https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/long-shadow-versailles-bruce-thornton/
Or we can continue with diplomatic bluster, “new world order” happy talk, and feeble sanctions, in which case we will just be managing our decline.
In 1919 the Versailles Treaty established in international law and global institutions two ideals that have framed Western foreign policy ever since. The first is the elevation of national self-determination and democratic government as the default goods for all the world’s peoples. The other is the notion that supranational institutions, international laws, and multinational treaties and covenants are the best means for adjudicating peacefully international disputes and conflicts.
Russia’s current violent, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is merely the latest example of a century’s worth of repudiation of these ideals that still shape modern foreign policy––a challenge that, if we’re lucky, may lead to a long-needed revision of this ideal of a “rules-based international order” and its dubious foundational assumptions.
American president Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and speeches during World War I articulated these ideals. In 1918 he told Congress, “National aspirations must be accepted; peoples may now be dominated only by their own consent.” This principle perforce was opposed to colonial empires, as Wilson made clear in the Fourteen Points: “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects it has in view.”
Of course, as we’ve seen over the past century, what the great diversity of global peoples and cultures mean by “justice” differs considerably, especially regarding the use of force to realize national ambitions at the expense of other nations. Such ideals have been vulnerable as well to the duplicitous diplomacy, propaganda, and aggression of ambitious states. Hitler brilliantly turned this ideal against its champions like France and England during the Sudetenland crisis of September, 1938. After all, didn’t the 3 million alleged ethnic Germans stranded in the new state of Czechoslovakia after the war deserve their “national aspirations” to be “accepted”? Why should they, as Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels lied during the crisis, have to tolerate the “brutal treatment of women and children of German blood” at the hands of alien Czechs?
