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Politics

Diez enseñanzas del regreso de la historia

Dec 13, 2022 Richard Haass

NUEVA YORK – Pocos echarán de menos 2022, un año definido por una pandemia que aún no ha terminado, el avance del cambio climático, inflación en alza, crecimiento económico en desaceleración y, sobre todo, el estallido de una costosa guerra en Europa y el temor a que un conflicto violento pueda estallar pronto en Asia. Algunas de estas cosas eran previsibles, pero muchas otras no; y todas proponen enseñanzas que bien haríamos en aprender.

En primer lugar, más de un académico pensaba que la guerra entre países era algo obsoleto, pero es todo lo contrario. Lo que vemos en Europa es una guerra imperial a la vieja usanza, en la que el presidente ruso Vladímir Putin busca extinguir a Ucrania en cuanto entidad soberana e independiente. Su objetivo es evitar que un país democrático y promercado interesado en estrechar vínculos con Occidente pueda prosperar en las fronteras de Rusia y dar un ejemplo que pudiera resultar atractivo a los rusos.

Por supuesto que en vez de la victoria rápida y fácil que esperaba, Putin descubrió que su ejército no es tan poderoso y que sus adversarios cuentan con mucha más determinación de la que previeron él y muchos en Occidente. Han pasado diez meses y la guerra continúa, sin final a la vista.

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Richard Haass

Writing for PS since 2000
153 Commentaries

Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), and was President George W. Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. He is the author, most recently, of The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (Penguin Press, 2023).

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Mirek Fatyga Dec 21, 2022

perhaps one should add couple more lessons?

-- those who advocate for the emergence of "rules based international order" should not violate it themselves. Noblesse oblige. US and UK (Anglo world) started the XXIst Century by invading a sovereign state, Iraq, based on made up casus belli. Anyone familiar with Soviet state propaganda had a severe case of deja vu watching US media and pronouncements of the US government prior to this war. And then, now lost in the mist of History, there was VP Cheney and his "energy task force". One does not need to be a lifelong conspiracy theorist to grow just a tad suspicious here.

-- having said the above, as onerous as the Iraq invasion had been, there still is no moral equivalence between the US and present day dictatorships of Russia and China. One only needs to look at Aleppo, Ukraine and the tragedy of Uyghurs. Nonetheless, Iraq invasion makes fighting the moral equivalence argument harder.

-- the major problem is, as it has always been, a dictatorship. The life cycle of dictatorships is almost always the same: winning power, consolidating power and crushing internal dissent, going to war once the domestic opposition has been extinguished. This life cycle is on graphic display in Russia. China is not there yet but the century is still young. The war can be larger or smaller, depending on which country gets taken over. If a major country with major military potential is taken over, the world war is a likely result. We are on the edge of one now and this one would be with nukes on day one.

-- another major problem is generational amnesia. History is a cycle of generational amnesia interacting with changing constraints due to evolving technologies and evolving economic constraints. Generational amnesia means that new generations no longer remember the horrors of war and dictatorship from personal experience and repeat the cycle, tempted by the siren song of easy answers to complex problems. Neglect of education is one of the facilitators of this cycle but education has to fight human nature, which is always a tall order.

-- in this cycle, the primary economic constraint is brought about by the consequences of world wide population growth. An example of this constraint: if one wanted to extend North American use of oil per capita to 8 billion people, world oil production would have to grow by ~600%. To the EU level, by ~300%. Neither is likely to happen. This is just one scarce resource. Solving this problem requires time, money, level head and perseverance, as well as basic honesty in communicating the predicament to the masses. The tensions that the predicament brings are an easy fodder for sociopathic demagogues and attempts to hide the problem by playing with money can lead to financial crisis which disrupts lives even more, similar to 1929.

-- A pessimistic view is that we are living through a rehash of 1930-ies. Just like then, western Democracies were asleep and reluctant to act forcefully in 2014 when the Ukraine war really started. In fairness, some measures were taken, particularly helping to strengthen the Ukrainian army. None of this was enough, leading to a full scale war in 2022. In this, we can see clear parallels to the Munich agreement. However, there are differences which give us some hope. While we have a new Molotov in the East, there is NATO and EU in the West which are still unified, leaving us without a Ribbentrop. There is hope.

-- We may miss a nuclear cataclysm of WW3 yet, but we will surely experience it if the Democratic system in the major Western countries fails. This system will surely come under strain because of aforementioned economic pressures. There is nothing more important than defending the Western democracy in spite of all its faults.

