Posted on 03/14/2014 7:04:09 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
“There has been no greater advance than this, gentlemen,” the President of the United States said. “It is a definite guarantee of peace. It is a definite guarantee by word against aggression.”
The year was 1919. The speaker was President Woodrow Wilson and the tremendous advance in human history was the League of Nations.
Then Japan seized Manchuria and turned it into a puppet regime. China turned to the League of Nations which ordered Japan to withdraw from Manchuria. Japan instead withdrew from the League of Nations. Five years later, Japan invaded China. China asked for help from the League of Nations. The League proved to be just as useless again.
Western sanctions against Japan were erratic. Chamberlain vowed that Britain would never submit to Japanese threats, but tacitly recognized Japan’s conquests. He called Japan’s repeated humiliations, “almost intolerable”.
Almost.
The UK had accepted the annexation of Austria and abetted the seizure of the Sudetenland. Japan knew that behind British diplomacy lay not strength, but fear of provoking the rising power of the Rising Sun.
A few months before WWII, British negotiators had finally convinced the Japanese to stop stripping British subjects naked, but by then the forcible stripping of British men and women had served its purpose of stripping British power naked.
“We lived on bluff from 1920-1939, but it was eventually called,” Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, wrote.
Wilson’s “definite guarantee of peace” had failed miserably. International law had been exposed as magical thinking. When confronted with aggression, the diplomats who had talked boldly of ending war crawled on their bellies and proposed territorial partitions, desperately trying to appease Japan, Germany and Italy.
The end of war really meant the beginning of a self-righteous appeasement in which decadent states besotted with their own moral high ground sacrificed the weak to the strong in exchange for maintaining the moral illusion of their peacemaking.
The rhetoric of the illusionists of peace hasn’t changed. Diplomacy must be given time to work. The invaded countries brought it on themselves. The invaders have a legitimate territorial claim. Does anyone really want to die for Manchuria, the Sudetenland and Abyssinia? They didn’t. Instead they ended up having to die for Hawaii, London and Paris.
Debating whether Putin is following the Hitler playbook displays a basic ignorance of history. Japan followed that same playbook in its invasion of Manchuria; a staged incident, a rapid invasion and a puppet regime. It didn’t originate that playbook. It’s probably as old as human history.
Secretary of State John Kerry mumbled that Putin was guilty of 19th century behavior in the 21st century, but it’s actually Kerry who is guilty of 19th century behavior.
President Woodrow Wilson had lived through the Civil War. His father had owned slaves. Lord Balfour’s godfather was the Iron Duke who had defeated Napoleon. Georges Clemenceau narrowly avoided being locked up by Napoleon III.
The League of Nations was the successor to a 19th century organization and the men who conceived it and built it had largely been born in the 1850s and 60s. They weren’t 20th century men building a better world, but 19th century men inflicting ideas that were already outdated on the modern world.
Their ideas didn’t work then and they don’t work now.
The bewildered responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are a naïve piece of theater that should have been retired in the 19th century, but somehow endures into the 21st as the lovers of peace insist on guaranteeing an end to aggression based on worthless pieces of paper that they have no intention of defending by armed force and then act surprised when their bluff is called and they frantically scramble to convince their own people that peace has been secured for our time.
Alexander Cadogan’s blunt statement remains relevant today. We have been living on bluff and Putin called it.
Our response will be a variation on the Stimson Doctrine in which we will refuse to recognize Russia’s puppet regime in Crimea, just as we refused to recognize the Soviet annexations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. There will be endless debates over whether the Ukrainians had it coming and praise for our wise leaders who kept us out of war.
Eventually war may come anyway.
Woodrow Wilson claimed that the League would work because countries would be embarrassed to invade other countries for fear of being frowned on by their neighbors.
“He will be afraid of the eyes of his neighbors. He will be afraid of their judgment of his character. He will know that his cause is lost unless he can sustain it by the arguments of right and of justice. The same law that applies to individuals applies to nations.”
But foreign leaders are not part of a community of one street, instead they answer to the cultural pressures of their own societies and nations. Wilson’s expectations of decent behavior meant nothing in Berlin, Rome or Tokyo. They still mean nothing in Beijing, Moscow or Tehran.
Wilson assured everyone that China would be taken care of. “I am proud to have taken part in an arrangement which promises the protection of the world to the rights of China.”
The League of Nations proved unable to protect China’s rights. Only China was eventually able to do that.
International law did not protect any of the weaker nations of the world. Strong alliances did. There is no world government of the moral high ground that can substitute for alliances built on strength. International law does not stop invasions. Armed force does.
Ukraine is a reminder of the folly of putting our faith in 19th century illusions that have been discredited more times than spirit-rapping or phrenology. The only agreements that matter are those that are kept, either through genuine friendship rooted in a shared cultural history, or the threat of force.
The illusion of international law is pervasive. It tells us that the world does not have to work the way that it really does if only we hold hands, think good thoughts and pledge to wage war no more. Its advocates pretend to be sober and sensible, but they might as well be the counterculture hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon.
The United States did China no favors by holding out the promise of a collective security based on a common decency that had no defense against its violation except a scandalized harrumph and we have done Ukraine no favors by offering it useless pieces of paper while encouraging its disarmament.
