I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different thing! Like totally!
Anne’s article was taken from her recent book, Twilight of Democracy, recording her dismay, which I entirely share, with the massive collapse of the post-Cold War Brave New World of global meliorism that so many of us saps thought we were headed for back in the nineties, and even in the oughties, until the Great Recession compounded the woes inflicted largely by George Bush’s disastrous War on Terror (and not by terrorism itself), said war being backed passionately by Anne, though not by me. Now I have read Anne’s book, and continue my approval, with the same caveat as before, that Anne’s devotion to American “leadership”, aka compulsive and destructive interventionism, could use some thought.
Anne’s book is, to a great extent, a personal reminiscence, for Anne is connected as I am detached. Born in Washington, DC, for years she was a serious insider in London, as editor and reporter for two elite publications, the Economist and the Spectator. Later, living in Washington, she was associated with the Washington Post and a variety of high-end neocon think tanks. Later still, she moved to Poland and eventually married Radosław Tomasz Sikorski, a leading Polish politician who later became defense minister for the country. Writing about the people she knew in Washington, in London, and in Poland, she wonders how and why so many bright, ambitious, and, apparently, idealistic people have given over their lives—and, really, their souls—to one brand or another of tribal, exclusionary nationalism. The growth of both right- and left-wing anti-Semitism in Europe, where it is far more politically respectable than in the U.S.—proving that we aren’t always the worst—is particularly distressing for Applebaum, who is Jewish and also a citizen of Poland, which—like the rest of Europe—has a miserable past record of anti-Semitism.
Anne’s anguish is palpable, and all too justified, but she is reluctant to search for causes, seeing the decay all around us almost exclusively in moral terms. She doesn’t want to recognize the massive faults in the construction of the European Union, well described back in 2017 by Matthias Matthijs in Foreign Affairs in his article Europe After Brexit A Less Perfect Union, faults that naturally gave way under the strains of both the expansion of the Union into Eastern Europe and the great burdens of the Great Contraction, a disaster whose burden the Union persistently and consistently increased, as a deeply frustrated Paul Krugman wrote back in 2016, Notes on Brexit, noting dismally that “the straight economics is pretty clearly on the side of Remain. Why, then, am I at all ambivalent? Because the EU is so dysfunctional, and seems utterly resistant to improvement.”
Anne, a stentorian cheerleader for the War on Terror, is also not so strangely silent on that topic as well, and, indeed, not above using a touch of guilt by association to discredit even the thought of questioning America’s foreign policy, which I find, well, dysfunctional and utterly resistant to improvement. Speaking of Pat Buchanan, whose racist and anti-Semitic views have been barely concealed for decades, she writes:
Over the years he [Buchanan] has evolved away from ordinary isolationism and toward what seems to be a belief that America’s role in the world is pernicious, if not evil. In 2002, he told a television audience, using language that could have equally come from Noam Chomsky or a similar left-wing critic of America, that “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted.”
Got that? If you question the wisdom of American foreign policy in the Middle East, if you dare to suggest that 9/11 was a result of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, well, you think America’s role in the world is pernicious, if not evil, just like anti-Semitic right-winger Pat Buchanan or America-hater Noam Chomsky. But what if we change “meddling” to “intervention” and “pernicious, if not evil” to “misguided and self-destructive”? Applebaum wants to take mere consideration of the idea that 9/11 was in any way “blowback” from U.S. actions off the table. But, you know, wasn’t it exactly that?2 If the U.S. hadn’t intervened so massively in the Middle East, why would Muslim radicals be so determined to drive us out? Applebaum’s real position, which she does not wish to state, much less defend, is that even if 9/11 was “blowback”, our interventions are necessary and just.
To call Applebaum an enthusiast for U.S. leadership is putting it mildly. A column she wrote endorsing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 is largely devoted to attacking the Obama administration for being insufficiently anti-Russian. Naturally, the argument that the massive expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe might have been, you know, a bad idea, prompting a suspicious and authoritarian Vladimir Putin to become more suspicious and more authoritarian is one she does not care to notice.3
Applebaum doesn’t want to accept the extent to which fears of immigration in Europe, which, more than any other, are driving xenophobic tribalism, have any basis in fact, but they do. The European welfare system is too generous to begin with, set up in the fifties and sixties when an unprecedented economic boom—due largely to the fact that Europeans were working rather than murdering one another, as they had in the first half of the twentieth century—and a socially cohesive population accepting the “rules of the game” without question combined to make such generosity feasible. We no longer have 4% growth, and there is no good reason to believe that we ever will again. Populations are aging, and are much less cohesive. Muslim immigrants in particular are in societies whose mores they often not merely misunderstand but reject and sometimes despise. As Matthias Matthijs demonstrated in the article I referred to earlier, bringing Eastern Europe into the EU triggered population flows that create problems, particularly in times of severe economic hardship, that may often result in vicious and irrational prejudice, but are not prompted by prejudice alone. Latin American immigration into the U.S. creates similar problems, even though legal immigrants don’t qualify for many U.S. welfare benefits, and illegal ones don’t qualify for any. Muslim immigration, which affects Europe far more directly than the U.S., has been significantly triggered by America’s repeated, and repeatedly disastrous, interventions in the Middle East, something else Applebaum doesn’t want to talk about. Furthermore, the rebirth of anti-Semitism in Europe is clearly linked to U.S. support for Israel,4 which has grown increasingly unquestioned and unquestioning, for a regime that is itself increasingly unattractive.