-- May you live in interesting times.
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Leto Atreides Dec 16, 2022

Economic inter-dependence did not prevent Putin from invading Ukraine, but it does not mean absence of economic inter-dependence will lead to a better outcome. Regardless of its limitations, economic inter-dependence has significantly decreased the risk of war between major economies. Reducing economic inter-dependence will only increase the risk of war.

Regarding China, what will be the alternative if China was not integrated economically with the rest of the world? One fifth of humanity locked in poverty, a nation that is more like North Korea and Iran? Would that be conducive to global peace and prosperity? The answer is clearly no. China's growing influence and assertiveness is something that can be managed because there is no indication that China is seeking global dominance through the use of force. Taiwan is a complex issue that differs from China's relations with other sovereign nations and must be examined separately, where the threat of force serves the purpose of deterrence against Taiwan independence. Chinese power rests mainly on its economic and trade relations with others. A good indicator of what kind of power China will become is to look at what kind of power China was when it was the most powerful nation in the region for much of the last two millennium. The greater danger lies in US attempts to contain China, especially by exploiting the tension over Taiwan and tacitly supporting Taiwan independence, which will make war an inevitable outcome.
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Robert Wolff Dec 16, 2022

Caveat:

Like Richard Haas I would still be extremely careful about how I presented the concept that “All Nations/Religions/Cultures have the same Concepts in Common” or that any dramatic changes in the historical cycles of history are avoidable.

Cultures (as proved by the current culture wars, actually do have everything in common, notably including the foundational characteristic that they are specifically dedicated to their own religious cult and exclusively for their religious followers in contest with all other religious cults. (This is the one [primitive tribal] commonality among all religions that we would all do better without).

Historical religions/cultures are the foundations of great interethnic antipathies and wars. Karl Marx realized this and believed it was a good reason for societies to eradicate religion as a central focus of human societies. But as Soviet Russia found out in its dissolution, religion is also the reason for cultural solidarity, and that without religion life loses its deep meaning that relies heavily on ‘cultural solidarity’ which is intrinsic to our historic primitive tribalism and religions.

The above is why the Soviet Union fell apart. The Chinese on the other hand have an overwhelming majority of Han history and culture and its binding Confucian religion, so they are having far more success at “Communism with a Chinese Twist” than the Soviet Union (which was composed of multiple cultures and religions organized as Soviets under the Soviet Constitution).

So religions and nations are both good and evil. They give meaning to human life but they also set religious/nationalistic societies in constant competition with one another which includes periodic catastrophic Wars.

At one point, just before the onset of WWII, Archduke Franz Ferdinand proposed changing the Austro-Hungarian rule with a triple monarchy of Slavs, Germans and Magyars, each having an equal voice in government. However, this idea was unpopular with the ruling elite, further stirring doubts of Franz Ferdinand's sanity. He also considered forming a federal government of 16 states, calling it the United States of Greater Austria. This idea was in direct conflict with the Serbian nationalists who had designs of breaking off with Bosnia and Herzegovina to form an independent state. Though he cared little for their nationalist ambitions, he advocated for a careful approach with the Serbs, warning his military leaders that harsh treatment toward them could cause an open conflict with Russia.

Remember that Archduke Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, just before he was assassinated (which was the beginning of WWI) said, “I am a Christian and I am a Jew and I am a Moslem and I am a Hindu and I am a Buddha”. On 28 June 1914, Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by the 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia.

Clearly, endearing all religions/cultures did not work out well for Archduke Ferdinand any more than rejecting all religions turned out well for the Soviet form of Communism. It is important to note that the Western concept of Humanitarianism (equal treatment of all [multi-religious/multicultural] peoples within each nation is failing for the same reason: [conservative] religious cultures are actually founded on the principle that you only treat those in your own cult equally and that you strictly discriminate in your treatment of others outside your own cult in order to compete with them. This conundrum wrapped in an enigma defies the possibility of stability in intercultural and international human relationships.
- Yoshimichi Moriyama Dec 17, 2022
  
  A very interesting comment about the important key function, good or bad, that religion plays.
  
