Silly Boy

Of all the commentaries I have read in the past six months, this [Luttwak’s] stands out as the silliest. Its tone reminds me of the ill-judged contempt with which the English used to regard eastern Europe. Poland, John Maynard Keynes remarked in 1919, was “an economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting”. Czechoslovakia was nothing more than a fancy name for “the mountains of Bohemia”.

The reality in Keynes’s eyes was that people in eastern Europe would always stew in their mutual hatreds and shared incompetence. The sooner the Germans took over the whole lousy region, the better. After all, it was economically next to worthless as far as Britain was concerned.

Such notions underpinned what would become the policy of appeasement in the Thirties. Later, the same prejudices could be heard to justify inaction when it was Stalin who was conquering Eastern Europe. Indeed, you could still hear the old talk about “quarrels in a far-away land between peoples of whom we know nothing” during the break-up of Yugoslavia 10 years ago. ~Niall Ferguson

It’s not surprising that Ferguson didn’t like Luttwak’s argument–I thought Luttwak was making a good deal of sense, and certainly more than Ferguson has managed in six years of commentary writing.  What is Ferguson’s counterargument?  The 1930s!  Yugoslavia!  He forgot to mention Chamberlain.  Even for many Europeans, Yugoslavia was a “far-away land” or at the very least one about which most Europeans knew little and all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia would have been better off had the West kept out of the entire fight.  Indeed, there might not have had to be quite so much fighting had the West not bolstered and backed the separatist states.  James Baker was later ridiculed for saying “we don’t have a dog in this fight,” but here we are seventeen years later and still haven’t learned the basic truth that Baker was right about that. 

What Ferguson fails to address is the question of whether eastern Europe was actually worth going to war over as far as Britain was concerned.  If eastern Europe was so worthless to Britain, why would any British Government make security guarantees to Poland (which it had no means to defend or resupply)?  In the end, Britain did go to war over eastern Europe, which proved to be a mighty foolish thing to have done, so there is some disconnect here.  The power vacuum created by Versailles and Trianon, the treaties that ripped the guts out of the German Reich and obliterated the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, was going to be filled by one great power or another.  Ferguson takes it as a given that Britain should have been deeply concerned about this, when it was Britain’s concern with eastern Europe that dragged it and France into the war before  their rearmament was anywhere near sufficient and helped bring on Dunkirk and the disaster of France in 1940.   

Anglophone peoples seem to love to get into fights over parts of the world they know nothing about.  Saying disdainful things about foreign lands about which people in your country genuinely did and do know nothing is a reasonable thing to do, provided that you do not then presume to think that these lands are absolutely vital to your national security.  Of course, those preaching intervention don’t know any more about these countries than their opponents and usually know less (this is why they think intervention is a good idea and that it will work).

Ferguson never once addresses the claims of the Near and Middle East’s geopolitical insignificance, its miniscule industrial capacity, its economic retardation and its political sclerosis.  On every matter of substance, Luttwak’s article has not even been touched, much less refuted.  What has Ferguson managed to say?  Ferguson doesn’t like the man’s tone!  Luttwak says outrageous things!  Luttwak is heartless!  Ferguson waves his arms around, moralises and hectors, but does not actually offer a real response.  My conclusion is that a rational argument for the great geopolitical significance of the Middle East is not to be found, or else Ferguson would have at least gestured in its direction.  Instead of that, we get vague and dire warnings about Armageddon, and we’re supposed to come away with the view that Luttwak is the silliest of them all?