Tragedy & Hope 101
Bonus Material
Here are many of my highlighted references from Henry Kissinger's
Diplomacy
.
Some of my notes and comments are also included.
- Text from Kissinger's book will be presented in quotes: "like this."
- My comments will be presented in parentheses: (like this).
- All of the material below was typed out manually, so there may be some typos.
- This document is approximately 18,000 words long.
For a list of all additional bonus material,
click here
.
18
: Regarding the United States:
“No country has been more reluctant to engage itself abroad” + the US has
“reverence for international law and democracy.” (The
electorate is generally reluctant to engage itself abroad and has
“reverence” for international law and democracy; but certainly not the policy
makers.)
“This century’s major international agreements have been
embodiments of American values – from the League of Nations…to the United
Nations.”
20
: The Balance-of-power system:
“Europe was thrown into balance-of-power politics when its first choice, the
medieval dream of universal empire, collapsed…When a group of states (are)
obligated to deal with one another, there are only two possible outcomes: either
one state becomes so strong that it dominates all the others and creates an
empire, or no state is ever quite powerful enough to achieve that goal. In the
latter case, the pretensions of the most aggressive member…are kept in check by
a combination of the others; in other words, by the operation of a balance of
power.”
26-27: Problems
constructing the necessary new world
order:
“In effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new world
order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging.”
+ “Whether an international order
is relatively stable…depends on the degree to which…the constituent societies
feel secure with what they consider just.”
27
: The analyst
enjoys luxuries that the statesman does not:
“Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build
them.”
30-31:
Praise for Woodrow Wilson + James Madison’s quote that taxes and armies are
“instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
“Woodrow Wilson was the originator of the vision of a universal world
organization, the League of Nations, which would keep the peace through
collective security rather than alliances.”
“Though Wilson
could not convince his own country of its merit, the idea lived on. It is above
all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has
marched since his watershed presidency, and continues to march to this day.”
32
: Thomas Pain
quote: “Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of
government.”
34
: and
58: Raison d’état “A States actions
can only be judged by their success” + The dilemma of Jefferson’s statecraft:
“Professors Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson brilliantly
analyzed this ambivalence in American thought: ‘He [Jefferson] wished…that
America could have it both ways – that it could enjoy the fruits of power
without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise.’”
35
: The Monroe
Doctrine:
“The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1832, made a moat of the ocean which
separated the United States from Europe. Up to that time, the cardinal rule of
American foreign policy had been that the United States would not become
entangled in European struggles for power. The Monroe Doctrine went the next
step by declaring that Europe must not become entangled in American affairs. And
Monroe’s idea of what constituted American affairs – the whole Western
Hemisphere – was expansive indeed…It declared that the United States would
regard any extension of European power ‘to any portion of this hemisphere as
dangerous to our peace and safety.’”
36: Evolution of
the Monroe Doctrine:
“In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine had warned the European powers to keep out of the
Western Hemisphere. By the time of the Monroe Doctrine’s centennial, its meaning
had been gradually expanded to justify American hegemony in the Western
Hemisphere. In 1845, President Polk explained the incorporation of Texas into
the United States as necessary to prevent an independent state from becoming ‘an
ally or dependency of some foreign nation more powerful than herself’ and hence
a threat to American security. In other words, the Monroe Doctrine justified
American intervention not only against an existing threat but against any
possibility of an overt challenge – much as the European balance of power did.”
37: Congress
thwarted calls for expansion / conquest – kept the military small through the 19th
century:
“By 1885, the United States had surpassed Great Britain
[in] manufacturing output. By the turn of the century, it was consuming more
energy than Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan, and Italy
combined…No nation has ever experienced such an increase in its power without
seeking to translate it into global influence. America’s leaders were
tempted…But the American Senate remained focused on domestic priorities and
thwarted all expansionist projects. It kept the army small
and the
navy weak.”