“These men were crusaders. They were not going forth to prove the might of the United States. They were going forth to prove the might of justice and right,” Woodrow Wilson said of the dead Doughboys of WWI.
Wilson did not live long enough to discover that without the might of the United States, justice and right were easily overpowered by tyranny and evil.
American might allowed the advocates of international law to live in an imaginary world in which their doctrines actually matter. And now that they have finally succeeded in tearing down American strength and ushering in a post-American world, their own world will end.
International law is a Potemkin village. A hollow facade upheld by the might of the United States. A post-American world means the end of international law.
Here on FR, in 2007, when it looked like a sure thing that Obama would be elected, I warned the world to be ready to look out for themselves; that we were going to have our hands full here domestically for a while and that the USA would not be on scene for any international crises. Israel is waking up to this reality; others should be. If I were in Taiwan, SK, Japan, SE Asia, the Baltics, Poland, Australia, etc. I’d be sweating bullets right now.
The League of Nations did such a good job of keeping peace — at least from 1919 to 1939. Twenty years of success!
We are already there. Obama is cutting army brigades left and right and shrinking the navy.
But we have decided on our priorities: gays in the military, withdrawal from Afghanistan without even the pretense of winning there and giving up on the role of being the world’s gendarme.
The Ukrainians were warmly received in Washington but the message they heard was: you have our sympathies but you’re on your own. And Putin has heard the same message.
America has no stomach for a sustained conflict with Russia. And the solemn pledge of America standing by Ukraine has as much heft as the Western assurances a century ago to places like China and Czechoslovakia. The Russians are back in a big way and its time for us to stop pretending we are their equal.
More than 2001, 2014 has graphically revealed that America’s Cold War holiday from history is over.
Me too. And the ones at the greatest risk are our allies that, a few generations ago, would have been seen as sort of colonies depending on our protection. e.g. Israel, S Korea, etc.
I am thinking of the movie “My Bodygard” and what happens when the bodyguard is taken out or otherwise derelict of duty. As bad as it is in the US, those places could end up like Crimea, but without the politeness.
But we had to get rid of American Rule of Law, first.
Deftly accomplished by the Socialist bully, in an ignorant and immoral America.
Well, at any rate, this should finish off the military:
The Europeans have rested and rebuilt due to having the US protect them—They need to step up to the plate. Kosovo was the last time USA would send troops to solve their problems. They must stand up to their own bullies-France is starting to do that—Maybe Germany will follow. We gave them a chance to re-build and re-arm after WW II. But—they have played us for suckers as they squandered their wealth on Socialist experiments—that sound good but bankrupt their states. The EU is a joke—so is the Euro money plan. Good luck Europe! You have a fellow European Power growing to the east—and its hungry! Better start to face him or learn to speak Russian—Da!
The Europeans have rested and rebuilt due to having the US protect them—They need to step up to the plate. Kosovo was the last time USA would send troops to solve their problems. They must stand up to their own bullies-France is starting to do that—Maybe Germany will follow. We gave them a chance to re-build and re-arm after WW II. But—they have played us for suckers as they squandered their wealth on Socialist experiments—that sound good but bankrupt their states. The EU is a joke—so is the Euro money plan. Good luck Europe! You have a fellow European Power growing to the east—and its hungry! Better start to face him or learn to speak Russian—Da!
Welcome to Obama-World.
A lawless government in the USA fosters lawlwssness everywhere.
.....At least for now anyways, between 2014 to 2016.
May 16, 2014 is coming, the “Operation American Spring” is coming to D.C.
Putin would've never entered Crimea or staged troops on the Ukranian border with a JFK, Reagan or GW Bush in office, for example. He would've clearly understood the price he'd have to pay wouldn't be worth it, and not done it in the first place.
Weak Presidents literally encourage this crap to happen by their being weak in the first place. Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama prove it.
"Ukraine" as presently constituted is not a natural country.
The same was true for Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The Versailles treaty after WW1 put Germans inside the border of the new country of Czechoslovakia (which also had ethnic tensions between Czechs and Slovaks which caused it to split apart 20 years ago).
That is why, when a country goes to war. It puts the country on a war footing and finishes what it starts.
I was concerned that, with the lack of the US to protect them, Canada could be attacked by russia through Alaska.
But then I remembered they’d have to go through Sarah Palin. So Canada’s safe.
They must stand up to their own bullies-France is starting to do that
You are right on 1 of 3 accounts there. The Soviets walked all over JFK, whose foreign policy was a disaster. G.W.Bush watched as the Russians invaded Georgia, as well. Ronaldus Magnus is the only one, out of the three, that verifiable stared down the Russian bear.
Yes, the Russians tried taking the Ukraine under Bush, but here again they withdrew once the Bush Administration made it clear that should they continue, they would be responsible for putting American troops "in harms way" -- something Putin understood as something he did NOT want to force, so Russian troops withdrew.
I think you can successfully argue that the perception that JFK and GW Bush were "weak" in some way which caused the above two events we're discussing, the difference is they quickly squashed that perception and caused our enemy (Russia IS still our enemy) to back down.
Obama can NEVER live down his weakness.
On that we can agree...worst president EVER...EVer...Ever...ever
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