Well, I certainly do. I mean, I wonder about a lot of things, and one of the things I wonder about is Dan’s article in the WashPost from a month or two back, which he called “The most pessimistic article I have read in 2021”, a “depressing read” (says Dan) found in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs by Richard N. Haass and Charles A. Kupchan, bearing the ponderous title The New Concert of Powers: How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a Multipolar World.
This article was not a depressing read because of its proposal for a great-power concert. It was depressing because of its bleak but accurate description of the state of the world. Consider: “Pax Americana is now running on fumes. The United States and its traditional democratic partners have neither the capability nor the will to anchor an interdependent international system and universalize the liberal order that they erected after World War II.” Show me the lie.
Show you the lie, Dan? Show me the depression! What happened from September 11, 2001 to August 31, 2013, when President Obama, after having announced that he was going to kick Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ass (loosely speaking) suddenly decided he needed Congress’s permission to do so, which was his way of saying “okay, I fucked up. Never mind”? That is to say, what happened when the United States certainly thought it did have the will to attempt to “anchor an interdependent international system and universalize the liberal order … erected after World War II,” only to discover that it signally lacked the capability to do so, resulting in a slow-moving orgy of blood, hypocrisy, and disaster, which is only now coming to its ignoble conclusion with our withdrawal from Afghanistan? What’s depressing is that you aren’t depressed by this stunning record of incompetence, which is as bloody as it is protracted and as protracted as it is bloody, a record that has significantly increased the level of disorder and suffering in the world and significantly reduced our standing and contributed mightily to the mood of xenophobic isolationism that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency, turning the Republican Party into not the anti-Democratic party but the anti-democratic party. That’s what’s “depressing”!
The thing is, there’s more depression to come. In fact, I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m also depressed by the absurdity of Dick and Charlie’s proposal, and by Dan’s lack of comprehension of, well, said absurdity (though, in fact, he doesn’t think it would work). Which, by my count, leaves me trebly depressed, but I’ll go on to double that depression because no one involved—not Dan, not Dick, not Charlie, and not the editors of Foreign Affairs, who printed the damn thing in the first place—seem to have the slightest understanding of how “history” shapes the possible in world affairs, why a “sensible”, “pragmatic”, and indeed “down to earth” proposal (all my words) can have not the slightest applicability to that elusive entity known as “the real world”. This is, uh, “piquant” in the case of all three of my suspects, since Haass and Kupchan draw explicit inspiration for their proposal from “history”, specifically the “Concert of Europe” that ran things, sort of, following the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe (in 1815) until the start of World War I (1914, of course), while Dannie Boy got my goat about three years ago with an article subtitled It's Robert Gilpin's world, we are just living in it, lauding to the skies Bob’s magnum opus, War and Change in World Politics, a book praised in particular because its analysis, instead of being limited to what one can call the “post-Westphalian world,”1 also drew examples from “pre- and non-European international systems stretching back to antiquity” Yet there is no reason on earth why Haass and Kupchan’s “New Concert of Powers” should ever get off the ground (indeed, no reason why anyone “serious” should propose it), a stunningly obvious fact that proves entirely invisible to Dan, who in fact worries that not that the “New Concert” would be impossible but rather than it will be inevitable, for lack of any meaningful alternative, though, at the same time, relatively impotent.
What is this proposed “New Concert”, of which I think so little? Haass and Kupchan explain:
The best vehicle for promoting stability in the twenty-first century is a global concert of major powers. [The authors propose China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States as members.] As the history of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe demonstrated—its members were the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—a steering group of leading countries can curb the geopolitical and ideological competition that usually accompanies multipolarity.
Concerts have two characteristics that make them well suited to the emerging global landscape: political inclusivity and procedural informality. A concert’s inclusivity means that it puts at the table the geopolitically influential and powerful states that need to be there, regardless of their regime type. In so doing, it largely separates ideological differences over domestic governance from matters of international cooperation. A concert’s informality means that it eschews binding and enforceable procedures and agreements, clearly distinguishing it from the UN Security Council. The UNSC serves too often as a public forum for grandstanding and is regularly paralyzed by disputes among its veto-wielding permanent members. In contrast, a concert offers a private venue that combines consensus building with cajoling and jockeying—a must since major powers will have both common and competing interests. By providing a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic dialogue, a global concert can realistically mute and manage inescapable geopolitical and ideological differences.
