thedrifter
09-15-04, 06:45 AM
Joe Buff: What "End of History"?

Looking ahead a tad to beat the rush, 9 November of this year will mark the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. Two years after that, in late '91, the Soviet Union officially dissolved itself -- a mostly symbolic act, since the USSR had by then very obviously splintered apart from within. Amid the joy and relief at this sudden outburst of global freedom and peace, some commentators pronounced "the end of history." By that, so far as I could tell at the time, they meant the world would quickly become a sedate and stable place, and nothing particularly important would ever happen again.

Woops! This just goes to show the perils of making big predictions in public. History, as the intervening years since 1989 have amply proven, is still very much alive, compelling, and challenging. Furthermore, to paraphrase from another context, it's clear that "We don't own history. History owns us."

I'd like to humbly -- but, with intent, provocatively -- offer some observations, based on events old and new, to partly debunk a few persistent myths about how the world really works. Shorn of the clouded vision caused by these key misperceptions, optimists among us can hope we'll hear less of such authoritative-sounding yet deluded pronouncements re foreign affairs, as the never-boring 21st century marches on.

Do Countries Have "Friends"? Nations, as the ultimate sovereign entities on the planet, act solely out of self interest, as cloaked as this might be by good manners, polite diplomacy, wishful thinking -- and well-funded propaganda. Today's ally could be tomorrow's enemy. Yesterday's mortal foe might turn into today's most die-hard friend. Just look at the historical record. The UK over two-plus centuries went from being America's enemy, to friend, to enemy, to friend, to enemy, to friend, to enemy, to friend. If you're wondering where this rollercoaster comes from, think about British policy during our War Between the States, and the war plans the British Admiralty drew up against us (on paper) amid the battleship-building races of the early 20th century -- when emerging U.S. industrial power threatened the UK's precious unilateral mastery over the seas. The first switcheroo by London from enemy to friend is my favorite example of how the watered-down "history" comfort-food taught in grammar school isn't much at all like the actual world.

War with France! From 1798 to 1801, the newborn United States and Revolutionary France fought an undeclared war at sea, the Quasi War. (We won decisively.) The fact that it wasn't declared didn't mean it wasn't serious. Vietnam was undeclared too, right? So, within barely fifteen years of the end of our War of Independence, during which Lafayette and his pals rendered us vital military aid against King George, we were at war with France, and the UK was giving us some not-so-surreptitious help. The reasons for this sudden reversal were twofold: The U.S. made the bad mistake of disbanding the Continental Navy in the mid-1780s, and there was something of a "regime change" in Paris when Louis XVI lost his head. And yet, not too long after the end of the Quasi War, England was having at us again in the War of 1812. For more recent empirical data, contrast the lineups in World War I and World War II. Japan and Italy were on our side in the Great War, but both were our enemies in the rematch that started barely twenty years later. It does get rather confusing.

Cyclical Isolationism/Pacifism: Every major war quickly (and erroneously) gets characterized as the last of its kind that we'll ever need. W.W.I was the war to end all wars -- sorry. W.W.II was the war to make the world safe for democracy -- it didn't. The Cold War's demise was supposed to ring in an era of warm and fuzzy global unity -- nope. Each "victory" leads to drastic cuts in U.S. defense spending, on the premise that big armed forces (and good intelligence) are no longer needed -- plus, after all, America is a peace-loving nation. Each time, when the Next Big War breaks out, we pay a dreadful price in treasure and blood because of this recurring unpreparedness. It seems there's no such thing as "lasting peace," just breathers between big wars. History does not repeat itself. Warfare does.

We're All Connected: Some folks think, with apparent good reason, that the world now has so many checks and balances that third-generation-style major war is impossible: International trade brings everyone close. Communication technologies -- like the Internet -- forge a single worldwide village in which large armed conflict becomes unthinkable. Air travel is so swift, and tourism so economically vital, that it's senseless for people from different countries to want to start killing each other en masse. Alas, if only history bore this out. Prior communication and transportation breakthroughs, such as the telegraph and the railroad, or the radio and the flying machine, didn't bring world peace. They just made the prosecution of war more efficient, and much more deadly. Germany and the UK were each other's single biggest trading partners in 1914. Look what happened there.

U-235 Galore: A fine example of how industrial development and rising economic prosperity don't guarantee peace is found in the unfolding drama over nuclear proliferation. The latest interesting brouhaha concerns South Korea's production of a speck of almost(?) weapons grade uranium. Seems likely this was just an ambitious science fair project carried too far, by theoretical researchers who hadn't thought about international treaties. The statecraft difficulties this incident is causing now with North Korea and Iran is more than amply covered elsewhere, so I won't go into that. The point is that the uranium refinement method used by the South Korean scientists -- the dual-laser method -- unlike other purification techniques is extremely easy to hide. This does not bode well for future nuclear arms control. Worse, many international treaties have perfectly legal escape clauses. For instance, the Treaty of Pelindaba, signed by African nations, formally bans all nuclear weapons and their precursor fuel and equipment from that entire continent. However, always read the fine print. Any signatory country can withdraw from the treaty due to "paramount national interests." The proper method of withdrawal is to merely inform the other signatories. One way -- in a hypothetical scenario intended to be scary -- that a country could "inform" others would be to drop an A-bomb on one of them.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: This law, related to the infamous Murphy's Law, warns that whenever you make a change that's supposed to be for the good, that change will have some consequences you hadn't thought to expect, which are bad. The collapse of the Soviet Union is an excellent case in point. OK, the world became a lot less likely to go up in a thermonuclear holocaust. But instead, we face the constant gnawing worry that one of those ex-Soviet H-bombs might make its way onto the terrorist black market, and be set off somewhere in the homeland of the U.S. or another very unfortunate place. (Say, in Moscow, with the button pushed by Chechen separatists?)

Forward into the Past: Amid all the global post-Cold War dismaying turmoil and strife, America seems partly in the grip of a form of denial of our own day-to-day living history -- via escape within our minds into a pat, upbeat, unthreatening past. W.W.II, supposedly the last "good" war, is a prime destination for these journeys of wistful nostalgia -- the end is well known, and it's happy. Why think about the horrors and uncertainties of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Darfur, and so on, when we can bask in self-congratulation over winning the "last" really big shooting war? Of course, in and of itself there's nothing wrong and a lot that's very right with honoring our cherished Greatest Generation, and celebrating the 60th anniversaries of climactic battles soon coming thick and fast. But in idealizing old glories we risk two important mistakes: Firstly, W.W.II was rife with intelligence failures (Pearl Harbor, Arnhem, the Battle of the Bulge) and costly military blunders and miscalculations (Kasserine Pass, the hedgerows of Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest) -- to think otherwise creates a unfair standard to judge every subsequent war. Secondly, an over-worship and regression into closed-off prior history could endanger our most outstanding national strength: that the USA as a dynamic entity, and We the People as a community of communities, always look ahead, planning and building a better tomorrow. Excessive escapism cripples -- it's a surrender in the face of urgent real-time hardships and conflicts, a shirking of the chore to address and solve pivotal, complex problems here and now. One hopes this head-ducking into a rose colored, mythical bygone era won't turn around and bite.

Quick Summation: Have we really seen "the end of history"? My answer has to be a loud, Not hardly!

Ellie