  China is a Legalist society far more than a Confucian. In the first Chinese empire, Qing, four hundred and twenty Confucian scholars were buried alive and Confucian books were burned because in Confucian teachings there was no element for an emperor worship. In the next empire, Han, Confucianism was greatly transformed into the emperor cult.
  "...the reality of empire was that of a hard core of wei, or force, surrounded by a soft pulp of de, or virtue...Although court records praise the Confucian wisdom of emperors, they in fact behaved like Legalists, who suggested that the well-ordered society depended on clear rules and punishment for violators rather than benevolence (June Teufel Dreyer, China's Tianxia: Do All Under Heaven Need One Arbiter? YaleGlobal Online, 30 October 2014.)"
  "It was not so much that Confucian philosophy won over Han thinkers as that Han scholars gradually adoped Confucius as their ideal protype. At the same time scholarly men who identified themselve with the Confucian tradition were being brought into what had started out as a purely Legalist type of government...The Confucian precepts about proper rituals and etiquette were also gradually incorporated into law --- a development quite at variance with the original Confucian emphasis on ethics in place of law. Confucianism was also beginning to be recognized as the official philosophy of the state...The incorporation of Confucianism into the Legalist state was in many ways a strange phenomenon, but it helps explain the superior lasting power of the Chinese imperial system over other empires...men of education became supporters rather than opponents of the state (Edwin. O. Reischauer, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation.)"
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Yoshimichi Moriyama Dec 15, 2022

When I was young I happened to read Geoffrey Barraclough's An Introduction to Contemporary History in Japanese. He said that we expect history will unfold itself in a certain way and that almost always our expectation fails; it develops in quite a differnt manner from what we expected it would.

Most if not all of the ten expectations that war would be obsolete, that economic intertdependence would constitue a bulwark againgst war, and that China would be integrated peacefully in the world system, etc. cannot be understood unless interpreted on the unconditional assumption of "The End of History." Hegel said all human history moved relentlessly toward human freedom and that Prussia would take the lead. We know it was all his eccentricity.
Each nation is strongly bound up with its past history and its past history could be likened to the subconscious of a person; we consciously think and act only in accordance with our subconsciouns, our consciousness being a shadow of our subconscious.
- Yoshimichi Moriyama Dec 16, 2022
  
  What we should have learned is not simply ten lessons but why we could have made so many false, untenable expectations. Liberalism is a parochial political belief no matter how we love it; it has too narrow an applicability in the world unlike the dollar and the euro, because people living in many divergent parts of the world have had different experiences in their history.
  
  First, Kennan said when NATO begant to expand into Eastern Europe that it was the biggest mistake the West had made since the demise of the Soviet Union. The West should feel itself not a little responsible for the Ukranean war.
  Second, no magician could have had democracy and human rights pop up out of China. China has been playing the international games according to its own few-thousand-year old rules since its moden contact with the West for the past, close to two hundred years and it has tried to impose them on international society. "...our relation to the peoples of the Far East had been colored by a certain sentimentality toward China...Today we have fallen heir to the the problems and responsibilites the Japanese had faced and borne in the Korean-Manchurian area for nearly half a century, and there is a certain perverse justice in the pain we are suffeing from a burden which, when it was borne by others, we held in such low esteem (Kennan, American Diplomacy.)" "Since 1900, the United Stated stood in the van of China's protectors, striving by moral suasion to defend the open door and the territorial integrity of the helpless empire, American traders, missionaries and diplomats had created a tradition of friendship with China that bordered on the quixotic (A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States.)" U.S. gunboats went up and down Yangtze River to protect American interests from Chinese mobs and authorities. They did not sail in Japanese rivers or in the seas around Japan. Because Japanese rivers were to shallow to float them and both Japanese government and people kept their international treaty and agreement obligations. It tookd about half a century for Japan to turn inequal treaties with Westen countries into equal ones and Japan did it all by negotiantions.
  Third, an Egyptian said on Japanese TV, "We had food, jobs, shelters and clothes with Mubarak. He is gone but we do not have food, jobs and clothes." An Arabian citizen said, "Democracy is a system impossible in the Middle East." The West could not expect gratitude from Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Libyans, etc. and it is very hard to gain easy political support from them if we see what we have done.
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Luca Bandiera Dec 15, 2022

Finally someone who has the honesty to say things are they are. All COPs were, at best, declarations of good intentions, immediately killed by private interest.
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john boveri Dec 13, 2022

There is some mighty clear thinking by Mr. Haass in these ten lessons that provide a base for decision making in the new year.
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