“A global concert can realistically mute and manage inescapable geopolitical and ideological differences”? Well, I guess it can, if it wants to. The authors say of the original Concert that its “primary objective was to preserve peace among its members through a mutual commitment to upholding the territorial settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.” This is casuistry at its finest. The Concert’s “primary objective” was to preserve the traditional monarchies of Europe and prevent the reemergence of the fires of the French revolution. The staggering power of the revolutionary armies of France, the staggering cost they inflicted on Europe, and the awareness (on the part of some, at least) that those armies were defeated, not by the efforts of the monarchies, but rather Napoleon’s uncontrollable appetite for domination, all terrified Europe’s ruling classes as they had never been terrified before. It didn’t hurt at all that the most powerful members of the Concert, Great Britain and Russia, were at opposite ends of Europe, and that Britain was expanding its power across the oceans while Russia was expanding her power across the enormous range of the Siberian steppes.2
The grandly named “Pax Britannica” was ultimately succeeded by the fatuously titled “Pax Americana”, which was similarly fueled by a specific set of historical circumstances, quite similar to the first “Pax”, actually, since both were essentially driven by the fear of revolution. The original idea of the United Nations was that it would guard against primarily imperialistic clashes, but that “danger” essentially vanished after World War II since the age of European imperialism was obviously over—empires were collapsing rather than expanding—and all of Europe—all of middle-class Europe, at least—was united by both the fear of a revival of German power and of an expansion of Soviet rule. As the standard phrase put it, Europeans wanted the Americans in to keep the Germans down and the Reds out. That essential bond no longer exists, and it never existed in the Middle East, which was why the efforts of both the Bush and Obama administrations to create, in effect, a new NATO, led to disaster rather than success.
The current world is not recovering from anything like the French revolutionary wars or the linked tragedies of World Wars I & II. We are—particularly those in the West, of course—incredibly spoiled. We simply do not know how bad life can be. One does not conjure up a sense of shared purpose born out of repeated tragedies and the prospects of even greater ones simply by clapping one’s hands and declaring “make it so”. At the current time, the foreign policies of the major nations are massively driven by domestic political needs: powerful domestic constituencies in virtually every major nation are convinced that their needs are being sacrificed to “foreigners”, and many politicians simply see no reason not to use foreigners as scapegoats—because, after all, they can’t vote.
Haass and Kupchan, like so many “experts”—like myself, really—lean heavily to the “Surtout, pas trop de zele” (“Above all, not too much zeal”) end of the spectrum. But no one should imagine that it would either desirable or feasible to return to the days of Tallyrand. One does not combat the dangers of zeal by pretending that it does not exist. Instead of imagining that a super council of bluff men (and women) of the world can work out national differences with the dispassionate precision of skilled surgeons, it is better to pursue an ongoing empirical critique of the numerous forces working to destabilize the world, which, unfortunately, cannot really be refuted except by their own failures, to bring those responsible for the failures to account, and to make clear the reasons for those failures. After all, the real impetus for Haass and Kupchan’s proposal is the lack of order in today’s world order, which briefly appeared to be capable of maintaining itself through its own unparalleled success in supplying the material wants of humanity to an extent sufficient to allow every human being a “human” life, one not driven by necessity. The advantages of both political and financial transparency were thought to be so overwhelming as to be irresistible.
Sadly, it wasn’t nearly enough. The prospect of infinite, and infinitely increasing, riches, convinced the world’s financiers that they could continue doubling their wealth every two or three years for decades to come, betting literally everything on the absurd notion that U.S. housing prices would record substantial annual increases “forever”.3 This was self-evidently absurd, but most financiers actually believed this, and invested their own money on this assumption. “Transparency” proved to be no adequate defense against greed. When everything fell apart, only government intervention saved them from ruin, something they never acknowledged. Sadly, the Obama administration indulged their fantasies far more than it should have.
