National amnesia

Awakening eras, crisis eras, crisis wars, generational financial crashes, as applied to historical and current events
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Tom Mazanec
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National amnesia

Post by Tom Mazanec »

After a lifetime without tragedy, we will soon have it again http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/29/the ... f-tragedy/
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

John
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Re: National amnesia

Post by John »

Tom Mazanec wrote: > After a lifetime without tragedy, we will soon have it again
> http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/29/the ... f-tragedy/
This is a great article. It's possibly the best generational view of
history that I've ever seen (not counting my own articles, of course).

The only thing wrong with the article comes at the very end, when it
concludes that "tragedy is not inevitable."

----

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/29/the ... f-tragedy/


Argument
Hal Brands, Charles Edel / The End of History Is the Birth of Tragedy

Americans have forgotten that historic tragedies on a global scale are
real. They’ll soon get a reminder.

By Hal Brands, Charles Edel
May 29, 2017


The ancient Greeks took tragedy seriously. At the very height of
Athenian power in the 5th century B.C., in fact, citizens of the
world’s first democracy gathered annually to experience tragedy. Great
theatrical productions were staged, presented to the entire community,
and financed by the public treasury. While the dialogue and plot lines
varied, the form, and the lesson, remained consistent. Prominent
individuals fell from great heights due to their own errors,
ignorance, and hubris. The injunction was clear: The destiny of
society was in the hands of fallible men, and even in its hour of
triumph that society was always perched on the abyss of catastrophic
failure.

This tragic sensibility was purposefully hard-wired into Athenian
culture. Aristotle wrote that tragedies produce feelings of pity and
horror and foster a cathartic effect. The catharsis was key, intended
to spur the audience into recognition that the horrifying outcomes
they witnessed were eminently avoidable. By looking disaster squarely
in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out
of control, the Athenians sought to create a communal sense of
responsibility and courage and to encourage both citizens and their
leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate.

Americans, too, once had an appreciation of tragedy. After World War
II, Americans intuitively understood — because they could remember —
how catastrophic a breakdown of world order could be, and they were
constantly reminded by the looming Soviet threat that international
stability and peace could not be taken for granted. And so, over a
period of decades, the United States undertook the unprecedented
geopolitical efforts necessary to ensure that world order did not
collapse once again. The result was something like a flawed
masterpiece — a postwar international system that was never perfect,
but one in which aggressors were contained and ultimately defeated,
democracy spread more widely than ever before, and both global and
American prosperity reached dizzying heights. A tragic sensibility
propelled Americans to do great things.

But as has been said before, Americans are serial amnesiacs. And
today, after more than 70 years of great-power peace and a
quarter-century of unrivaled global supremacy, Americans have lost
their sense of tragedy. The U.S.-led international order has been so
successful, for so long, that Americans have come to take it for
granted. They have forgotten what that order is meant to prevent in
the first place: the sort of utter breakdown of the international
system, the descent into violence and great-power war, that has been
all too common throughout human history. And this amnesia has become
most pronounced, ironically, as American power and the international
order are coming under graver threat than at any time in recent
memory. Today, the United States and the world it did so much to
create are once again courting tragedy — precisely because Americans
have lost their ability to imagine what tragedy really is.

Tragedy as the norm

We tend to think of a full-on collapse of global order, characterized
by widespread international violence and great-power war, as something
that cannot happen in our time — a relic of a bygone era. But such a
perspective is profoundly ahistorical, for such breakdowns have long
represented the norm as much as the exception in international
affairs. Indeed, the classical realists — Thucydides, Niccolò
Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes — and their 20th-century counterparts,
such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, understood that the
history of international relations was in large measure a story of
precisely such tragedies.

After all, it happened to the Greeks, despite their efforts to
cultivate a tragic sensibility. In the Peloponnesian War of the fifth
century B.C., Athens and Sparta, the two dominant powers in ancient
Greece, came to blows. The war was not unforeseen, as tension had been
rising between the two powers for years, but the timing and the
rapidity of its outbreak was. After all, Sparta and Athens were
technically at peace with each other, having signed a 30-year peace
treaty, agreed to settle disputes through arbitration, and having
generally avoided escalation throughout multiple crises over the
proceeding 15 years. But, in response to a seemingly trivial dispute
involving their allies and the imposition of economic sanctions
against the city of Megara, the Greeks voted for war.

