DAN HENNINGER: WINDS OF WAR AGAIN
http://online.wsj.com/articles/winds-of-war-again-1406760959?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3
One wishes Barack Obama and John Kerry more luck in Ukraine and the Middle East than Neville Chamberlain had in Munich.
If it’s true that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then maybe we’re in luck. Many people in this unhappy year are reading histories of World War I, such as Margaret MacMillan’s “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.” That long-ago catastrophe began 100 years ago this week. The revisiting of this dark history may be why so many people today are asking if our own world—tense or aflame in so many places—resembles 1914, or 1938.
Whatever the answer, it is the remembering of past mistakes that matters, if the point is to avoid the high price of re-making those mistakes. A less hopeful view, in an era whose history comes and goes like pixels, would be that Santayana understated the problem. Even remembering the past may not be enough to protect a world poorly led. To understate: Leading from behind has never ended well.
In a recent essay for the Journal, Margaret MacMillan summarized the after-effects of World War I. Two resonate now. Political extremism gained traction, because so many people lost confidence in the existing political order or in the abilities of its leadership. That bred the isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s. Isolationism was a refusal to see the whole world clearly. Self-interest, then and now, has its limits.
Which brings our new readings into the learning curves of history up to 1938. But not quite. First a revealing stop in the years just before Munich, when in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia.
A woman in the Sudetenland, as Germany’s troops arrive, 1939. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Before the invasion, Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, did what the civilized world expected one to do in the post-World War I world: He appealed for help to the League of Nations. The League imposed on Italy limited sanctions, which were ineffectual.
One might say this was one of history’s earlier “red lines.” Mussolini blew by it, invading Ethiopia and using mustard gas on its army, as Bashar Assad has done to Syria’s rebel population. Mussolini merged Ethiopia with Italy’s colonies in east Africa. The League condemned Italy—and dropped its sanctions.
In defeat, Haile Selassie delivered a famous speech to the League in Geneva. He knew they wouldn’t help. As he stepped from the podium, he remarked: “It is us today. Tomorrow it will be you.”
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, not unlike John Kerry today, shuttled tirelessly between London and wherever Adolf Hitler consented to meet him to discuss a nonviolent solution to Hitler’s intention to annex the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans. Hitler earlier in the year had annexed Austria, with nary a peep from the world “community.” Many said the forced absorption of Austria was perfectly understandable.
One may hope Mr. Kerry and President Obama have more success with their stop-the-violence missions to Vladimir Putin, Kiev, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Tehran, Afghanistan and the South China Sea than Neville Chamberlain had with Hitler, who pocketed eastern Ukraine—excuse me, the Sudetenland—and then swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia, which ceased to exist.
But here’s the forgotten part. After signing the Munich Agreement on Sept. 29, 1938—an event now reduced to one vile word, appeasement—Chamberlain returned to England in triumph. Many, recalling 1914-18, feared war. Londoners lined the streets to cheer Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler. He was feted by King George VI. At 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain said the words for which history remembers him: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
Winston Churchill, in a speech to the House of Commons, dissented: “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.” Hitler, as sometimes happens in history, had negotiated in total bad faith, with no interest in anyone’s desire for peace. When World War II ended in 1945, it had consumed more than 50 million people.
The U.S.’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though fought by a dedicated professional military, are said to have turned America in on itself, as two big wars did to Europe. The idea is that Americans are tired of their world role now. But tireless men like Hitler always finds advantage in other nations’ fatigue.
Some note the current paradox of the public’s low approval for Mr. Obama’s handling of everything from Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza, while the same polls show a reluctance to involve the country in those problems.
But there is no contradiction. The U.S. public’s resistance reflects coldblooded logic: Why get involved if the available evidence makes clear that America’s president won’t stay the course, no matter how worthy the cause?
After returning from Munich, Neville Chamberlain told the British to “go home, and sleep quietly in your beds.” After 1914 and 1938, one wishes it could be so now. Wars, in their causes and timing, are unpredictable. What is not impossible is recognizing the winds of war. Doing less than enough, we should have learned, allows these destructive winds to gain strength.
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