The stresses of globalism are world-wide and arise from globalism itself. Literally billions are lifted out of poverty, but the transformation is far from either uniform or complete. Poverty breeds suffering, but inequality breeds envy and discontent. Revolutions are led by young men and women educated to hold expectations that are beyond all likelihood of their fulfillment. The retreat to xenophobic nationalism has been just as marked in Asia as in Europe and the U.S., and the policy failures of U.S. and European elites can in no way be held responsible for this. But the willingness of people whom Applebaum thought of as being “like her” to surrender to the nostalgie de la boue—the “nostalgia for the mud”—terrible though it is, and as well as Applebaum describes it, is only half the story of what has happened here in the West.
Afterwords
Back in 2008, I ridiculed Anne in the rather harshly titled post, The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum for a column she had written following her return from Afghanistan, in which she said
Though Americans like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war in Afghanistan, on the ground it’s clear that those categories aren’t relevant. Of course we can “win”: The real question is whether we are willing to pay the high cost of victory.
For me, the “real question” was whether we needed to “win” in Afghanistan, a question that Anne clearly didn’t want to answer. Hey, you want to be a winner, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, winners never quit, and quitters never win!
Anne, to my mind, unconsciously undermined her case by concluding
we haven't exactly "neglected" Afghanistan, as Barack Obama and others often say. It's just that we haven't yet faced up to what we have undertaken to do here. Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq, more rugged, more impoverished and vastly more complicated, with more languages, more ethnic groups, more tribes and more-lethal neighbors. It has only begun to test our stamina.
Well, in 2008 it was already pretty fucking clear that our invasion of Iraq had been a total fucking disaster, costing thousands of lives and tens of thousands of casualties, and trillions of dollars, and yet Anne says, “Hey, roll up your sleeves, boys! In Afghanistan, we’re just getting started!” Did it never occur to Anne that Afghanistan might not be worth tens of thousands of lives and trillions and trillions of dollars? Annie, did you ever look in the mirror? I know it’s scary, but you should try it sometime.
I have my own “theory” on what happened “conservatism” in America post Reagan, The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? and have frequently struggled to get a handle on some of our 21st-century blues, perhaps most explicitly in Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end.
1. Ponnuru explicitly advocated the impeachment of Trump and his removal from office, which ought to give him some cred as a never-Trumper, but also writes a piece like this one, John Yoo’s Defense of Trump, carefully enumerating Yoo’s totally bogus talking points, and then offering this vague summation: “In early 2019, Yuval Levin and I took a much less sympathetic look at Trump’s constitutional record. But it is certainly true that if you believe the above propositions, that record looks better”—which is like saying that if you believe that the earth is flat, the notion that you could sail off the edge makes more sense. Hey, they don’t call him “Noncommittal Ramesh” for nothing! So, really, Ramesh isn’t complicit complicit. But he is complicit with the complicit.
2. For the enth time I will refer the reader to Christian Alfonsi’s “definitive” study, Circle in the Sand, which notes that both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration were repeatedly warned by the U.S. embassy in Riyadh that keeping U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia following the first Gulf War was infuriating right-wing elements in that country, zealots who were determined to force the U.S. to leave.
3. Applebaum’s political hero, of course, was John McCain, who never saw a country he didn’t want to invade. However, she broke with him in 2008 when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. She wrote a column in the Washington Post explaining why she wasn’t going to vote for him and “he never spoke to me again.” Interestingly, Applebaum’s fellow never-Trumper William Kristol was a strenuous advocate for Palin, famously gushing over her at the time. I chuckled heartily at the avalanche of abuse Annie suffered for her treachery/good taste from outraged “true conservatives”, writing “Nothing shows the intellectual bankruptcy on the Right so clearly as the embrace of this airhead [Palin] as the savior of the Republican Party.”
4. Anti-Semitism in Europe is a convenient way of owning the Yanks. Applebaum is rightfully distressed by the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain’s Labour Party, but doesn’t seem to wonder whether Tony Blair’s fervent embrace of George Bush’s Middle Eastern policy might be related to it. Muslims, who do not see why Europeans had to “solve” the problem of European anti-Semitism at Arab expense, can be, one might say, honestly “anti-Zionist”, but for most westerners anti-Zionism is simply anti-Semitism with a shave.