The resulting conflict inexorably expanded into something like a world
war, as most of the known world was drawn into the vortex of a
struggle that lasted nearly three decades. The conflict was so costly
in lives and treasure that it devastated winner and loser alike,
precipitating massive social and political ruptures and leaving the
Greek city-states divided and vulnerable to external conquest. Few
observers had initially expected that a quarrel over client states
would bring about the end of Greece’s golden age and the eventual
eclipse of the Greeks as powerful and independent actors on the world
stage, but this was precisely what happened.

More recent centuries give little reason to think that the nature of
international relations has fundamentally changed. Europe, which stood
at the center of the international system for nearly 400 years,
suffered repeated descents into cataclysm, from the Thirty Years’ War
of the 17th century to the French revolutionary wars in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries to the two world wars of the 20th century.
Each of these conflagrations was preceded by intensifying challenges
to, and then surprisingly rapid breakdowns within, the prevailing
international order. And, in each case, the ensuing destruction and
violence were appalling.

The Thirty Years’ War, which began as a conflict between Catholic and
Protestant states within the Holy Roman Empire, eventually expanded to
encompass all of Europe. In the German states alone, it resulted in
demographic disaster — a population decline of roughly 25 percent by
even the most conservative estimates, equivalent to 80 million
American deaths today. The French revolutionary wars lasted for over
two decades, revolutionized European politics, and unleashed warfare
on a scale and intensity previously unknown. Sobered by these
upheavals, the major powers constructed a fairly stable peace
thereafter, marred “only” by localized great-power conflicts such as
the Crimean War and the wars of German reunification. But this
comparative tranquility utterly collapsed in the 20th century with the
outbreak of World War I in 1914 — another global explosion triggered
by a seemingly minor spark — and then, after a mere 21 years’ respite,
the unleashing of World War II. These conflicts fundamentally
transformed the modern world: They devoured tens of millions of lives,
empowered some of the most brutal political and ideological forces in
human history, and ultimately brought Europe’s time atop the global
system to an end.

Even a casual survey of modern history thus suggests that breakdowns
of international order litter the historical landscape. These
breakdowns occurred for multiple and varying reasons: sometimes having
to do with relative shifts in the balance of power, sometimes having
to do with clashing ideologies, sometimes having to do with simple
blunders and other idiosyncrasies of statecraft. But the results were
all too often similar — and catastrophic. In an anarchical world
characterized by sharp competition between states, tragedy is often
simply a fact of international life.

Tragedy as inspiration

In fact, these breakdowns were so traumatic that modern international
orders — systems of rules, norms, and power relationships that govern
international affairs — have generally taken shape in the wake of such
tragedies and been designed to prevent their recurrence. International
orders rest on more than historical memory, of course. They are also
dependent on favorable configurations of power in the global arena and
often on some degree of ideological consensus among the system’s
leading actors. But it has often been the recollection of tragedies
experienced — and the hope that future tragedies might be averted —
that has motivated key states and leaders to summon their creativity
and power in the service of order.

Consider the order-building project that established the modern
international system. Exhausted by the violence of the Thirty Years’
War, the rulers of Europe signed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to
control the forces that had stoked that violence. Westphalia was a
diplomatic revolution. It created a political order that precluded
interference in other states’ domestic affairs, enshrined secular and
not religious authority as the basis for state sovereignty, and
attempted to prevent aggression and war through the maintenance of a
balance of power between those states. And it rested on a recognition,
shared among key participants, that the continental cataclysm that had
befallen Europe in the three decades prior to Westphalia simply could
not be permitted to happen again.

