The supreme international crime
Good evening, and welcome to Talking Europe for Monday, January 6, 2020. I am very grateful for all the new subscribers who are joining us with this edition of the newsletter. Thanks to everyone who has shared these posts!
Despite the dramatic events in the Middle East, it’s not necessarily the case that a bigger war will break out. But I’m pessimistic, and I have to admit the reason for my pessimism is that I simply can’t figure out what is going on. It’s the disorder that is making me nervous, the fact that I can’t make any sense of these events, that I can’t fit them into any logical pattern, that I can’t put a name to them.
In 2002 and 2003, it was clear that there would be a war because the Bush administration wanted war and every American institution that we might have counted on to prevent war failed. But what does the U.S. government want now? I have no idea. While the theory behind the 2003 war was dumb and the arguments advanced for it were specious, still it must be said that there was a theory and there were arguments. Today there is nothing.
The situation now reminds me of 1914, but not in the way you might think. We are often taught that that fateful year was characterized principally by a system of alliances and that once the alliances came into operation, triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke at Sarajevo, war was inevitable. But it was not the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that caused the war, nor was it even Austria’s determination to punish Serbia for it. Nor was it Russia’s mobilization. Nor was it Germany’s granting of the infamous “blank check” to Austria. Nor was it Britain’s decision to come in a few days later. (Etc., etc. — you know the story.) Of course, it was all of those things together that made the war, but those decisions did not have the kind of automaticity that should permit us to package them into a neat explanation for the war’s outbreak. They were discrete events, but each of them occurred within the prevailing spirit of the age.
That spirit involved, I think, a foggy sense that a war might come. Yes, of course, there was Norman Angell’s Great Illusion, the bestseller first published in 1909 that argued Europe had grown too prosperous to do something as stupid as a big, destructive war. That book is sometimes cited as evidence that the war was a kind of surprise, but behind Angell’s argument was an assumption that war, if it did come, might not be so bad. War also had in those days a certain temptation about it. “As many men fled to it as fled from it,” says a character in Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel Ungeduld des Herzens (published in English as Beware of Pity).
There was a vagueness surrounding the war aims of the belligerents, a grand incongruity between what they said they wanted and the terrible violence they were inflicting on each other to get it. Their goals ranged from the tragically prosaic (various little strips of land) to the comically hubristic (the defense of civilization, or making the world safe for democracy). Did anybody really get what they wanted once it was all over? I guess France got Alsace back (which Louis XIV had taken from Germany), at least until 1940.
What would we be fighting for in a Middle Eastern war today? What would anybody be fighting for there that they couldn’t get without fighting? Can anyone name the intolerable threat that would require us to fight? And yet everyone is talking about war, and if you do that enough it starts to seem natural somehow. The mental exercise that is making me so pessimistic is this: I try to imagine peace breaking out, and nothing comes to mind. I try to imagine how it would happen, and I can’t. Which leaders of which countries would be at the head of a peace movement? Which institutions would underwrite it? Which army would secure it? Which values would breathe life into it?
There is for me, an American, a further ghost that haunts me, a guilt that torments me. In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Northern forces in the Civil War and later became president, wrote of his service in the Mexican War (1846-1848), which he called “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” The war was started illegally and dishonestly when the American army sent men into Mexico to provoke a skirmish and then claimed the incident had taken place in newly-annexed Texas, on U.S. soil. Abraham Lincoln, then a member of Congress, famously attacked the Polk administration and demanded to be shown “the spot” where the attack really took place. (He introduced in the House of Representatives what became known as “the spot resolutions.”) Grant wrote that the annexation of Texas, which was at the root of the dispute with Mexico, was “from the inception of the movement to its final consummation a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American union.” But “nations,” he wrote, “like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.” By which he meant the Civil War (1861-1865).
The Americans have never come to terms, never attempted to come to terms with the crime they committed in launching a war of aggression in 2003. They certainly know that it was a crime. After all, they themselves said it was, at Nuremberg:
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
In the national spirit now there is a tacit recognition of all this; it’s part of the sense that pervades this country that something has gone terribly wrong. Is there a desire, subconsciously, for expiation? Are we, like that Stefan Zweig character, fleeing toward war?
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