Maybe I just can’t help myself, but I’m afraid Mr. Douthat offers up a target too good to pass by.  Unfortunately, I don’t subscribe to the WSJ, so I have not read the editorial itself, but I did look over the synopsis at NYT.  The basic question is the year being invoked as the foreign policy comparison with the present moment.  Readers will already be familiar with my thoughts about the 1938 option.  Other contenders are 1942, 1948, 1972 and 1919.  Now I appreciate the 1919 comparison, which is described as the paleo view, but as tempting as it is to see the fires of self-determination/democratisation creating all sorts of disastrous consequences that will consume entire regions as a result of Mr. Bush’s policies I don’t think that’s really the most apt comparison in any case.   

If I believed in these sorts of comparisons, which I think are misleading and tend to produce the conclusions that you bring to the inquiry in the first place, I would put on my history cap and, in true reactionary fashion, say that our predicament resembles that of the Habsburgs c. 1630.  No measly 20th century examples for me, thank you. 

Pushing beyond the settlement in the Treaty of Luebeck (1629), Ferdinand II overreached and believed that he was on the verge of re-Catholicising the entire Empire and started abusing the Lutherans of the Empire accordingly.  This heavy-handed triumphalist measure succeeded in nothing so much as pulling Sweden (and France–on the side of Sweden) into the conflict and fundamentally altering the balance of power in the war for the next almost twenty years.  In the end the Empire lost ground and lost any chance of recovering the Protestant lands of the Empire for Rome, and even then only after decades more of conflict.  Thus, as Geoffrey Parker might say, success is never final. 

Lebanon might have been our 1629 moment of overreaching, when we thought we could show the Iranians who was boss by having our proxy smash their proxy.  The comparison is hardly exact, because these comparisons are always hodgepodges that never really work, but I think unfortunately that the arrogance and presumption behind the U.S.’s full support for the Lebanon war may mark the high-water mark of U.S. power in the region. 

But as this example shows, these comparisons are not very helpful.  Because this is what I think the current predicament is, I found a comparative example that suited what I already thought.  The neocons always think it’s 1938, because they have no way of thinking in any other terms: take away talk of appeasement and dictators, and they have no foreign policy expertise to offer.  Beinart is bound to think it’s 1948, because otherwise no one would pay any attention to all of his Truman-babble.  The stay-the-course geniuses have to say that it’s 1942 (presumably we’re looking at this from the American, and not the Axis, perspective) because it means that there can only be progress from here on out.  Paleoconservatives may see a replay of 1919, though probably the more pessimistic among us may think that this refers to the Russian Civil War and Wilson’s other stupid interventions in the Old World, but more likely other paleos would be skeptical of making these comparisons because of the unrepeatable contingencies of every period that make these sorts of arguments less than illuminating. 

So I would have to conclude that we are, in fact, in 2006 and we are in a situation that is basically new and unprecedented.  There has never been quite this confluence of forces in the region, and there has rarely been a moment before now where conventional military power has been of such limited value in deciding international disputes.  There are things we can glean from previous historical examples, but every difference in detail makes the present moment unique and almost guarantees that if we approach the current situation as if it were very similar to another situation we will make the wrong calculations and get ourselves into a bigger mess than we might have otherwise if we attended to what is actually happening now rather than riding our respective hobbyhorses and issuing dire warnings.  

Many of the miscalculations in the July crisis of 1914 were made because everyone relied on the experiences of the immediate past: Austria concluded that it could get away with punishing Serbia just as it had gotten away with formally annexing Bosnia; Germany concluded that it would not back down as it had in 1905; Russia decided that it must come to the aid of Serbia to check Austrian ambitions, unlike its inaction in 1908 after the annexation (of course, for some reason, the government did not ponder the consequences of their last ill-fated military adventure, which provoked widespread revolution).  All of them were in some sense foolish to think in this way.  (These three were the major Powers that contributed to the general war more than any other, except perhaps Britain with her dithering and indecision, so I focus on them.)  Instead of making decisions centered in the crisis of the moment, each Power assumed that the other would back down or act in precisely the same way as each one had done in the past; if everyone had done what he was “suposed” to do, if everyone had acted in just the same way as in 1908, there would have been no general war and the world would be much better off today.  Except that 1908 was unique and did not repeat, and because the July crisis was entirely different in nature–and this should have been clear to everyone at the time.  But the actors did not want, or were unable, to acknowledge many of the differences and plunged ahead. 

If it is a truism that every army fights the last war–and this is taken as an indictment of the military’s slowness to adapt to new circumstances–what can be said for foreign policy thinkers and public “intellectuals” (if we must call them that) who routinely embrace the idea of reliving the diplomacy and refighting the war of three or four wars ago?  If militaries are slow to adapt, these people show signs of being genuinely maladaptive in their inability to see things except through the lens of their preferred paradigmatic examples of international crisis.  Indeed, these paradigms are likely to distort and confuse us more than help our analysis of the situation, not least because certain examples–particularly the 1938 one–impose a moral and emotional weight on the debate that is dangerous and irresponsible.  If you treat this as 1938 and you really think Hitler is on the rise and about to launch his war, nothing is going to deter you from taking action against him, knowing what you know about Hitler.  This makes people get very excited and muddles their thinking.  There is also the problem that Hitler is dead and we are not actually facing Hitler redivivus.  Indeed, it may be that if we act now as some believe the West should have done in 1938 we will precipitate precisely the kind of disaster that we believe we are going to prevent.  Comparisons of this kind are fun, and they give us historians work to do, but they cannot be the basis for analysing international tensions with any effectiveness.  Besides, any ten year old can come up with these comparisons after watching enough History Channel propaganda.  Historians more than anyone know that it is our attention to historical differences that can tell us the most about any given period relative to others.