The Forever War?

Sorry for the lack of posting this week, but things have been especially busy with work and other matters. Since my last entry, I managed to finish Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Patrick J. Buchanan. Once finished, I then read some reviews by John Lukacs and Victor Davis Hanson (here and here).

In his book, Buchanan argues that Great Britain (via Winston Churchill) committed a serious blunder by going to war against Nazi Germany in 1939. Taking a broad view of the early twentieth century, Buchanan states that in the future, historians may regard the First and Second World Wars as two phases of a "Great Civil War of the West" that did not reach its ultimate conclusion until the end of the Cold War in 1989. The notion of the time period of 1914 to 1989 being one of continuous conflict is not Buchanan's alone – in The Shield of Achilles, Phillip Bobbitt refers to it as the "Long War" of 1914-1990. One could also argue that the war is not even over as of 2008, for since 2003 in Iraq, the United States has been engaged in a project of restoring political order to a part of the Middle East that has not known long term peace since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps a better term would be "The Forever War" – coined by science fiction author Joe Haldeman in his classic novel of the same name.

In any case, Buchanan's narrative is thought-provoking. The start of what would come to be known as World War I signaled the end of a long period of global Western expansion. By the early twentieth century, several European nations – Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and to a lesser extent Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, had amassed massive colonial hegemonies, the largest of which was the British Empire. Without a doubt, the West dominated the world politically, economically, militarily, and territorially. However, by the end of the First World War, Germany's colonial empire abroad was no more - having been carved up by Britain, Japan, Australia, and South Africa – and several monarchial dynasties had fallen, among them the houses of Hohenzollern (Germany), Hapsburg (Austria-Hungary), and Romanov (Russia). And in the war's aftermath there emerged a rising world power: the United States of America.

Also emergent in the two decades after World War I were totalitarian dictatorships in Italy, Japan, Russia, and Germany – led by men who would plunge the world into a second global conflict that would dwarf the first in terms of physical destruction and loss-of-life. In the aftermath of World War II, the British Empire upon which the sun once never set would cease to exist, as the United Kingdom, strapped for funds and manpower, was unable to hold on to its far-flung possessions, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two remaining hegemons, the latter of which would collapse by the end of the 1980s.

Buchanan places the blame for the end of Western global domination upon Winston Churchill, who Buchanan believes was instrumental in leading the British Empire to its ultimate demise. Churchill held key positions within the Liberal government that oversaw Britain's entry into World War I and was a leading member of the Conservative Party by the 1930's, ultimately becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom upon Neville Chamberlain's resignation in 1940. Buchanan portrays Churchill not as the "Last Lion" who courageously stood up to the scourge of Nazism when all appeared to be lost, but rather as a war-hungry toff who loudly agitated for Britain's involvement in two continental European wars in which Britain had no overriding national interest. Without Britain's entry into either war, Buchanan maintains that the first would have been a mere replay of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and that the second might have been no more than a slugfest between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin – a war in which both sides might have been weakened sufficiently to the point that neither would ever have threatened the peace-loving democracies of the West.

That is tricky territory for any historian, academic or amateur, to tread upon as there is simply no way to prove or disprove such counter-factual assumptions. But Buchanan marches on, claiming that Churchill and others among Britain's war party were recklessly irresponsible in pushing Britain into entering a costly war with Imperial Germany, imposing a "Carthaginian Peace" (as South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts called it) upon Germany at Versailles, and ultimately committing a series of diplomatic blunders that pushed Benito Mussolini into Hitler's arms, allowed Hitler to re-arm, and goaded Hitler into attacking Poland in September 1939 – a country which Britain and France foolishly (and unrealistically) promised to protect in the event of a German invasion.

Criticisms of Buchanan's thesis have been harsh. In the July 2, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, historian John Lukacs (pronounced LOO-kash) criticizes Buchanan for committing the logical fallacy of special pleading, selectively quoting a renowned historian like A.J.P. Taylor who maintained "Only Danzig prevented cooperation between Germany and Poland" to support his thesis, but then ignoring other quotations (Churchill being "the savior of England") from Taylor that undermine it. Throughout the book, Buchanan posits Hitler as more of a passive player in the diplomatic games of 1930s Europe, rather than the belligerent aggressor he actually was. On Buchanan's dichotomy of an aggressive Churchill/Britain vs. a passive/reactive Hitler, Lukacs writes:

A man has, or more precisely chooses, his opinions. The choice, ever so often, depends on his inclinations. In this review it is not my proper business to speculate about Buchanan's inclinations. I must restrict myself to his arguments.

Another historian who takes issue with Buchanan's arguments is Victor Davis Hanson. One argument Hanson finds spurious is Buchanan's assertion that Britain's issue of a war guarantee to defend Poland was directly responsible for such atrocities as the Katyn Forest massacre, the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz, the destruction of the Polish Home Army, and the half-century of Soviet repression that followed. Hanson responds:

This is reprehensible. Now British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz, rather than the innate sinister nature of Nazism? Does Buchanan believe that had Britain not tried to stop Hitler, the death camps would never have occurred? Does he know of the prewar Nazi precursors to the Final Solution, the geneses of which were clear from Germany's own treatment of its chronically ill and mentally disturbed?

Indeed, Buchanan does fall into the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc on this point, much like the conspiracy theorists and revisionist historians at lewrockwell.com who assert that Franklin Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and that American foreign policy was culpable for the events of September 11, 2001, rather than the Japanese militarists and Islamic radicals who committed the respective heinous acts. It is, to put it simply, complete nonsense.

But what is not nonsense, and quite refreshing, is the other side of Churchill that Buchanan exposes his readers to. The Churchill we see here is not the hagiographical icon feted by so many admiring historians, but rather a talented, intelligent, brave, but occasionally flawed man whose career was far from spotless. For example, it was Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, bore direct responsibility for the disaster that was the Battle of Gallipoli in which more than 200,000 British, Australian, and New Zealander troops lost their lives, and who as Prime Minister was responsible for ordering the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942, just to give a couple of examples.

I certainly do not agree with all of Buchanan's assertions, nor do I agree with his overall indictment of Churchill or the parallel he draws between 1930s Britain and early twenty-first century America. I do, however, appreciate Buchanan's ability to force his readers to re-examine long-held assumptions – and because of that, I recommend this book.

***

Having completed Buchanan's book, I am now finishing up Harry Turtledove's Opening Atlantis and will shortly begin re-reading Tom Kratman's A State of Disobedience. Good weekend wishes to all!