http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/rich-arrogant-and-stupid/print/
The modern West demonstrates a phenomenon unknown in history––unprecedented wealth, technology, and access to information combined with abject stupidity. Wisdom once known by every village explainer and cracker-barrel crank has been discarded and replaced with phony “sciences” making claims about human nature and behavior that are based on nothing other than false assumptions, political ideology, and wishful thinking. Whether it’s foreign policy, managing the economy, or teaching the young, our leaders institute policies that violate the traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of human experience.
The debacle unfolding in Syria is not a consequence of a failure of complex knowledge known by “experts,” or of mismanagement of abstruse technical diplomatic procedures. It’s a failure to understand human nature as well as illiterates did in the past. Common sense tells us that any negotiation with an adversary depends on a credible threat of serious force. Sometimes violence must be used just to demonstrate a willingness to back up words with deeds and convince skeptics you mean what you say. Likewise a treaty is only as good as the commitment to enforce its provisions with violence. A serial failure to do so, particularly when those failures are accompanied by empty bluster or passive-aggressive diplo-speak, invites more aggression and violations. History is full of examples of this simple truth. The 20’s and 30’s of the last century illustrate aggressor after aggressor brushing aside treaty obligations and the bluster of the League of Nations while pursuing their aggression––Japan in China, Italy in Ethiopia, and of course Germany in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
More recently, North Korea, a failed thugocracy surviving only by dint of Chinese life-support, brilliantly exploited the unwillingness of the West to back up its threats with force. Just peruse the timeline of the West’s attempts to stop North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the serial failure of diplomacy unsupported by credible force becomes obvious. Yet despite that glaring example of the wages of ignoring common sense, Obama––hard on his humiliating appeasement of Syria camouflaged by U.N. “inspections”––is now playing diplomatic footsie with Iran’s alleged “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani. This would be the same Rouhani who a few years ago publicly bragged about using diplomatic gabfests to buy time for advancing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Obama and other foreign policy naïfs think that his threat of an “unbelievably small” cruise-missile fireworks show frightened the Iranian regime––the same terrorist gang with American blood up to its elbows––into this charm offensive. The truth is Obama’s patent willingness to perfume his failure of nerve with “negotiations” convinced the Iranians that he will not use force to stop their nuclear program, and that throwing him a few diplomatic bones might win them a relaxation of sanctions for very little cost.
Why do we do ignore traditional wisdom the way we do? Because we can afford to indulge the internationalist fantasy that war is an anomaly from our uncivilized past, and that all peoples want what we want––peace, leisure, and prosperity––and are eager to avoid conflict with diplomatic words in order to avoid military deeds. Common sense and a knowledge of history show that in reality, many peoples want something else––honor, fidelity to their gods, domination of others––and are willing, if not eager to use violence to achieve these goals.