39: In 1902,
Teddy Roosevelt explains the need to police the world:
“For Roosevelt, muscular diplomacy in the Western
Hemisphere was part of America’s new global role. The two oceans were no longer
wide enough to insulate America from the rest of the world. The United States
had to become an actor on the international stage. Roosevelt said as much in a
1902 message to the Congress: ‘More and more, the increasing interdependence and
complexity of international political and economic relations render it incumbent
on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the
world.’”
42: Teddy
Roosevelt claims Russian / Japanese conflict is good for “our game”
“He wanted Russia to be weakened rather than altogether
eliminated from the balance of power – for, according to the maxims of
balance-of-power diplomacy, an excessive weakening of Russia would have merely
substituted a Japanese for the Russian threat…On the basis of geopolitical
realism rather than high-minded altruism, Roosevelt invited the two belligerents
to send representatives…to work out a peace treaty…that limited the Japanese
victory and preserved equilibrium in the far East.”
43: Teddy
Roosevelt calls the American people “short-sighted” for not wanting to enter
World War 1:
“In a letter to Rudyard Kipling…Roosevelt admitted to the difficulty of bringing
American power to bear on the European War: ‘Our people are short-sighted, and
they do not understand international matters…Thanks to the width of the ocean,
our people believe that they have nothing to fear from the present contest, and
that they have no responsibility concerning it.’”
46
: 47: Wilson and being the world
policemen:
“Even at his most exuberant, Roosevelt would never have dreamt of so sweeping a
sentiment portending global interventionism. But, then, he was the
warrior-statesman; Wilson was the prophet-priest. Statesmen, even warriors,
focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the ‘real’ world is the one
they want to bring into being….In Wilson’s view, there was no essential
difference between freedom for America and freedom for the world…he developed an
extraordinary interpretation of what George Washington had
really meant when he warned against
foreign entanglements.”
48
: Lusitania + Wilson enters ww1 to
make men free:
“Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania and above all its renewal of unrestricted
submarine warfare became the proximate cause of America’s declaration of war.
But Wilson did not justify America’s entry into the war on the grounds of
specific grievances…Rather, the war had a moral foundation, whose primary
objective was a new and more just international order.”
52
: Wilson wants
the power to destroy any nation threatening peace, seeks it through League of
Nations:
“In 1918, Wilson stated as a requirement of peace the hitherto unheard of and
breathtakingly ambitious goal of ‘the destruction of every arbitrary power
anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the
peace of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its
reduction to virtual impotence…throughout this instrument [the League Covenant]
we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the
moral force of the public opinion of the world.’…For three generations, critics
have savaged Wilson’s analysis and conclusions; and yet, in all this time,
Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy
thinking.” (Wilson’s “principles” or the rhetoric used to sell the
interventionist policy? There is certainly a huge difference. …supporting brutal
dictatorships, overthrowing democratically elected governments; I don’t think
these actions are seen as representing the “moral force” or “public opinion of
the world.”)
56-58: The
origins of balance of power:
“What historians describe today as the European balance-of-power system emerged
in the seventeenth century from the final collapse of the medieval aspiration to
universality – a concept of world order that represented a blending of the
traditions of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The world was conceived
as mirroring the Heavens. Just as one God ruled in Heaven, so one emperor would
rule over the secular world, and one pope over the Universal Church…With the
concept of unity collapsing, the emerging states of Europe needed some principle
to justify their heresy and to regulate their relations. They found it in the
concepts of raison d’état and the
balance of power. Each depended on the other.
Raison d’état asserted that the wellbeing of the state justified
whatever means were employed to further it; the national interest supplanted the
medieval notion of a universal morality. The balance of power replaced the
nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in
pursuing its own selfish interests, would somehow contribute to the safety and
progress of all the others…The earliest and most comprehensive formulation of
this new approach came from France, which was also one of the first
nation-states in Europe…the principal agent for this French policy was an
improbable figure, a prince of the Church…Cardinal de Richelieu, First Minister
of France from 1624 to 1642. Upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu’s death, Pope
Urban VIII is alleged to have said, ‘If there is a God, the Cardinal de
Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not…well, he had a successful live.’