The corruption of finance went hand in hand with the corruption of the public sector. The fantastic increase in the amount of wealth sloshing around in the world made it painfully easy for government leaders to surrender their virtue. The notion that the advantages of political and financial transparency were so overwhelming that society would, in effect, run itself proved pathetically naïve. Is there anyone whose virtue is proof against the “private jet” lifestyle? Give me a ride in a private jet, and I’ll tell you.
It is this “lesson”, drawn from the failures of globalism, that the world is largely in recoil from—aided and abetted mightily both by the European Union’s painfully naïve optimism about the effects of its expansion into central and eastern Europe and the massive increase in right-wing Islamic terrorism, very largely the result of compulsive U.S. meddling in the Middle East, both to control the price of oil (to the general approval of our European allies) and to win the approval of the Israel lobby in the U.S. (something our allies could do without, and which helps foster “anti-Zionism”—aka “anti-Semitism”—among them). A new “Global Consort” is precisely what the times are not calling for (unfortunately).
It is a point in Dan’s favor—Dan Drezner, the guy I was complaining about earlier—that he’s as skeptical of Haass and Kupchan’s “Consort” as I am. Says Dan
Color me skeptical. For it to even get started, the territorial squabbles over Crimea and the East China Sea would have to be settled or cabined, and may I just say: Good luck with that.
Well, color me sordid, or at least Metternichian. The Crimea became part of the Russian Empire in 1774. The Russians could have “lived” with an independent Ukraine as long as it wasn’t too independent. But of course the U.S. insisted on what really amounted to mindless expansion of our “sphere of influence” over all of the former Russian Empire, with the obvious goal of ultimately toppling Putin himself. In the East China Sea, Taiwan has a “complicated” history, to say the least, but was officially declared a part of the Chinese Empire in 1683, was taken by the Japanese in 1895, returned to the Republic of China in 1945, and then became the refuge of Chiang Kai-shek after fleeing the mainland in 1949. The shocking fact is that neither is worth a world war, something for which Dan seems to vaguely feel regret, as if wanting to believe that, if only the U.S. could muster enough gumption, we could enlist a world-wide alliance sufficient to bully Russia and China into doing things our way. The good news is, we can’t, and the further good news is, we don’t need to, because neither country is threatening our essential interests. The bad news is, people like Dan feel that unless our military intellectual complex, of which he is a proud minion, is kept cranking at “Maximum Danger!” intensity, we are in “decline”, nothing more than a bloated pack of sluttish, lotus-eating antinomians.4
Afterwords
Dan appears to want to believe that American foreign policy, even preceding World War II, with the release, really, of the “Atlantic Charter” by FDR and Churchill in August 1941 promising “self-determination” for the peoples of the world, the U.S. has always been on the side of democracy. He ignores the fact that, during the Cold War, the U.S. generally preferred to deal with authoritarian governments, often very brutal ones, in the “Third World” rather than risk elections. He further fails to recognize that our Middle Eastern policy has never been about “democracy” but always about “oil and Israel”, and devil take the hindmost. In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, historically not one of my fave raves, wrote the following:
Most of the international military obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated. Our alliances should be alliances of equals, with equal risks, burdens and responsibilities. It is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an unusually successful, open republic.
This was heresy, of course, and quickly suppressed.5 Fortunately, heresy has reared its ugly head again, this time at the National Review from Kevin D, Williamson. I’ve already quoted Kevin in a recent post, but I liked what he had to say so much that I’ll do it again:
The United States does not have the power to force the other nations of the world to adhere to its interests and values on its own. It never has — including at the height of its power and prestige in the immediate postwar years. But rather than recognize the facts on the ground and organize its diplomatic business accordingly, the United States has in recent years lurched from absurdity to absurdity and from crisis to crisis, now aping the crude nationalism of Beijing, now striking a grandiose Wilsonian pose — while at almost all times and on almost all occasions making foreign policy an instrument of short-term domestic politics, subordinate to short-term political calculation. This has led — inevitably — to the undermining of our national interests rather than their fortification.
