Rethinking the Lessons of World War II

Submitted by John on Sun, 07/27/2008 - 2:44pm. Tags:

Foreign Affairs

I usually don't write about foreign affairs. It's not because of a lack of priorities or interest. Indeed, I find it to be vastly more important when discussing presidential politics than most other issues. The problem is that I find it so obvious in terms of proper courses of action that I really never have much to add. In general, hawkishly myopic and simplistic thinking on foreign policy seems a far easier romantic seduction to avoid than grand top-down socio-economic adventures on the domestic front. Sure, both, IMO, are grounded in the same exact flawed analysis and thinking but this error seems so much more overt and easy to spot when thinking up grand schemes that involve far away lands with many more obvious pitfalls.

One event, upon which much of our foreign policy logic is based, stands out above all others: World War II...."The Good War", the war whose lessons seem to trump and mock as silly all POV's that would dare balk at the "obviously accurate" lessons we learned from that war.

A recent Cato Daily Commentary by Ted Galen Carpenter examines those lessons.

Carpenter:

The World War II experience is so pervasive in American culture that it's nearly imprinted on the national DNA. People who know nothing about other periods of U.S. and world history know—or think they know—the lessons of World War II. The pop-culture version is roughly as follows: Weak and naïve Western leaders, especially British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, foolishly attempted to appease Adolf Hitler at Munich, but their supine behavior merely emboldened him, and Nazi aggression soon engulfed Europe. The heroic Franklin Roosevelt tried to rouse the American people to join the fight before it was too late, but he had to overcome the resistance of shortsighted isolationists. Ultimately, Japan—Germany's ally—forced the issue of American involvement by launching an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. then assumed its essential role as world leader, which apparently it must continue to play forever.

In short, those lessons are:

1. Aggression must be confronted immediately and without hesitation. Appeasement merely emboldens the aggressor and makes the inevitable conflict to defend ourselves harder to win.

2. Every event is directly or indirectly tied to America's security. Only naive, "isolationists" would question this truth.

And how have these ironclad lessons from the universal WW2 template served us?

(crickets)

The problem, as Carpenter says, is that WW2 is clearly the exception, not the norm. Sure, any arguments that would assert our entry into WW2 was unnecessary seem unconvincing and perhaps wishful thinking...especially in the European Theater. But should this then follow as the default stance to take when considering American policy in foreign affairs and matters of military action?

Whether or not America's entry into World War II was wise, the supposed lessons of the conflict have distorted U.S. foreign policy and suffocated prudent strategies for more than six decades. American officials and pundits have portrayed an array of tin-pot dictators as the reincarnation of Hitler: Kim Il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even tried to equate the clownish Hugo Chavez with Hitler. The notion that decrepit, third-rate powers such as North Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, and Venezuela could ever compare to Nazi Germany—which had the world's second-largest economy and a modern, extremely capable military—would be humorous if U.S. leaders did not base policy on that fallacy.

Since WW2 "clarified" our foreign policy, its misguided lessons have been overused...if not misused.

Conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and host of other regional conflicts (ten in all) have not left us clearly in better places. Never mind coups and covert operations like in Iran. One can argue that they have in fact left with more problems than before. Now threats are inflated, our military over-used and over-extended and it seems that the needs for its further use never seem to end.

To hawks, it is always 1938, and every adversary is the next Hitler.

Americans must get beyond such thinking, or our country risks an endless series of Vietnam and Iraq-style debacles—if not something even worse.

I say we give the WW2 mindset a well deserved and overdue rest. Serious threats and problems may indeed arise. But does it mean that we take every possible conflict or problem and apply the WW2 slippery slope logic? NO. The irony is that such thinking becomes the real slippery slope.
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Thought-provoking diary and (#105708)

by Brooks and B Ra... on Sun, 07/27/2008 - 9:42pm

Thought-provoking diary and interesting discussion so far.

First, I think the "lesson" of WWII is often terribly oversimplified to the point of nonsense. All too often bozos insist that we must go to war (or at least credibly threaten to do so) simply because anything else would be "appeasement" and "if we've learned one thing from history, it's that ya' can't appease an aggressor!" How dumb is that?? First, the definition of "aggressor" for those purposes has become quite flexible and arbitrary. But beyond that, if we never "appeased" any country that could arguably be taking actions that threaten our security, we would have been (and would still be, if humans were still alive) constantly at war with much of the world.

Having said that, I think it would also be wrong to adopt the mentality of the pre-WWII isolationists, who themselves were probably largely exaggerating the supposed lesson of WWI: that war is awful so we shouldn't fight half way around the world in other people's squabbles (and that we shouldn't even bother maintaining a strong military capable of projecting power abroad). First, doing so can indeed lead to a more costly war later (or to conditions that would have made war preferable at the earlier, lower cost), and second, because the lives of non-Americans DO matter. Preventing genocide or conquest leading to tyrannical subjugation can indeed be worthy causes for war.

And leaving aside whether or not we think a particular outcome would be worth going to war, of course we also have to factor in practical considerations: What is the likelihood we could actually achieve that outcome? How confident can we reasonably be in the probabilities we assign to possible outcomes? What indirect/secondary/long-term consequences could there be even if we are successful in the war. Sometimes going to war even for a worthy cause backfires. And sometimes NOT going to war backfires.

To state the obvious, to the question of whether or not we should go to war in a given situation in which our homeland hasn't been attacked, the answer is: It depends. As stated previously on this thread, it's a matter of calculation of costs and benefits (as well as related probabilities/risks). No easy, universally applicable, bumper sticker size rules. And by the way, I saw a bumper sticker today that said "I'm already against the next war", which I thought was witty and perhaps not meant quite so absolutely, but which, if meant absolutely, would be irrational, irresponsible, and immoral.

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By the way, while I give (#105709)

by Brooks and B Ra... on Sun, 07/27/2008 - 9:45pm

By the way, while I give Matthews a mixed review in general, he was on fire here. Just GOLD!

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Rethinking the Lessons of World War II

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