This ambivalent epitaph would no doubt have pleased the statesman, who achieved
vast successes by ignoring, and indeed transcending, the essential pieties of
his age….Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history. Richelieu was the
father of the modern state system. He promulgated the concept of
raison d’état and practiced it
relentlessly for the benefit of his own country.”
59-60: The 30
Years’ War:
“Richelieu came into office in 1624, when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor
Ferdinand II was attempting to revive Catholic universality, stamp out
Protestantism, and establish imperial control over the princes of Central
Europe. This process, the Counter-Reformation, led to what was later called the
Thirty Years’ War, which erupted in Central Europe in 1618 and turned into one
of the most brutal and destructive wars in the history of mankind…As a prince of
the Church, Richelieu ought to have welcomed Ferdinand’s drive to restore
Catholic orthodoxy. But Richelieu put the French national interest above any
religious goals. His vocation as cardinal did not keep Richelieu from seeing the
Habsburg attempt to re-establish the Catholic religion as a geopolitical threat
to France’s security. To him, it was not a religious act but a political
maneuver by Austria to achieve dominance in Central Europe and thereby to reduce
France to second-class status…a victory for the Counter-Reformation was exactly
what Richelieu was determined to prevent. In pursuit of what would today be
called a national security interest and was then labeled – for the first time –
raison d’état, Richelieu was prepared
to side with the Protestant princes and exploit the schism within the Universal
Church.”
60-65: The strategic advantages of deception
:
“The Habsburg rulers were men of principle. They never
compromised their convictions except in defeat…therefore, they were quite
defenseless against the ruthless Cardinal’s machinations…Emperor Ferdinand II
[had) almost certainly never heard of
raison d’état. Even if he had, he would have rejected it as blasphemy, for
he saw his secular mission as carrying out the will of God…Never would he have
conceded that divine ends could be achieved by less than moral means…A ruler
committed to such absolute values found it impossible to compromise, let alone
to manipulate, his bargaining position...
Richelieu treated Ferdinand’s faith as a strategic
challenge. Though privately religious, he viewed his duties as minister in
entirely secular terms. Salvation might be his personal objective, but to
Richelieu, the statesman, it was irrelevant…Richelieu was determined to prolong
the war until Central Europe had been bled white…That a prince of the Church was
subsidizing the Protestant King of Sweden [to] make war against the Holy Roman
Emperor had revolutionary implications as profound as the upheavals of the
French Revolution 150 years later…In order to exhaust the belligerents and to
prolong the war, Richelieu subsidized the enemies of his enemies, bribed,
fomented insurrections, and mobilized an extraordinary array of dynastic and
legal arguments…
So novel and so cold-blooded a doctrine could not possibly
pass without challenge…it was deeply offensive to the universalist tradition
founded on the primacy of moral law…One of the most telling critiques came from
the renowned scholar Jansenius, who attacked a policy cut loose from all moral
moorings: ‘Would he dare say to God: Let your power and glory and the religion
which teaches men to adore You be lost and destroyed, provided my state is
protected and free of risks?’ That, of course, was precisely what Richelieu was
saying to his contemporaries and, for all we know, to his God. It was the
measure of the revolution he had brought about that what his critics thought was
a reductio ad absurdum
was, in fact, a highly accurate
summary of Richelieu’s thought. As the King’s First Minister, he subsumed both
religion and morality to raison d’état,
his guiding light…
Demonstrating how well they had absorbed the cynical
methods of the master himself, Richelieu’s defenders turned the argument of
their critics against them. A policy of national self-interest, they argued,
represented the highest moral law; it was Richelieu’s critics who were in
violation of ethical principle, not he…it was Richelieu’s critics whose souls
were at risk. Since France was the most pure and devoted of the European
Catholic powers, Richelieu, in serving the interests of France, was serving as
well the interests of the Catholic religion…If, in evaluating a statesman,
reaching the goals he sets for himself is a test, Richelieu must be remembered
as one of the seminal figures of modern history. For he left behind him a world
radically different from the one he had found…following the Peace of Westphalia
of 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, the doctrine of
raison d’état grew into the guiding principle of European
diplomacy.”
