America’s Century Of Making The World Safe For Democracy

Part 2 – On The Other Hand….

… Where Woodrow Wilson fails: foreign affairs.

During World War 1 President Wilson should have forced de colonization on Europeans from a position of strength: the Allies greatest peril was the German all-out offensive of 1918, and he might have used that leverage to bring his Fourteen Points to practical life. Wilson’s idea of the League of Nations is undiscussed since it was a dream too far: the United Nations power in conflict resolution has been mostly ineffectual. Wilson tried to establish the principles of international rule of law at the treaty of Versailles too long after the Colonial powers had a chance for a blood transfusion, the peril forgotten. With a just process of transition to modernity, the second bloodiest conflict in the West’s history need not have led to the first. It is bitter that America’s rescue subsidized Europe’s continued Colonial plunder. It is bitter to know the true epitaph that should be on every World War 1 soldiers’ headstone: “Sunk cost of Empire.” Bitterest of all: the law of sunk costs applies all the more to government paying in blood (almost always someone else’s), and this lesson almost always goes unlearned. The Communist parasite meme might never have taken hold of a decolonized world with less immunocompromise from war exhaustion.

If World War 1’s reality was of nothing but an industrial scale flaunting of the law of sunk costs, it’s only a more extreme outcome of what war almost always is: few wars are won without attritional exhaustion and comprise. Total, clear, transformative victory is exceedingly rare, and even fewer wars redeem anything. America’s experience in redemptive war is very unusual, its outlier success now distorts our cultural approach to problem-solving. Wilson’s grandiose “making the world…” was a cultural leap for Americans, but the Virginia-accented, acid-eloquent dissent you hear in the background is Thomas Jefferson’s ghost warning us that Leviathan will never be caged again.

Following the World Wars, the Korean War was the newly-born West’s (true-born West, we could say) involvement in a civil war to check Communist power, as a United Nations mandate, Wilson’s League of Nations remade. But America’s bombing campaign of Korea was savage, undermining our aspirations for the rule of international law almost from the start, after being culturally desensitized to the unprecedented destruction of World War Two; another distorting legacy (uniquely, none of it was destructive to us). The outcome is acceptable only when seen in contrast to what the Soviets were getting up to (Hungary, Czechoslovakia). A friendly dictator was maintained until the people of South Korea launched a peaceful revolution to claim their democratic rights. With the dictator of South Korea we will see how much easier it is to war on our enemy for bad governance than our friends. We will see this again.

Post World Wars, with the Western pupils of the Wilson way finally releasing their Empires’ people into the world (and nowhere was it neat, particularly in the Middle East), decolonization became entangled with the heating Cold War. The new world order was soon dismayed as the USA stepped into the French Colonists’ role in the Vietnam war: backing a Catholic minority against a broadly popular insurgency for independence, involving ourselves in a Jackleg electoral fraud. The war was really an anti-Communist crusade, completely misconstruing the motivations and goals of Hanoi (this essential misconstruing pattern will repeat in our various Middle Eastern debacles). The Vietnamese were never the cat’s paw of the Soviets or the Chinese, or anyone else’s. The Soviets were knives-out with China in this period, and China would fight a war with Vietnam shortly after the fall of our crooked-client South. The dominoes fell all over Indochina because we gutted them out with our wars, not because of their supreme Communist-conspiring, terroristic cunning (sound familiar?). Had Ho Chi Minh called himself anything other than Communist, we might have been friends, like we are now. Such should have been our first lesson of what wars with concepts (“Communist plot” “GWOT: Global War on Terror”) means in actual implementation. This, and the illogic of destroying people for their own good is libertarian philosophical bedrock. To quote Stevie wonder: “when you believe in things that you don’t understand, you will suffer.”

What is the right Wilsonian philosophical context for thinking about our Middle Eastern adventures? The case has been made that the conflagration really is the final battle of World War 1, and the end of “artificial” Colonial empire: the Sykes Picot accord of national land distribution in defiance of ethnicity and culture, for the purpose of dismembering Turkish power, while divvying the Colonial lucre. Sykes Picot set the bomb, and the fuse would inevitably be lit, goes the argument. But the fact is that America blew the bomb in an act of hubris no other nation could contemplate, let alone implement. And we blew the bomb, once again, in mimicry of Colonial-like notions of what Iraq should be (and Syria, for that matter. We pronounce that Assad “has to go,” but an informed, rational choice might be him over the bearded beheading Islamo-totalitarians).

