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Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

— Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

So, over the years I’ve trodden the well-worn path from radical to reactionary. I blame University and my enquiring mind. Also life experience. And hindsight.

I took a paper on American foreign policy since World War 2, and all things considered thought I did quite well on the objectivity front for an anti-war conscientious objector who could sing Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier word perfect.

He’s the one who gives his body as the weapon of the war
And without him all this killing can’t go on.

What seems to have interested me most was how and why the United States had moved from its traditional isolationism — and reluctance to enter both the world wars — to establishing, post-war, an “accidental empire” over most of the “non-communist” world.

How did that happen? How did she get into the mire of Vietnam?

Had she been doing what great powers have always done? Consciously built an empire, like the European powers? Ensured her own military and economic security? Or had she been defending those same interests on behalf of the other, exhausted nations of the free world?

Regarding the United States’ isolationist stance, I had an 1821 quote from John Quincy Adams before he became President:

[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

What that meant in practice is made clearer by the Monroe Doctrine, of which Adams was one of the architects — again before he became President. This expressed, in a nutshell, that America had no wish to interfere in European affairs, and that the Europeans should, likewise, not interfere in the Americas.

The fact that in the 1820s the Europeans controlled more of the Americas than the US did, and that the US had no ability to interfere in Europe whether it wanted to or not, had changed dramatically by the mid 20th Century. Nevertheless, I suggested that isolationism was still strong and her initial impulse after both World Wars had been an attempt to resolve conflicts through international organisations rather than force of arms — in other words through the League of Nations after World War I (strongly supported by President Wilson, but left unratified by the US Senate in 1919) and the United Nations after World War II.

But the initial US desire to demobilise and withdraw into isolation after the second World War was squelched in the late 1940s by the perceived Soviet threat to the security of Western Europe. Europe was more or less prostrate after the war, whereas the US was wealthy, militarily untouchable, and (to express it in the language of the time) the Free World’s last defence against Communism. There followed the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Arms Race, Communist victory in China, and the Domino Theory — that is, the idea that Communism must be resisted everywhere, but especially in Asia, because if one country in a region fell to it, its neighbours would come under threat.

According to my essays — but don’t take my word for this, as I only got Bs for them — there were two other significant concepts underlying both American policy and American public opinion. The first was the assumption of American invincibility — that she might no longer be impregnable, thanks to nuclear weapons, but she could still win against any adversary. The second was how consistently American policy was couched in moral terms, and the difficulties and confusion that caused — from Truman’s original speech in 1947 through to President Johnson’s Johns Hopkins speech 18 years later in the midst of an escalating war, and just five years before I sat this paper. Johnson had said that America was in Vietnam because

…we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Viet-Nam defend its independence.

And I intend to keep that promise.

To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies, and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong.

We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Viet-Nam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s word.

Vietnam brought the first cracks in Americans’ belief in both their invincibility (since they could only manage stalemate in Vietnam) and their righteousness (since so many Americans opposed the war).

But to me the key word in what I’ve said above is “perceived” —the perceived Soviet threat. We can debate, now, whether that threat was real or not — whether the dominoes would have fallen if the Americans had done nothing — but we have the benefit of hindsight. The policy makers of the 1940s had to decide there and then whether or not those threats were real, and how to respond to them.

How could they be sure whether or not the dominoes would fall? How could they know that the Soviet Union would be gone in 1989? It’s all very well for us to have an opinion, but mine then was 25 years too late — and by the way, it would be another 18 years until the Wall fell. Your opinion, now, is 70 years too late.

So, would you like to have been a policy wonk in the State Department with George Kennan and the others? Steered Truman, Eisenhower and JFK down a better path? Without your time machine, mind you, just with better insights and decision-making protocols?

Aged seventeen “public service” had sounded like a good career to me. I remember as a boy thinking I’d like to be the eminence grise, the mandarin behind the politician. Never the front man, mind you. I’d be Chief of Staff Leo McGarry or more likely Speech Writer Sam Seaborn to West Wing’s President Bartlett. I knew my limitations.

All I needed to get started was a conjoint BA-LLB.

§

In the aftermath of 50 more years of more-or-less catastrophic wars, of crises averted, well managed or enflamed, our current leaders can look back at what their forbears did, and the consequences intended and unintended, and hopefully learn a few lessons — if only, like us, how best to fight the last war.

But — but! They must approach the next war, the next crisis, without the benefit of hindsight. How can they be sure what Putin will do next? What deal would he accept — and would that be the end of it?

Will China try to do to Taiwan what it did to Hong Kong?

How best to address all the Middle Eastern issues? There are a few safe centuries between us and their Christian equivalents, but what’s to be done about fundamentalist Islam today? What about the Muslims in our own communities? About migration?

And they won’t be starting with a blank slate. What’s to be done about what’s been done already? By Nixon in Vietnam, Obama in Iraq, Netanyahu in Israel, Trump and Biden in Afghanistan?

What about the crises we aren’t even aware of yet?

We can cut our leaders some slack for not having a crystal ball — for not having hindsight about the future.

We can expect them not to be right all the time — although it would be good if they were quick on their feet and corrected for their mistakes.

We can hope for some wisdom, even to the extent of thinking longer term than the next election.

But what we should also expect is statesmanship — policies, not crusades. N. Graebner quotes Walter Lippmann as saying:

A policy, as distinguished from a crusade, may be said to have definite aims, which can be stated concretely, and achieved if the estimate of the situation is correct. A crusade, in the other hand, is an adventure which even if its intentions are good, has no limits because there is no concrete programme. To substitute specific aims for vague hostilities is the statesman’s business in a time of trouble and danger.

§

I’ve never had the slightest ambition, post-school, to be a politician, or to pretend to be a statesman. Not really. I’ve never wanted responsibility for making those decisions.

Still, someone needs to make them. We can hope to be left alone, but that’s a false hope. It falls over with the townsfolk and farmers of Belgium and Holland in the middle of two world wars. Or — depending on which war you have in mind — with the French, the Germans, the Russians and the rest, bulldozing and pillaging their way back and forth across Eastern Europe, taking everything from everyone in their way — forage for their horses, their livestock for food, their houses for shelter, their men for conscripts and their women for entertainment.

It fails whenever European or Chinese or Arabian or Viking sails show up in your bay at any time in history. Or when the French raise their flag again in Hanoi.

Somebody has to decide what to do when geopolitics happen, and better still, how to forestall the worst consequences, because they may not all be bad.