69: Frederick
the Great:
“The nature of raison d’état as an
essentially risk-benefit calculation was shown by the way Frederick the Great
justified his seizure of Silesia from Austria, despite Prussia’s heretofore
amicable relations with that state and despite its being bound by treaty to
respect Austria’s territorial integrity…Frederick the Great treated
international affairs as if it were a game of chess. He wanted to seize Silesia
in order to expand the power of Prussia. The only obstacle he would recognize to
his designs was resistance from superior powers, not moral scruples. His was a
risk/reward analysis: if he conquered Silesia, would other states retaliate or
seek compensation? Frederick resolved the calculation in his favor. His conquest
of Silesia made Prussia a bona fide
Great Power…”
71
: William of
Orange:
“England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced it into an
immediate confrontation with Louis XIV of France. The Glorious Revolution had
deposed the Catholic King, James II. Searching for a Protestant replacement on
the Continent, England chose William of Orange, ruler of the
Netherlands…Henceforth, William would spearhead the fight against Louis XIV.
Short, hunchbacked, and asthmatic, William did not at first glance appear to be
the man destined to humble the Sun King. But the Prince of Orange possessed an
iron will combined with extraordinary mental agility. He convinced himself –
almost certainly correctly – that if Louis XIV, already the most powerful
monarch in Europe, were permitted to conquer the Spanish Netherlands
, England would be at risk...[William] sought out partners
and soon found them.. Sweden, Spain, Savoy, the Austrian Emperor, Saxony, the
Dutch Republic, and England formed the Grand Alliance – the greatest coalition
of forces aligned against a single power that modern Europe had ever
seen…France’s pursuit of raison d’état
was reined in by the self-interest of Europe’s other states. France would remain
the strongest state in Europe, but it would not become dominant. It was a
textbook case of the functioning of the balance of power.”
72-73: Balance
of Power + “Fighting them there so we don’t fight them here”:
“The Whigs argued that Great Britain should engage itself
only when the [balance of power] was actually threatened, and then only long
enough to remove the threat. By contrast, the Tories believed that Great
Britain’s main duty was to shape and
not simply to protect the balance of power. The Whigs were of the view that
there would be plenty of time to resist an assault on the Low Countries after it
had actually occurred; the Tories reasoned that a policy of wait-and-see might
allow an aggressor to weaken the balance irreparably. Therefore, if Great
Britain wished to avoid fighting in Dover, it had to resist aggression along the
Rhine or wherever else in Europe the balance of power seemed to be threatened.
The Whigs considered alliances as temporary expedients, to be terminated once
victory had rendered the common purpose moot, whereas the Tories urged British
participation in permanent cooperative arrangements to enable Great Britain to
help shape events and to preserve the peace.”
74: Great
Britain the “balancer” of Europe + France drops
raison d’état as reason for expansion,
goes with “spreading liberty”:
“In this manner, Great Britain became the balancer of the
European equilibrium, first almost by default, later by conscious strategy.
Without Great Britain’s tenacious commitment to that role, France would almost
surely have achieved hegemony over Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth
century, and Germany would have done the same in the modern period.
