Beach drawing of war poet Wilfred Owen during commemoration at Folkestone of 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Steve Parsons/Press Association. All rights reserved
This
year saw the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, in which some
16 million Europeans died, two great European countries were destroyed, and
others crippled. This year may also be seen by future historians as the last
year of the period between the cold wars, when after 29 years of relative
quiet, the world's major powers once again moved into positions of deep and
structural mutual hostility.
The
First World War also engendered the dreadful scourges of Communism and Nazism,
and thereby led to the Second World War, which very nearly finished off
European civilisation. As a result of these catastrophes, almost all of the
political and cultural elites that led their countries into war in 1914 were
swept away, and in the Russian and Austrian cases, destroyed. Historians differ
concerning the precise balance of causes and of blame for the disaster of 1914,
but on one thing all are agreed: nothing that the great powers could
conceivably have gained from going to war remotely compared to what they risked
losing. Nothing
that the great powers could conceivably have gained from going to war remotely
compared to what they risked losing.
During
World War I, the British and French, later joined by the Americans, portrayed
the war as one of civilisation against German barbarism. One hundred years
later, one can certainly say that on balance the British and French systems
were better than the German; but one must also admit that an Algerian subject
of the French Empire or an African subject of the British Empire might have a
different perspective – and also that the Russian Empire made a pretty odd
member of a supposed alliance for democracy.
Above
all, as it turned out, the real barbaric threat to European civilisation did
not come from any of the European ruling establishments of 1914. It came from
the hatreds and tensions generated within European societies by the social and
economic changes of the previous decades, which the war then released. One of
the reasons why the conservative elites of European countries before 1914
encouraged aggressive nationalism in their societies was because they thought
that this would divert mass support away from socialism, and thereby preserve
the old European order. They were most disastrously mistaken.
Graver threats
I
fear that in their enthusiasm for a new cold war against China and Russia, the
western establishments of today are making a mistake comparable to that of
their forbears of 1914, and that the historians of the future will judge us by
a similarly harsh standard. This is not primarily because of the threat of
world war, but because this new cold war is serving – and in certain quarters
is deliberately intended to serve – as a distraction from vastly graver threats
which will eventually overwhelm us if they are not addressed.
Existing
western political elites (on both sides of the political divide) are
desperately unwilling to address these threats, because this would involve radical
changes to their existing ideological positions. In their obsession with
their own righteousness and civilizational superiority, the western elites are
also falling into the moral trap warned of by Hans Morgenthau (a cold warrior
who opposed Soviet aggression, but also a German Jew deeply acquainted with the
civilizational fantasies that had helped bring on the disaster of 1914-18):
“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of
a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe… the light-hearted equation between a
particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible,
for it is the very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the
Biblical prophets warned rulers and ruled. The equation is also politically
pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgement which, in
the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations.”
Anti-Russian
regimes
The
historians of the future may also note the multiple ironies involved in the
idea of the USA leading a new "league of democracies" against an
"authoritarian alliance". In Asia, of course, this anti-Chinese
alliance would include as key members Vietnamese communists, murderous Filipino
authoritarian populists, and above all Indian Hindu neo-fascists. Even in
Europe, the most bitterly anti-Russian regime – that of Poland – is also the
one that in its authoritarianism and cultural nationalism is in fact
ideologically closest to Putin! In the USA, we may devoutly pray that in 2020
Trump will be defeated and replaced by a more convincing leader of the
"free world". On the other hand, all the evidence now suggests that
in 2022, France will elect a president from the National Front. Does anyone who has interviewed
the "Yellow Vests" in France seriously think that they are acting as
they do because of manipulation from Moscow?
Even
if they do not lead to catastrophic war, diverting domestic discontent into
external hostility very rarely works, because of course the factors that
created the discontent remain unchanged. Does anyone who has interviewed the
"Yellow Vests" in France seriously think that they are acting as they
do because of manipulation from Moscow? Does anyone who has seriously studied
the crisis of the white working classes in the USA (Robert Putnam or Thomas
Frank, for example) write that the reason that they have voted for Trump is
because they have been swayed by Russian propaganda?
Rising death rates
The
people who claim this would do better to address a much more important link
between developments in Russia and the USA, and a far more important
contribution to the rise of Putin and Trump: the rising death rate among
working class males in Russia in the 1990s and the USA in recent years, for the
same reasons: diseases and addictions fuelled by economic, social and cultural
insecurity and despair. In Central America, a far more terrible version of
these pathologies is driving millions of people to seek to move to the USA,
driving in turn the radicalisation of parts of the US population; yet total US
aid to Mexico in 2017 was less than that to Ukraine or Egypt, and a fraction of
that to Afghanistan. Does any truly responsible national establishment neglect
its own neighbourhood in this way?
Looming
behind these problems is the even graver danger of climate change, which
threatens damage to the USA and the West incomparably greater than anything
that the Chinese or Russian governments could or would wish to inflict. In a
tragicomic irony, amidst the hysteria over a minor clash between Russia and
Ukraine in the Sea of Azov, and barely noticed by most of the US media, there
was one example of close US-Russian co-operation: the US and Russian
governments combined to block adoption of the latest UN report on climate
change.
This
is not to say that there are not real threats from Russia and China, and real
areas (notably trade) where the USA needs to push back. But these are all in
the end limited issues, which are either negotiable or containable. None of them
justifies trying once again to
restructure the national strategies and institutions of the USA and Europe
around the principle of a cold war. None of these issues justifies
trying once again to restructure the national strategies and institutions of
the USA and Europe around the principle of a cold war.
If
Khrushchev had not transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Republic to the
Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1956, everyone would recognise the Sea of Azov as
Russian, and this issue would not even exist. In the South China Sea, the USA
is pushing back against China in the name of an international Law of the Sea
which the USA itself does not recognise. If the Chinese were ever so mad as to
use their position in the South China Sea against US trade, the US Navy could
block Chinese trade to the whole of the rest of the world. And so it goes.
Sarajevo
There
were of course deep factors pushing the European states to war in 1914. The one
that actually led to war however was Serbian nationalist claims to
Austrian-ruled Bosnia, leading to the assassination of the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It seems highly probable that not one in a hundred of
the British soldiers who died in the First World War had previously ever heard
of Serbia's claims, or of Sarajevo. In the name of God, let us not make this
mistake again.
This article was originally published in The National Interest on December 22, 2018.