Similarly, the British-led Congress system after 1815 was designed to
prevent Europe from imploding as it had during the French
revolutionary wars and succeeded in that task for nearly a century. It
did so by drawing the five major powers of Europe into a system in
which they had at least minimal incentive to uphold a stable peace.
This system was anchored by British and Russian power and by the
conservative political values that prevailed in most European capitals
after 1815. It, too, was a profound innovation in the history of
modern international relations — one that featured regular
consultation to contain local conflicts and diplomatic antagonisms and
one that required each member to forgo some degree of unilateral
advantage as the price of relative peace. But like Westphalia, it was
an innovation that looked backward as much as forward, for it was
designed to stifle the sources of the conflicts that had plagued
Europe after 1789 — and what ultimately held it together for so long
was the hard-earned recognition that the likely alternative to such a
system was a resumption of bitter upheaval.

One need not even look so far back into history to understand that
tragedy has often served as inspiration for such painstaking efforts
to reconstruct international order and preserve the peace. This was
precisely what motivated the generation of Americans who lived through
World War II and shaped America’s response to the postwar world.
American leaders and elites — the “wise men,” as they were known for
decades; “the blob,” as they would be called less generously today —
consciously rejected the isolationist attitudes that had prevailed in
the 1930s. They committed to making the extraordinary exertions
necessary to stabilize the postwar world and prevent World War II from
coming to be seen as mere prologue to an even more destructive global
conflict.

They did so by embracing American leadership, embedding the United
States within a global network of security alliances, participating in
multilateral institutions, and promoting broadly beneficial concepts
like free trade, democracy and human rights, and respect for the rule
of law. They committed to confronting aggressors early, before they
could destabilize key regions or pose an existential threat to
international peace and security. They accepted that there would be no
“return to normalcy,” that the United States — as the world’s
strongest nation and the only one capable of bearing this burden —
would have primary responsibility for upholding a congenial world
order. And they based these efforts on a set of basic intellectual
principles that guided U.S. policy for generations: that it was
cheaper to maintain international order than to restore it once it had
been destroyed; that it was better to make modest sacrifices now
rather than enormous sacrifices later; that global norms and stability
were not self-sustaining but rather required continual support and
maintenance by those countries that sought to perpetuate and advance
them.

In the late 1940s as in the years after 1815, the U.S.-led world order
was informed as much by haunting lessons from the past as by inspiring
visions of the future and particularly by the multiple failures of the
isolationist strategy of the 1930s. After the searing experience of
World War II, American leaders concluded that failure to stand up for
friendly nations in the face of external aggression, failure to speak
up on behalf of democratic values under assault, failure to prevent a
trade war born of or sparked by protectionism, and failure to support
international organizations by withdrawing American support produced a
world with a leadership vacuum and an invitation to chaos. These
failures, in turn, directly informed the great successes of postwar
American foreign policy: the creation of a positive-sum global
economic order anchored by the Bretton Woods institutions, the
erection of a containment policy that for decades checked the
aggressive impulses of the Soviet Union, the building of an
international alliance system that maintained stability and tamped
down conflict in key regions, and many others. What we now think of as
the brilliantly successful postwar international order was a response
to the repeated tragedies that had preceded it — and the menace of an
expansionist, illiberal Soviet Union reminded Americans that tragedy
could all too easily recur if the United States pursued a different
path.

Indeed, America’s leaders were acutely aware of how precarious and
easily disrupted international peace traditionally had been, and this
knowledge steeled them in the face of the challenges of the postwar
era. In January 1950, for instance, the Harry Truman administration
declared that the Korean Peninsula lay outside the American defensive
perimeter, based on the judgment that it was not, by itself, critical
to the global balance of power. But when Kim Il Sung marched his
forces southward five months later, Truman quickly made the difficult
decision to resist. He based that decision, he later wrote, on his
earlier experiences living through the dark years preceding World War
II:

In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had
attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria,
Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies
failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead.… I
felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist
leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own
shores.… If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third
world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world
war.

International order had to be reinforced when challenged, Truman
understood; the use of military force now could prevent the necessity
of fighting an even larger conflict later. To the generation of
statesmen who had seen just how rapidly and completely the
international system could erode, the lesson was clear: Eternal
vigilance was the price of an enduring peace.