Having sought pre-eminence for a century and a half in the
name of raison d’état, France after
the Revolution had returned to earlier concepts of universality. No longer did
France invoke raison d’état for its
expansionism, even less the glory of its fallen kings. After the Revolution,
France made war on the rest of Europe to preserve its revolution and to spread
republican ideals throughout Europe…on behalf of universal principles of
liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
79
: Congress of
Vienna:
“The victors of the Napoleonic Wars assembled at Vienna in
September 1814 to plan the postwar world [and continued to meet through
Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815]…The need to rebuild the
international order had become even more urgent…Prince von Metternich served as
Austria’s negotiator…The King of Prussia sent Prince von Hardenberg, and the
newly restored Louis XVIII of France relied on Talleyrand…Tsar Alexander I,
refusing to yield the Russian pride of place to anyone, came to speak for
himself. The English Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, negotiated on Great
Britain’s behalf…These five men achieved what they had set out to do. After the
Congress of Vienna, Europe experienced the longest period of peace it had ever
known…This unique state of affairs occurred partly because the equilibrium was
designed so well that it could only be overthrown by an effort of magnitude too
difficult to mount. But the most important reason was that the Continental
countries were knit together by a sense of shared values. There was not only a
physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial
harmony. The balance of power reduces the opportunities to use force; a shared
sense of justice reduces the desire to use force…Metternich presaged Wilson, in
the sense that he believed that a shared concept of justice was a prerequisite
for international order…”
80
: Germany,
whether weak or strong, is a problem:
“Indeed, at least since the Thirty Years’ War, Germany’s
internal arrangements had presented Europe with the same dilemma: whenever
Germany was weak and divided, it tempted its neighbors, especially France, into
expansionism. At the same time, the prospect of German unity terrified
surrounding states, and has continued to do so even in our own
time…Historically, Germany has been either too weak or too strong for the peace
of Europe.”
84
: Interesting quote on the folly of legislating
rights:
“Rights, according to Metternich, simply existed in the nature of things.
Whether they were affirmed by laws or by constitutions was an essentially
technical question which had nothing to do with bringing about freedom.
Metternich considered guaranteeing rights to be a paradox: ‘Things which ought
to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of
arbitrary pronouncements…Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result
only in the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is
attempted to be safeguarded.’”
90-91: Weakness
of collective security - the “strong” have nothing to gain + Castlereagh
suicide:
“The weakness of collective security is that interests are
rarely uniform, and that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general
system of collective security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction
than on joint action; they either will be held together by glittering
generalities, or may witness the defection of the most powerful member, who
feels the most secure and therefore least needs the system. Neither Wilson nor
Castlereagh was able to bring his country into a system of collective security
because their respective societies did not feel threatened by foreseeable
dangers…To them, participating in the League of Nations or the European Congress
system compounded risks without enhancing security.”
“Castlereagh said at his last interview with the King, ‘it
is necessary to say goodbye to Europe; you and I alone know it and have saved
it; no one after me understands the affairs of the Continent.’ Four days later,
he committed suicide.”
92: Crimean war:
“In 1854, the Great Powers were at war for the first time
since the days of Napoleon. Ironically, this war, the Crimean War, long
condemned by historians as a senseless and utterly avoidable affair, was
precipitated not by Russia, Great Britain, or Austria – countries with vast
interests in the Eastern Question – but by France…In 1852, the French Emperor
Napoleon III, having just come to power by a coup, persuaded the Turkish Sultan
to grant him the sobriquet of Protector of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire,
a role the Russian Tsar traditionally reserved for himself. Nicholas I was
enraged that Napoleon…should presume to step into Russia’s shoes as protector of
Balkan Slavs…Lord Palmerston, who shaped British foreign policy…was morbidly
suspicious of Russia…Austria, which had the most to lose from a war, proposed
the obvious solution – that France and Russia act as joint protectors of the
Ottoman Christians. Palmerston was eager for neither outcome. To strengthen
Great Britain’s bargaining position, he sent the Royal Navy to the entrance of
the Black Sea. This encouraged Turkey to declare war on Russia. Great Britain
and France backed Turkey.
