Back to the Future

In Brief

President Bush has a new swagger in his step and the Star Spangled Banner has never sounded so good. There's aircraft carrier groups moving all over the place, much to the delight of people who liked September 11th's explosions so much that they're eager for lots more. History House takes some time to wonder whether solving this problem by going 350 years back in time is a good idea.

Party On

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The News

10/1/2001 On September 11th, 2001 suicidal terrorists slammed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. George W. Bush declared war on terroists around the world, as well as the governments who supported them. The United States indulged itself in a patriotic orgy.

"The only safe way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend." -Abraham Lincoln.

George W. Bush, whose own daddy was never very good at "the vision thing", has proclaimed that most visionary of things: a New World Order. Bush and his advisors would like their response to the terrorist attacks on America to replace World War II as the world's defining conflict. The fact that Bush has declared a new doctrine ("our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them") has newspapers like the Economist declaring that the heretofore comically inept[1] Dubya may be history's successor to Truman -- a statement that manages to dishonor the memory of a man who grew up fighting in the (first) Great War, not boozing it up with the boys in the Rangers' dugout. We here at History House have seen this New World Order before, and we're not entirely sure we liked it the last time it made the rounds ... four hundred years ago.

John Quincy Adams, the nineteenth century's somewhat brainier Dubya[2], echoed famously isolationist George Washington when he said that

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

Bumbling Idiot?

Nice Guys Finish Last

So in 1821 the Greeks, fighting for independence from their age-old enemies, the Ottomans, got the finger from then Secretary of State Adams. A century later, that bumbling idiot Woodrow Wilson decided that foreign policy was a good place to practice piety. Hitler and Communism provided a fortunate, if unique, convergence of aims: America could do good while looking after its self interest. But politician cum rock star Henry Kissinger reminded us in the 1970s that the best foreign policy is selfish. For the better part of 2001 Bush followed in Quincy and Kissinger's footsteps and decided the right way to conduct foreign policy was to shoot the world the biggest bird in recent memory.[3]

So why does Dubya, so skeptical of military adventurism, now think the best policy is to go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy?" A bit of old-fashioned revenge might be entirely excusable, but the declaration that America will no longer respect the sovereignty of nations deemed to be harboring terrorists has Bush stating for the record that the US will, without the benefit of so much as a flux capacitor or sports almanac, leap four hundred years back in history to join the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia. Perhaps we should explain.

God's Got the Best Armies

In the first half of the seventeenth century Europe stumbled out of bed with a horrible hangover: the Reformation. The Catholic Church, always handy with a solution for times like this, invented the Jesuits and unleashed the Counter-Reformation. In the name of religion, the Catholic Hapsburg Empire, followed swiftly by the Holy Roman Empire, started a series of wars against Protestant nations that turned Europe, and especially Germany, into an anarchic hell of pillaging mercenaries, famine, disease and rape.[4] "We live like animals, eating bark and grass" noted one peasant -- who probably wouldn't feel that much better off in twenty-first century Afghanistan. Another noted, "Many people say there is no God." Decades of this finally got Protestants and Catholics alike to thinking that maybe there was something they were missing -- after all, God was the whole reason they got into this mess.[5]

God wants us to kill you!

The problem was that every time a local peace treaty was signed, some meddling nation would want to come and reconquer the locals. The peasantry grew understandably hacked off at having to adopt whichever religion their local Duke had that month. It was an intractable problem for nearly half a century: anyone with an army felt compelled to go subjugate some people and convert them to their brand of Christianity.

Bygones

It took six months for delegates of the nations of Europe, holed up in Westphalia in 1648, to come up with a solution. Their answer was one of those things that, like electricity or canned beer, was so innovative that we now take it for granted. We cannot imagine life without it: the sovereignty of nations. Agreeing to disagree, the rulers of Europe decided that the only way to stop war was to declare that the internal affairs (which in those days really meant the religious affairs) of a nation were off-limits to external meddling -- even if God was involved. In the words of the delegates, faith would be divorced from diplomacy. This system worked, notwithstanding the ideological hiccup of the Napoleonic wars, to preserve the general peace in Europe for another three hundred years. It's also why we can't go occupy Quebec just because we don't like Celine Dion.[6]

The entire world today is based on the Westphalian notion of sovereignty. The UN is practically a shrine to it. By stating for the record that he will freely police the internal affairs of states that he does not agree with, Bush is driving a stake into the heart of the system.

Big, Round Decisions

Is that a bad thing? After all, the dirtbags who leveled the Trade Towers don't seem the type of people to be especially worried about a dusty old treaty. But abandoning non-interference forces some very stark decisions on the United States, questions that are sure to deeply divide the country. After all, this is a country which can't come to a consensus on the real vs. fake dilemma of Britney Spears' chest.

Who is it OK to go police? Afghanistan seems to be acceptable to most people right now. But what if the government of Pakistan fails? Should we go in there? Well, once we've announced it's okay to solve other countries' internal problems, we wonder if India might not be quite pleased to go straighten out their irksome neighbor. And even if a country does decide to police another -- how are they to achieve success? Does anyone imagine that US cops and infantry will be able to effectively provide law and order in Pakistan? Or Iraq? We here at History House are quite sure that the Turks would love to waltz into Iraq and bust some Kurds up... all under the similar anti-terrorist pretext. Is this OK?

The Westphalian delegates decided it was better to forbid all these activities than to start down the slippery slope -- they had thirty years of hell fresh on their minds when they did it. We have thirty years of peace and two "Law and Order" spinoffs on TV. We probably think we're up to the task.

On the other hand, what good is trusting another nation, like Afghanistan, to police its internal affairs, when that nation can't control its own borders and is openly hostile? Unless the US is actually willing to run Afghanistan as a foreign territory, then it might be time for some "nation building" so there's some people there we can trust. Hm. We here at History House wonder how far all of this return to pre-Westphalian politics has been thought through.

If George Carlin were Secretary of State, he'd advocate building a fence around the whole place and waiting a few hundred years. He may not have a bad idea.

Footnotes

1. A phrase you probably associate most strongly with the Italians.
2. For those playing along at home, John Quincy Adams was the only other president to follow his father into office. He didn't accomplish much.
3. It wasn't really that long ago that even the Europeans were burning Bush in effigy.
4. Ah, religious wars always bring out the best in people
5. In an interesting side note, one military commander of note for the Holy Roman Empire became so addled during the course of the war he had his men kill every dog, cat and rooster in every village he came to.
6. More's the pity, really

 
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