War and peace

At CRB David Goldman writes,

In the decade since President George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech, America has gone from hyperpower to hyperventilater. The Obama Administration and the Republican leadership quibble about the modalities of an illusory two-state solution in Israel, or the best means to make democracy bloom in the Middle East’s deserts, or how vehemently to denounce Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, everything that could go wrong, has. Europe’s frontiers are in play for the first time since the fall of Communism; Russia and China have a new rapprochement; American enemies like Iran have a free hand while traditional American allies in the Sunni world feel betrayed; and China has all but neutralized American sea power within hundreds of miles of its coast.

America’s credibility around the world is weaker than at any time since the Carter Administration. American policy evokes contempt overseas, and even more at home, where the mere suggestion of intervention is ballot box poison, while the Republicans’ isolationist fringe wins straw polls among the party’s core constituents. In 2013 the Pew Survey found 53% of U.S. respondents considered America less important and powerful than a decade earlier, the first time a majority held that view since 1974, just before the fall of Saigon. And four-fifths of respondents told Pew that the U.S. should not think so much in international terms but concentrate on its own problems, the highest proportion to agree with that proposition since the survey began posing it in 1964.

Goldman reviews To Make and Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations, by Angelo M. Codevilla. ...Codevilla approves the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a way to hold local rulers responsible for the hostile actions of their subjects, but abhors the ensuing occupation and counterinsurgency campaign, which only “hardened the divisions between this artificial country’s main religious-ethnic groups.” As for “democracy,” he scoffs that “U.S. viceroys spent most of a decade fruitlessly trying to negate the Shias’, Sunnis’, and Kurds’ democratically expressed mutual antagonism.” The much-lauded “surge” “consisted of turning over to Sunni insurgents the tribal areas into which the Shia were pushing them. Rather than defeating them, the U.S. government began arming them.” And the result: “After a bloody decade, Iraq ended up divided along ancient ethno-religious fault lines but more mutually bitter.”

He rejects intervention in the Syrian civil war as such. “It is not clear by what right or to what good we Americans should foster a set of killings, the bounds of which we know not and cannot control, nor, above all, whom that would benefit. Thus Syria’s internal struggle falls under the heading of ‘their business.’” But he laments the lost opportunity to punish Syria after Damascus instigated the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut; our failure to use the 150,000 American troops in Iraq in 2003 to destroy the Bashar al-Assad regime in retaliation for hosting anti-American forces; and the Bush Administration’s 2006 decision to halt Israel’s attack on Hezbollah. These were Syrian acts of war against America, and America should have responded with war. A fortiori, Codevilla argues, America should have made war on Iran in response to the 1979 seizure of American diplomats and other acts of war. The same criterion applies to other Islamic regimes that support terror: “Our business now is forcefully to restore respect for ourselves by holding those rulers responsible. The longer we wait, the more force will be needed.”

After Lincoln’s election, Jefferson Davis offered to stop secession if Lincoln would annex Cuba and other prospective slave territories to the South. I call attention to this episode not to argue details with Codevilla, but rather to broach a broader issue. Slavery trumped matters of principle or sentiment because of a circumstance beyond any American’s control: soil exhaustion by intensive cotton cultivation, which would have strangled the South’s economy unless America acquired new land. The economics of slavery, that is, arguably turned a comedy of errors into a tragedy in which the main participants could not act other than they did.

America got “such a peace as the circumstances permitted” after the Civil War, Codevilla argues, although “the Republican Party inflicted twelve years of attempted nation-building on Southern states—sucking their remaining wealth, building political rotten-boroughs to pad its powers in Congress, and rubbing salt into wounds by appointing Negroes to positions with punitive powers.” Here Codevilla seems callous. There is a difference between American efforts to impose democracy on foreign lands, and a commitment to extend democratic rights to people born on American soil but previously denied such rights. It was not the freed slaves’ fault that they were ill-prepared for democratic citizenship: America had imported them against their will and therefore bore the responsibility for their condition. Codevilla argues that it was inevitable for a century to pass between the end of the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; but he does not dissuade me from believing that the tardy fulfillment of Reconstruction’s promise was a scandal.

If America’s Civil War had broken out later, after 1861, the Union well might have lost and slavery would have spread throughout South America. Had the South enjoyed time to link up with Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico in 1862, and perhaps also with Lord Palmerston’s Britain, the blockade of Southern ports and even the Union cause would have been untenable. In that sense, John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid and other abolitionist actions drew out the South prematurely and contributed to Union victory.

Ronald Reagan and his national security team, at least in his first administration, understood that the sclerotic Soviet economy could not compete with America’s, and that Russia understood its window to project power was closing. That insight informed Reagan’s commitment to Cold War victory. Détente with a declining superpower was not an option: America had to win. For the same reason, it is misguided to expect a negotiated settlement with Iran.

Codevilla calls for the formation of a different, genuine elite aligned with the outlook of America’s founders: “America needs a new generation of statesmen,” he contends, who “would have to affirm their craft’s forgotten fundamental: that the search for peace begins with neutrality in others’ affairs and that when others trouble our peace we impose it upon them by war—war as terribly decisive as we can make it.”

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