The real causes of the war were deeper, however. Religious
claims were in fact pretexts for political and strategic designs. Nicholas was
pursuing the ancient Russian dream of gaining Constantinople and the Straits.
Napoleon III saw an opportunity to end France’s isolation and to break up the
Holy Alliance by weakening Russia. Palmerston sought some pretext to end
Russia’s drive toward the Straits once and for all.”
100
: “Tories”
and “Whigs” reverse roles:
“In the eighteenth century, the Tories as a rule represented the King’s foreign
policy, which leaned toward intervention in Continental disputes; the
Whigs…preferred to retain a measure of aloofness from quarrels on the Continent
and sought greater emphasis on overseas expansion. By the nineteenth century,
their roles had been reversed. The Whigs…represented an activist policy, while
the Tories…were wary of foreign entanglements.”
103: Realpolitik
replaces the term raison d’état
without changing its meaning:
“The collapse of the Metternich system in the wake of the Crimean War produced
nearly two decades of conflict…Out of this turmoil, a new balance of power
emerged in Europe. France, which had participated in three of the wars and
encouraged the others, lost its position of predominance to Germany. Even more
importantly, the moral restraints of the Metternich system disappeared. This
upheaval became symbolized by the use of a new term for unrestrained
balance-of-power policy: the German word
Realpolitik replaced the French term
raison d’état without, however, changing its meaning…[Realpolitik is based
on the notion] that relations among states are determined by raw power and that
the mighty will prevail.”
104: Napoleon III and Bismarck overturn the Vienna settlement:
“Between them, Napoleon III and Bismarck managed to
overturn the Vienna settlement, most significantly the sense of
self-restraint…Both felt that the order established by Metternich at Vienna in
1815 was an albatross.”
109
: On German confederation:
“The German Confederation was designed to act as a unit
only against an overwhelming external danger. Its component states were
explicitly forbidden to join together for offensive purposes, and would never
have been able to agree on an offensive strategy – as was shown by the fact that
the subject had never even been broached in the half-century of the
Confederation’s existence.”
114: Napoleon miscalculates: Expects Austria to win Austro-Prussian
War
120-121: Otto
Von Bismarck:
“The destruction of the Vienna system, which Napoleon had
begun, was completed by Bismarck…No longer was there talk of unity of crowned
heads or of harmony among the ancient states of Europe. Under Bismarck’s
Realpolitik, foreign policy became a
contest of strength…He was convinced that Prussia had become the strongest
German state and did not need the Holy Alliance as a link to Russia. In his
view, shared national interests would supply an adequate bond…Bismarck
considered Austria an obstacle to Prussia’s German mission, not a partner in
it.”
122-125:
Bismarck’s thoughts on “power” /
Realpolitik:
“In Bismarck, the Habsburgs faced the same challenge with
which Richelieu had presented them – a policy divorced from any value system
except the glory of the state. And, just as with Richelieu, they did not know
how to deal with it or even how to comprehend its nature…The reasons for
Bismarck’s break with the Russian conservatives were much the same as those for
Richelieu’s debate with his clerical critics, the chief difference being that
the Prussian conservatives insisted on universal political principles, rather
than universal religious principles. Bismarck asserted that power supplied its
own legitimacy…Realpolitik for
Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available
option without the constraint of ideology.”
126-128: No
moral considerations and survival of the fittest:
“Realpolitik demanded tactical flexibility, and the
Prussian national interest required keeping open the option of making a deal
with France…To Bismarck, the convictions of the generation of Metternich had
turned into a dangerous set of inhibitions. [Leopold von Gerlach, a man to which
Bismarck “owed everything”, strongly disagreed with Bismarck’s policy. In
response to Gerlack’s criticism, Bismarck wrote] ‘I am prepared to discuss the
point of utility with you; but if you pose antinomies between right and
revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no
longer and can merely say: I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is
not yours to judge.’ This bitter declaration of faith was the functional
equivalent of Richelieu’s assertion that, since the soul is immortal, man must
submit to the judgment of God but that states, being mortal, can only be judged
by what works. Bismarck did not reject…moral views as personal articles of
faith…but he denied their relevance to the duties of statesmanship by way of
elaborating the distinction between personal belief and
Realpolitik: ‘I did not seek the
service of the King…The God who unexpectedly placed me into it will probably
rather show me the way out than let my soul perish.’