Afterwords II—This isn’t Robert Gilpin’s world, and we aren’t living in it
Dan appears to be rather obsessed with “decline”. His essay in praise of Robert Gilpin’s book War and Change in World Politics (1981), which I referenced earlier, is largely devoted to Gilpin’s supposedly unsurpassably prescient analysis of the near-inevitable decline of “hegemons”, which tracks very closely with Paul Kennedy’s far more famous “masterwork” (Dan’s word), Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), both works often little more than clumsily “objective”—that is to say, utterly meretricious—denunciations of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era—both infinitely scornful of the U.S. “failure of nerve”. Kennedy in particular comes off in my eyes as nothing more as a resentful Brit anxious to demonstrate the superiority of “Pax Britannica” to that of “Pax Americana”. The fact that Kennedy's sneering takedown of America's lack of pluck was followed only two years later by the utter collapse of the Soviet Union was, one can say, “highly amusing.” Well, a fellow can't be expected to know everything, can he?
“Decline is a choice!” the late Charles Krauthammer used to bellow during the Obama years. But “decline” is not a choice. Britain was not a “weary titan” in the years just before World War I but an economic pigmy, dwarfed by both Germany and the U.S. British steel production just prior to World War I was half that of Germany’s, which in turn was half that of the U.S. Britain’s empire and immense merchant marine gave it a GDP comparable to Germany’s, but the U.K. could never have prevailed in a one on one slugging match with its rival. And the U.S. today resembles not a weary titan so much as a stupid one, stupid for following Dan’s advice rather than ignoring it for the folly it so entirely is. Please, academics! Stop sitting in your studies and demanding that young men die to prove your fantasies of manliness! Surtout, pas trop de zele! Especially with other folks’ lives!
1. Quoting William C. Wohlforth, Gilpinian Realism and International Relations. The “Peace of Westphalia” in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War, a famously bloody struggle for dominance waged largely in German territory between largely Protestant and Catholic forces, although naturally purely secular interests often entered in. A major feature of the conflict was the prospect of starving, unpaid armies sweeping across the already plundered countryside and subjecting the hapless peasants to even more exploitation. The Peace supposedly established the principles of “good behavior” among nations—they would respect each other’s sovereignty in both territory and religion—a reputation scarcely deserved, since later in the 17th century Louis XIV significantly expanded the territory of France, attempted to seize the entirety of the Netherlands, recognized the Catholic James III (the “Old Pretender”) as King of England rather than the Protestant William of Orange, and sought to put his grandson on the Spanish throne, while in the 18th century Prussia conquered the Austrian province of Silesia and later Prussia, Austria, and Russia swallowed up all of Poland.
2. Even so, the UK and Russia did collide with one another in the Crimean War (1853-1856), in large part because the Ottoman Empire was not given a seat at the table, due, of course, to “ideological differences”.
3. The great increase in housing prices was fueled by a great innovation, the securitization of mortgages, which significantly reduced their cost. But because this meant that lenders made their money via fees, received immediately on the sale of the home, rather than monthly mortgage payments over a span of years, lending agents had every reason to sell as much house as possible, a potent inducement to chicanery. Buyers, hypnotized by the hype, proved painfully gullible. “Sophisticated” purchasers of high-end investments were equally blind. I recall reading an account by a mathematician who increased his salary by about 1000% by leaving his university position to work on Wall Street creating elaborately balanced investment packages. Pressured by a salesman to approve a certain package for sale, the mathematician explained that he needed to run a series of approximations to determine how the package would hold up under a wide variety of economic conditions. “Don’t bother,” the salesman told him. “The Japanese will buy anything with our name on it.”
4. For more on antinomians (which Word can spell) and antinomianism, see footnote 3 of this post.
5. Jeanne’s essay does not appear to be on line. It’s discussed here by über non-fave rave Pat Buchanan.