This approach led to tragedies and excesses of its own, of course,
with a costly and divisive U.S. intervention in Vietnam being the most
notable example. There is such a thing as being too vigilant, and the
United States occasionally learned this lesson the hard way. But on
the whole, it is hard to argue with the approach that U.S.
policymakers took in the postwar era. The Cold War is now generally
seen as a “long peace,” the postwar era as a veritable golden age in
which human prosperity increased by leaps and bounds and the
democracies — not the brutal authoritarian regimes that threatened
them — came to dominate the global arena. All of these accomplishments
rested on the unique and unprecedented ways in which the United States
deployed its unmatched power in the decades after World War II. And
those efforts, in turn, were inspired by tragedy.

The contemporary amnesia

This postwar order has been so successful, in fact, that Americans now
seem to be losing the tragic sensibility that brought it about in the
first place. It has been — thankfully — almost three-quarters of a
century since the United States last confronted the sort of
catastrophic insecurity associated with a crackup of the international
system. And it has been 25 years since the end of the Cold War,
leading many observers to conclude that geopolitical competition
itself is a thing of the past. The effect has been a natural
slackening of the efforts required to maintain the stability and
security to which Americans have become accustomed. In 1961, John F.
Kennedy could confidently assert that Americans were willing to “pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe” in support of a favorable concept of world order. That
willingness now seems, increasingly, to be in doubt.

Consider the state of the U.S. defense budget. A robust, well-funded
peacetime defense has been the cornerstone of America’s order-building
efforts since World War II; outright military primacy has been the
foundation of the international system since the end of the Cold War.
But today, America’s dominance is slipping, and its willingness to
stem that decline is uncertain. Russia and China are pouring money
into their own military capabilities in hopes of negating U.S. power
in Eastern Europe and East Asia and projecting their own influence
farther afield. The U.S. military budget, meanwhile, declined in real
terms from $768 billion in 2010 to $595 billion in 2015; on its
current trajectory, defense spending will soon represent a smaller
share of GDP than at any time since the outbreak of World War II.
Steps to bolster the American military deterrent in any meaningful way
— as opposed to the smoke-and-mirrors “buildup” proposed by President
Donald Trump — are politically infeasible, with entitlement spending
still a sacred cow and tax increases apparently unfathomable.

Americans and their elected representatives seem to have forgotten, in
other words, that there are worse things than having to reform Social
Security or pay another 3 to 5 percent of one’s earnings in income
taxes and that American military dominance has traditionally been what
prevents those worse things from happening.

Or consider the broader state of American public opinion on foreign
affairs. The last several years have seen a remarkable resurgence of
sentiment to the effect that it is time for the United States to tend
its own garden, rather than tending the world’s. In 2013, [1]52
percent of Americans agreed that the United States should “mind its
own business internationally and let other countries get along the
best they can on their own.” Three years later, the number agreeing
with a similar statement had risen to [2]57 percent. This is some of
the most pronounced anti-internationalism that we have seen since the
years immediately following the Vietnam War, and it reflects a growing
sense that Americans are no longer so eager to bear the burdens
traditionally associated with global leadership.

And it is hard to blame them. Their leaders, in recent years, have too
frequently stoked that very sentiment. Barack Obama repeatedly argued
that it was time to forsake nation building abroad in favor of nation
building at home, and he claimed that the arc of the universe bent
inevitably toward justice — thereby implying that America didn’t need
to do much bending of its own. Senior Obama administration officials
[3]dismissed Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine as “distinctly 19th-
and 20th-century decisions” instead of acknowledging such actions as
typical of the renewed great-power revisionism that increasingly
threatens to define the 21st century. More recently, Donald Trump has
repeatedly characterized America’s alliances and other commitments as
sucker bets that allow other countries to make a killing at
Washington’s expense; he has revived the language, and even proposed
reviving some of the policies, associated with the “America First”
program of the 1930s.

There is, particularly in Trump’s worldview, no tragic sensibility to
be found here — no recognition that the international system, and the
United States itself, has avoided tragedy and made so much progress
over the past seven decades only because America has labored so
diligently to make it so. And there is no recognition that attacks on
free trade, admiration for autocratic leaders, and questioning of U.S.
alliances threaten to undo these very accomplishments.