Because of his magnificent grasp of the nuances of power
and its ramifications, Bismarck was able in his lifetime to replace the
philosophical constraints of the Metternich system with a policy of
self-restraint. Because these nuances were not as self-evident to Bismarck’s
successors and imitators, the literal application of
Realpolitik led to their excessive dependence on military power, and
from there to an armament race and two world wars.”
136: Praise for
Bismarck’s “greatness,” ridicule for Napoleon III
141: Mentions Russian invasion of
Afghanistan; doesn’t mention Brzezinski’s strategy to draw them in
147
: Contrived
war scare:
“Facing down a nonexistent threat is an easy way to enhance a nation’s
standing.”
152
: Standing
armies, and the powerful individuals connected to them, can become a force that
acts against the wishes of the “leaders” who supposedly control them:
“The British Ambassador in St. Petersburg speculated that
Russia’s pressure on India ‘had not originated with [the Tsar], although he is
an absolute monarch, but rather from the dominant part played by the military
administration. Where an enormous standing army is maintained, it is absolutely
necessary to find employment for it…When a system of conquest sets in…one
acquisition of territory leads to another, and the difficulty is where to
stop.’”
155: Bismarck’s
admiration of Disraeli:
“Though their backgrounds could not have been more
different [Disraeli and Bismarck] came to admire each other. Both subscribed to
Realpolitik and hated what they
considered moralistic cant. The religious overtones of Gladstone’s
pronouncements
seemed pure humbug to
them.”
160
: Bismarck
encourages French expansion:
“He encouraged French colonial expansion, in part to deflect French energies
from Central Europe, but more to embroil France with colonial rivals, especially
Great Britain.”
161-162:
Britain’s Gladstone calls for morality – no moral difference between a person
and a state:
“In 1880, Gladstone, offended by Disraeli’s emphasis on
geopolitics, launched…the first whistle-stop campaign in history and the first
in which the issues of foreign policy were taken directly to the
people…Asserting that morality was the only basis for a sound foreign policy,
Gladstone insisted that Christian decency and respect for human rights ought to
be the guiding lights of British foreign policy, not the balance of power and
the national interest. At one stop, he declared: ‘Remember that the sanctity of
life in the hill villages of Afghanistan is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty
God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in
the same flesh and blood has bound you by the law of mutual love…not limited by
the boundaries of Christian civilization…’ Gladstone blazed a trail which Wilson
later followed when he claimed that there could be no distinction between the
morality of the individual and the morality of the state.”
163-164: Create
crisis for funding:
“The fact that the military budget was voted for periods of
five years at a time tempted governments to create crises during the crucial
year in which the defense program would be voted…governments were highly
susceptible to nationalist propaganda and too prone to inventing foreign dangers
to rally their constituencies.”
169:
Realpolitik is fine; just not too
much:
“Throughout the process of German unification, there had
been little concern about its impact on the balance of power. For 200 years,
Germany had been the victim, not the instigator, of the wars of Europe. In the
Thirty Years’ War, the Germany had suffered casualties estimated as high as 30
percent of their entire population, and most of the decisive battles of the
dynastic wars of the eighteenth century and of the Napoleonic Wars were fought
on German soil.
It was therefore nearly inevitable that Germany would aim
to prevent the recurrence of these tragedies. But it was not inevitable that the
new German state should have approached this challenge largely as a military
problem, or that German diplomats after Bismarck should have conducted foreign
policy with such bullying assertiveness.”