The similarity to the post World War 1 world does not end there: status quo power balances were in flux with the demise of the Soviet Union, leaving an international blank slate for us to write our interests on. In so doing, we set the conditions for creating a refugee crisis so large (over two million) that they could populate their own nation, if given the chance. They will remain in a permanent condition of UN refugee limbo if the history of region is any guide.

The second Iraq war was an approach taken straight out of the World War 2 playbook, Marshall plan included: a grandiose, top-down, project to “drain the swamp,” and bootstrap Islamic governance into competence (we can’t even do this for our own institutions. And how many Americans would agree we should try?). Meanwhile, the only effective Islamic institution is Hezbollah, a terrorist NGO. And what of democracy? The blind spot Wilson never encountered is the assumption that democracy will be informed by enlightenment. Had he lived longer, he would have seen this dilemma play out in German democracy. But Wilson has an excuse, he’s been gone this century. What to make of the makers who failed to consider the meaning of imposing top-down democracy on a culture that holds it their duty ordained by God to resist our influence? We completely misconstrued the human landscape of our Middle Eastern experiment; all power and no wisdom. Wilson never sought to make the world safe “for separation of power,” or “rule of law,” he was the ultimate and original imperial President, creating the role. Consider the gulf between “Make the world safe for democracy,” and “make the world safe for enlightenment,” to see the impossibility of success.

What to make of Afghanistan in a “making” context? An expensive cultural experiment that will take another century to see the back of?

Another lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam: we can smite our enemy in the name of making democracy, but we can’t smite our allies.

Here would be a good time to look at Wilson’s racism: he was a race separatist of the old school, writing into his eighteen points a credo of proposing nationality along racial lines. Strange, since he was President of a credal nation of immigrants. But, like a broken clock being right twice a day, maybe Wilson’s nineteenth century cynicism would have spared the Middle East some of the immense damage of our whimsical hopes for both democratic and inclusive governance. As it stands, the only beneficiary of our making in the Middle East has been the ethnic minority Kurds. And Wilson would recognize the inevitability of wars creating on their own gravity; creating their own permanent facts divorced from goals, sunk cost chased in the all-the-more way of politics: a war on Islamic assholery cannot but be perpetual.

Wars are the ultimate example of the sunken costs fallacy, but whereas with business it is a principal of survival in the marketplace, with government the sunken costs turns into a survival imperative for those doing the sinking and the costing. Just as German militarism was a cultural way of being, now American grandiosity and militarism in problem solving has become part of ours: “let’s have small, incremental adaptive solutions” is now as politically untenable to the wielders of a military budget larger than that of the next 7 nations in the world combined, as “peacefully trade your way to world dominance” would be to old Imperial Germans. It’s tempting to say that the USA more resembles mercantilist colonialist Germany now than it does pre-Wilsonian American-style Republicanism. Many of those pre-Wilson Americans had Father George Washington’s farewell address warnings of foreign entanglements next to their Bibles. Much of this wisdom came from their intimate knowledge of useless European Colonial wars, as the ghosts of my Wife’s and my own ancestors could attest. Maybe we could use more American muslims to reteach us the same lessons.

Our two most senior Generals; Washington and Eisenhower, had similarly jaundiced views of permanent war institutions.

It’s the evolution of this cultural shift that I most hold against Woodrow Wilson. Hubris in the Middle East mirrors Wilson’s professorial hubris. All power, no wisdom is an apt description of most of America’s chronic problems. Making democracy, vs making enlightenment, is another. And Jefferson’s ghost is now screeching that Leviathan is hungry and standing right behind us. The other Father’s ghost you hear is Alexander Hamilton’s: “Do you have any idea how much this costs?! Five Trillion dollars is a lot of money! A quarter of our debt!”

That, and all the blood.