Posted on 09/16/2014 9:03:25 AM PDT by Starman417
Robert Kagan had an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. Titled “Power Failure” it discussed the parallels between the aftermath of WW I and today. In it he talks about the feeling in the US and the UK after WWI that war itself had seemingly become impossible.
Then as now, Americans and Britons solipsistically believed that everyone shared their disillusionment with war. They imagined that because war was horrible and irrational, as the Great War had surely demonstrated, no sane people would choose it.
That the US and Europe would pare back their military spending after a cataclysmic war is understandable. That the peace of the Roaring Twenties led them to believe that war was sufficiently passé it need no longer be prepared for is not. War has been a hallmark of human history since recorded time. Those few times when War seemed to be absent from large swaths of land it was often because peace was imposed at the tip of a sword, not because everyone just wanted to get along. While the Roman citizens who lived during Pax Romana enjoyed a relative peace, that peace was guaranteed by tens of thousands of soldiers dispersed throughout the Empire and along its borders.
The logical outcome of the winnowing of the American and British military muscle and resolve post WW I was of course WW II. From ignoring the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to allowing Hitler to rearm in 1935 to abandoning the Czechs in 1938, it became increasingly clear to the Axis powers that they could act with impunity. It was only a matter of time before such appeasements led to a second world at war. As Kagan points out, we see a similar pattern today. Weakness begets belligerency. And that is the key takeaway from his piece, and from history in general.
The post WW II period has been one of the most peaceful in human history, primarily because of American – and to a lesser extent NATO – military strength. While hotspots cropped up from time to time in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba and various other Latin American nations, there was a distinct absence of the world wide conflicts that highlighted the first half of the 20th century, and a dearth of wars between European states such as those that characterized much of the 18th and 19th centuries. A more recent example is the fact that after George Bush decided to go after the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, suddenly Muammar Gaddafi decided that he wanted to give up his terrorist ways. Conversely, as the west has appeased both Iran and North Korea, both nations have continued to develop nuclear weapons.
Osama Bin Laden may have been wrong on many things, but one thing he was right about was this: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse”. Today the strong horse is Vladimir Putin as he seeks to reassemble the Soviet empire. Today the strong horse is Communist China as it bullies its neighbors from Japan to Vietnam to the Philippines and thumbs its nose at Britain as it ignores the democracy agreement it signed on Hong Kong. Today the strong horse is ISIS as it shows its enthusiasm for raining down terror across Mesopotamia and showcasing the murder of innocents of children, civilians and foreign journalists.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Correction: It’s not “strong horse vs weak horse,” it’s “strong horse vs weak d*ck”.
(Excuase the vulgarism, but one must correctly sum up the situation if the analysis is to proceed.)
Americans apparently were so convinced that there would be no more wars that they felt safe enough to elect a boy president. Presumably the world playground had been made safe enough for him to play and not get skinned knees or a bloody nose or pushed around by bullies from one of the neighboring schools.
Just as Islam purges nonbelievers within its midst, the nonbelievers too shall have to purge Islam - with expulsions the likely outcome and banning of the religion altogether within the West.
The Kagan piece in the WSJ was excellent, btw. There are indeed many similarities to the pre-WWI situation - very disturbing.
No arrows.
The biggest similarity is the appeal of isolationism that happened after WWI and after the Iraq War. We saw a similar return to this thinking after Vietnam, but Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage taking kind of woke America up. Carter was doing an Obama before the culture had been so thoroughly corrupted with pacifism, defeatism, and isolationism. Now, Putin and ISIS/ISIL can each count on some support from the pacifist, defeatist, and isolationist clique of dilettantes and philistines.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.