Indeed, if Americans have grown tired of bearing the burdens of
international leadership, it is probably because they have simply
forgotten why that leadership is worth bearing in the first place. Why
do we have troops and military hardware stationed around the globe?
Why do we have an extensive system of alliances the world over? Why do
we worry so much about what happens in faraway places like Ukraine or
the South China Sea? Why do we pursue free trade even when it
sometimes comes at a near-term cost to certain industries and workers
in the United States? There are, of course, good historical answers to
all of these questions, and they all come back to the very nasty
things that tended to happen to the international system before the
United States took up its ambitious, globe-girdling role. But now most
of the country has forgotten that history, in part because of the
simple passage of time but more precisely because the successes of
American leadership have made it possible to forget. America’s tragic
sensibility has faded and has increasingly been replaced by a
worldview that is equal parts naive, dangerous, and ahistorical.

The darkening horizon

The irony is that this amnesia is afflicting us precisely as the
international environment is once again becoming more threatening. In
East Asia and Eastern Europe, revisionist authoritarian powers are
coercing their neighbors and nibbling away at the international order.
Chinese leaders are laying plans for a Sino-centric Asia, and Russian
leaders are talking about the transition to a “post-West” world: It is
hard to see how either transition can be accomplished without coercion
and violence. In the Middle East, Iran is asserting its regional
ambitious, Bashar al-Assad is perpetrating a slow-motion genocide, and
the Islamic State and other jihadi groups continue to wreak havoc even
as their military fortunes decline. North Korea is racing ahead with
its nuclear and missile programs in defiance of the international
community, posing an ever greater threat not simply to its neighbors
but to the United States as well. And across these various regions and
issues, the rules that seemed to have gained such global dominance in
the wake of the Cold War are increasingly being challenged and
transgressed. Nonaggression and the peaceful resolution of disputes,
the ability of countries to choose their economic and geopolitical
alignments free from intimidation or coercion, freedom of navigation
in the world’s key waterways — all of these norms are being tested
more severely today than at any time in decades.

The threats today are diverse, but they do share a common theme. They
represent the warning lights flashing on the dashboard; they are
indications that an international system that has long been so
historically exceptional in its effectiveness and stability is now
fraying at the edges. The revival of great-power competition is
particularly concerning: Geopolitical revisionism on the part of
unsatisfied major powers is traditionally the sort of thing that has
preceded large-scale war with all of its horrors. Hard as it may be
for us to imagine, it is by no means inconceivable that we will one
day look back on the challenges and disruptions the international
system is now experiencing as auguries of the greater tragedy that
would follow.

But if tragedy is commonplace, it is not inevitable. And this dark
scenario need not materialize, for the United States and its myriad
allies do not lack the strength to prevent it from materializing. Yes,
the international power balance is undoubtedly shifting; it is no
longer as favorable as it was in 1945 or 1991, and some corresponding
degree of change is therefore unavoidable in global politics. But the
United States is no fallen hegemon just yet; it still commands
unmatched economic and military capabilities, and Washington and its
allies still control a preponderance of global military and economic
power. The existing international order is under challenge, then, but
it can still be effectively defended; the alliances, institutions, and
arrangements that have underpinned it may yet remain resilient if the
countries that have so vigorously supported them in the past make up
their minds to do so again.

The key questions, then, are not simply questions of power — they are
also questions of willpower. Will the countries that have historically
defended the international order summon the nerve, unity, and
resources to defend it again today? Will they realize that it is not
historical inevitability, or some triumph of “the better angels of our
nature,” but rather incessant and determined effort that holds
disasters such as great-power war and catastrophic instability at bay?
Will they remember precisely how bad things can get, and how quickly
they can get that way, when international orders fall apart? The
United States and its allies once found, in tragedy, the determination
necessary to create something beautiful. Will they now recover an
equivalent determination to keep that good thing going?

In writing about the successes and ultimate failure of the Congress
system in the 19th century, Henry Kissinger observed that “in the long
interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost; it was forgotten
that states could die, that upheavals could be irretrievable.” Today,
Americans are likely to end up rediscovering their sense of the tragic
one way or another — either by reacquainting themselves with the
tragic sensibility that they seem to have lost or by experiencing the
real-world tragedy that their amnesia, if not corrected, may help
bring about.



1. http://www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/ ... ent-slips/
2. http://www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/ ... er-status/
3. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/u ... z2urHh1SRI

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