WILIAM R. HAWKINS: KERRY’S CENTURIES OF ERROR
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/kerrys-centuries-of-error?f=puball
“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” said Secretary of State John Kerry on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The 19th century reference is one Kerry has used frequently since the Ukraine crisis erupted, but there are a couple of problems with this attempted use of history.
First, invasions are not an event unique to the 19th century. Indeed, there are many more recent examples from the 20th century Kerry could cite, including both world wars, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and the Gulf War among others. Soviet Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep puppet governments in power against popular calls for reform. In both cases, Soviet troops were told that they were stopping an impeding counter-revolution. If Moscow did not intervene, the “enemies of socialism” were going to open to the West and let NATO forces into the countries being defended by the Red Army. The similarities to the current Ukraine situation are obvious, perhaps too much so for Kerry who wants to avoid anything that would imply a revival of the Cold War.
Yet, President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine given March 4 sounded like they came out of the Brezhnev Doctrine expounded after the Czech invasion. No change in neighboring governments hostile to Russian interests will be tolerated.
Putin’s emphasis on protecting ethnic Russians raised another example from 20th century Czechoslovakia; the Munich crisis of 1938 and the annexation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler made the “humanitarian” argument, “I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place,” said Der Fuhrer. Yet, there were no signs of persecution, the only violence being fomented by Nazi agents. The British and French, who were pledged to the defense of Prague, negotiated away the Czech frontier to Hitler to preserve what British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously claimed was “peace in our time.” In 1939, German troops rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia to complete the conquest.
Putin is currently playing it cool, like Hitler in 1938. The Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian and a majority welcomes Moscow’s intervention. It is likely that a referendum in Crimea would favor union with Russia; something Putin hinted at. He does not seem ready to invade the rest of Ukraine, saying that the military exercise involving 150,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border was ending. He stated, however, that Moscow “reserves the right to use all means at our disposal to protect” Russian speakers in the country’s south and east if they are in danger. Crimea is in the south, but there are other pockets of ethnic Russians in the eastern part of Ukraine. Putin declared, “We are not going to fight with the Ukrainian people. I want you to understand me clearly. If we make such a decision, it will only be for the protection of Ukrainian citizens.” by which he supposedly meant citizens who are really Russians. However, he also referred to Ukrainians and Russians as “brothers” thus opening the door to conquest of the entire country to protect the entire Slavic family from Western influence.
Is Putin holding Ukraine north of Crimea hostage against any attempt by Kiev to regain the south? Or against any Western sanctions that would really bite? Will Moscow use its agents to stir up trouble in eastern Ukraine to justify further Russian intervention? Will Moscow plot to place a puppet in power in Kiev? Britain and France appeased Hitler in 1938, leading to further aggression in 1939; what will Western appeasement of Putin in 2014 lead to? This is a 20th century example to which Kerry does not want to allude.
There is a second set of 9th century examples to which Kerry and his boss President Barack Obama also do not want to cite. The early part of that century saw the flowering of classical liberalism, an ideology that has remained at the center of modern liberal and libertarian views of world affairs.
When the Washington Post editorial board made its surprising criticism of Obama on March 2, it was talking about the tenets of classical liberalism. The board argued that “For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which ‘the tide of war is receding‘ and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces….. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances – these were things of the past.” The difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want to escape from the past rather than learn from it. Thus, every time they believe “history has come to an end” they advance their alternative “fantasy” view as the guide for the unsullied future. President Obama has only been trying to recapture the feelings of the Clinton administration after the Cold War ended. As President Bill Clinton had proclaimed in 1999, “Perhaps for the first time in history, the world’s leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory.”
The same feelings had come to the fore after World War II with the creation of the United Nations; and at the end of “the war to end all wars” in 1918 with the League of Nations and a flurry of arms limitation agreements. The flowering of classical liberalism was in the decades following a generation of wars spawned by the French Revolution and Napoleon. Surely after such massive conflicts the world would be different.
The three legs of the classical liberal stool are military disarmament, free trade (which is economic disarmament) and world government. The purpose is to render the nation-state powerless and subordinate to the “international community” so it cannot cause trouble. Immanuel Kant in his 1795 tract Perpetual Peace argued, “Just like individual men, [states] must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws and thus form an international state (civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth.” It would be necessary to prevent sovereign states from engaging in acts of imperialism, intervening in the internal affairs of others, maintaining standing armies, employing spies, or using public debt to finance war. And, of course, Free Trade was to be promoted to bind people together as individuals practicing peaceful exchange “free” of state interference to protect national capabilities and independence.
The classical liberal campaign against the nation-state has been expanded to a general rejection of the state at home as well as abroad by libertarians. It has been maintained even by those liberals who were drawn towards state socialism in domestic policy. Indeed, as British historian Bernard Semmel notes, by the end of the 19th century, radicals were abandoning laissez-faire to embrace new social programs in an effort to win votes away from conservatives who were promoting a program of national renewal. “They acted to block labor support for a neo-mercantilist Tory policy by promising such reforms as old-age pensions and sickness and unemployment benefits…to enlist the interest of the trade unions against the alternative use of available tax revenues for armaments.” The welfare state would replace the national security state by draining the treasury. Any look at the Obama administration budgets and their projections forward confirms that this strategy is in full play.
China has been the main beneficiary of this classical liberal idea that commerce was “the grand panacea” and that under its influence “the motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and great fleets would die away” to quote Richard Cobden from 1835. At the January 2011 summit in Washington, Obama told a roundtable of American and Chinese business leaders, “There has been no sector of our societies that have been stronger proponents of U.S.-China relations than the business sector. And so I’m very pleased that we have some of America’s top businesses here. Many of them have a longstanding relationship with China.” The summit between Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao followed a summer of major naval exercises and aggressive rhetoric from Beijing in defense of North Korea and of China’s expanding territorial claims along the Pacific Rim. To ease tensions, Obama offered Hu more money, as if the Communist regime would not use increased resources to further support its ambitions.
In 2012 Russia was accepted into the World Trade Organization (as China had been in 2001) with the same hope that its leadership could be bought off with shiny objects. But then Chamberlain had thought the same could be done with Hitler and set up a special office to explore how trade could improve relations with the Nazi regime. Major corporations were happy to support this effort even as Winston Churchill warned against “building German industry with British and American money.” Another 20th century example ignored in the 21st century.
The Washington Post editorial board concluded, “Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia.” And if they could figure this out at the Washington Post, there is no excuse for anyone else to remain in the dark. The tenets of classical liberalism continue to be non-starters in the real world of contending st
William R. Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues. He is a former economics professor and Republican Congressional staff member.
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