Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
According to reports, the hedge fund Elliott Management defended the Iran war in a note to investors last month. In particular, it argued against the liberal cliché that “force alone” cannot defeat an idea. Weren’t Nazism and Japanese imperialism both bombed out of existence in 1945? Did democratic constitutions not take their place? Might the same therefore not happen in theocratic Iran? On that basis, who but a churl or a pacifist would refuse to give war a chance?
It is hard to know where to begin with this, but here are two important differences between the second world war and the current crisis.
First, the German and Japanese regimes were aggressors. What tainted their ideologies forever was not just the defeat but the moral stigma of having started the war in the first place. Defeat on its own isn’t enough to discredit an idea. Otherwise, democracy would never have recovered in the Netherlands or France after the military capitulations of 1940. As it turned out, both countries were democratic again within the decade. It is guilt that tarnishes an idea, not the fact of losing. The Iranian regime, for all its direct and proxy aggression, did not start the specific war of 2026. There was no equivalent of Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Poland as original sin. (We will come back to matters biblical later.)
Second, Germany and Japan democratised because the Americans stuck around for years to insist on it. The US and other occupying powers helped to design the West German federal constitution. It removed the divine status of the Japanese emperor. It micromanaged reforms as wide-ranging as female suffrage and the disestablishment of state Shinto. None of this is going to happen in Iran. No conceivable US president is going to garrison and administer a nation of 90 million Muslims in the same region that saw the botched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, the plan for the rehabilitation of Iran is — what? To send one’s best wishes from a trading desk in West Palm Beach? We can console ourselves that a hedge fund has responsibilities only to its investors. The real problem is that politicians, including the mightiest ones, are also in thrall to the second world war as the historical template for everything.
When Sir Keir Starmer did not support the Iran mission, Donald Trump likened him to Neville Chamberlain. From the Vietnam war in the 1960s to the Iraq war this side of the millennium, the slur of “appeaser” has been used to hush dissenters against foreign interventions. This would be easier to take if the hawks occasionally emulated the Allies by winning. Instead, the post-1945 record is so often one of outright military defeat or unintended consequences. Obsession with the second world war keeps getting the west — especially the Anglo-American world — into trouble.
In a recent book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, the historian Alec Ryrie makes an intriguing argument. The second world war has replaced the Gospel as the story that anchors western civilisation. “Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good,” he writes, “but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.” I’d call this progress. The war was the more recent event, after all, and does not involve metaphysical speculation. But the result — intellectual rigidity, a black and white world view — is the same. The left can stigmatise almost any act of cultural conservatism as the thin end of a wedge whose fat end is Hitlerism. The right can frame almost any autocratic regime as a threat that demands a heroic military response.
This would not be so bad if the second world war were typical of conflicts. In fact, it is a captivating event precisely because of its strangeness. The war was existential in its stakes, clear-cut in its morality, unambiguous in its outcome. Most wars since 1945 have been local (Ukraine), morally complex (Vietnam) or ultimately inconclusive (Korea). As a binding myth for the west — what the Greek defeat of Persia once was — the second world war is useful. As a tactical guide in the 21st century, it is not.
Conservatives often accuse the left of controlling language and therefore the terms of debate. But the single most successful example of this cynical art in all of politics is the conservative hegemony over the term “appeasement”. It is so potent a slur that even those who support specific instances of appeasement — if that means granting concessions to an enemy to end or postpone hostilities — don’t think of themselves as doing so. To cut short the Cuban missile crisis, the US agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey. The following decade, it recognised Red China. The UK freed domestic paramilitaries from jail and let their political associates hold governmental office in Northern Ireland. Which of these appeasements were wrong?
This week, Marco Rubio described the offensive phase of the Iran war as “over”. Trump has announced that he will pause the US operation to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, despite announcing it just days earlier. The administration wants out of a misconceived conflict without losing face. This has happened so often since 1945 that it should bring about a questioning of the mental habits, the historical reference points, that have guided US statecraft since then. It won’t.
The fixation with the second world war will hold until it is superseded by a larger event, which rather implies a third. The dread is that eventually the one leads to the other.
[email protected]
Source:
www.ft.com