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There Is No Returning to a “Pre-American” World

It must be hard to rework the same tedious comparisons to 1930s international politics so that they seem different or interesting, but even by these low standards Hanson’s latest effort isn’t very good: A newly confident, united, and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances […]

It must be hard to rework the same tedious comparisons to 1930s international politics so that they seem different or interesting, but even by these low standards Hanson’s latest effort isn’t very good:

A newly confident, united, and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over feeling used and abused. Sound familiar? A weak Britain and France had almost no confidence in their own declining militaries — sort of like the sad spectacle of their impotence in Libya that we have witnessed over the last two months.

Where to begin? Britain and France have too much confidence in their shrinking militaries. By one count, France is currently engaged in six significant foreign military operations overseas. The sad spectacle in Libya is the product of two governments that don’t have the means to wage major wars on their own but want to do it anyway. This would be almost the exact opposite of the British and French unwillingness to use force to settle political disputes. Instead of the “spirit of Locarno,” we have the hyper-active bellicosity of Sarkozy. What Hanson seems to be trying to say is that Victor Davis Hanson has no confidence in the British and French militaries.

As everyone will have noticed right away, the Germany comparison is painfully wrong. It makes all the difference in the world that Germans currently feel put upon because they are being called on to bail out weaker European economies. This is a problem that comes from having the wealthiest, most productive European economy. It is a radically different sort of resentment from the one that Germans felt toward the former Allies for war reparations, demilitarization, disarmament, and being forced to accept responsibility for WWI. Today Germans are being berated by their neighbors for being too peaceful. Suffice it to say, this was not the main concern with Germany in the 1930s.

These are just some of the bad comparisons that Hanson makes to advance the tired argument that a “post-American” world order could be similar to the world order between WWI and WWII. Hanson writes:

In other words, the post-American world could look a lot like the rather terrifying pre-American version of seven decades past. Why in the world would we wish to return to it?

Why indeed? Of course, no one wishes this, and it isn’t at all likely to happen. Hanson’s argument seems to be based on the lazy conceit that if American hegemony ends or diminishes the world will revert to the world as it was before that hegemony existed. I understand that this is a useful scare tactic to justify continuing hegemonic policies, but why does he think it’s true? Because of a handful of poorly-drawn, inaccurate comparisons between the 1930s and today?

The reality is that the largest economic powers of Asia and Europe have strong interests in preventing and avoiding large-scale war in their regions, and the territorial disputes and expansionism that fueled the destructive wars of the 20th century are not the main threats to international peace today. The major international wars of the last decade are largely those that have been launched or escalated by Western powers, which ought to be acting as status quo powers, and there are no revisionist powers of the kind that existed in the period between the world wars. To believe that the world is going to revert to a “pre-American” order simply because the U.S. does not engage in hyper-active intervention around the globe is to believe that all of the other nations of the world have learned nothing from the experience of the last century.

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