“Whereas Frederick the Great’s Prussia had been the weakest
of the Great Powers, soon after unification, Germany became the strongest and as
such proved disquieting to its neighbors. In order to participate in the Concert
of Europe, it therefore needed to show special restraint in its foreign policy.
The reason German statesmen were obsessed with naked power
was that, in contrast to other nation-states, Germany did not possess any
integrating philosophical framework. None of the ideals which had shaped the
modern nation-state in the rest of Europe was present in Bismarck’s construction
– not Great Britain’s emphasis on traditional liberties, the French Revolution’s
appeal to universal freedom, or even the benign universalist imperialism of
Austria….Bismarck’s Reich was an artifice, being foremost a greater Prussia
whose principal purpose was to increase its own power.”
170 & 172: PNAC
philosophy…in Germany:
“German military planners always thought in terms of
fighting off a combination of all of Germany’s neighbors simultaneously. In
readying themselves for that worst-case scenario, they helped to make it a
reality. For a Germany strong enough to defeat a coalition of all its neighbors
was obviously also more than capable of overwhelming any of them individually.
At the sight of the military colossus on their borders, Germany’s neighbors drew
together for mutual protection, transforming the German quest for security into
an agent of its own insecurity…
Bullying tactics seemed to Germany’s leaders the best way
to bring home to their neighbors the limits of their own strength and,
presumably, the benefits of Germany’s friendship. This taunting approach had
quite the opposite effect. Trying to achieve absolute security for their
country, German leaders after Bismarck threatened every other European nation
with absolute insecurity, triggering countervailing coalitions nearly
automatically. There are no diplomatic shortcuts to domination; the only route
that leads to it is war, a lesson the provincial leaders of post-Bismarck
Germany learned only when it was too late to avoid a global catastrophe.”
175: Russian war
with Japan
181
: Russian /
French alliance:
“In 1894, a military convention was signed in which France
agreed to aid Russia if Russia was attacked by Germany, or by Austria in
combination with Germany. Russia would support France in case of an attack by
Germany, or by Germany in combination with Italy.”
192
: Germany,
regardless of its intentions, must be weakened:
“On January 1, 1907, Sir Eyre Crowe, a prominent British
Foreign Office analyst, explained why, in his view, an accommodation with
Germany was impossible and entente with France was the only option…True to the
tenets of Realpolitik, Crowe argued
that…Germany’s intentions were essentially irrelevant; what mattered were its
capabilities. He put forward two hypotheses: ‘Either Germany is definitely
aiming at a general political hegemony…threatening the independence of her
neighbours and ultimately the existence of England; or Germany, free from any
such clear-cut ambition…is seeking to promote her foreign commerce, spread the
benefits of German culture, extend the scope of her national energies, and
create fresh German interests all over the world wherever and whenever a
peaceful opportunity offers…’ Crow insisted that these distinctions were
irrelevant because, in the end, they would be overridden by the temptations
inherent in Germany’s growing power…Great Britain made it clear that it would
not stand for any further accretion of German strength.”
195
: Interesting
note on Bosnia:
“This no-mans-land between the Ottoman and Habsburg
Empires, which contained Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim religions, and
Croatian, Serbian, and Muslim populations, had never been a state or even
self-governing. It only seemed governable if none of these groups was asked to
submit to the others.”
202
: “Mobilization” overtakes “firing the first shot” as decisive act of war:
“Military planning had, in effect, become autonomous. The
first step in this direction occurred during the negotiation for a
Franco-Russian military alliance in 1892. Up to that time, alliance negotiations
had been about…what specific actions by the adversary might oblige allies to go
to war. Almost invariably, its definition hinged on who was perceived to have
initiated hostilities…In May 1892, the Russian negotiator…sent a letter to his
Foreign Minister…explaining why the traditional method for defining the
casus belli had been overtaken by
modern technology. [He] argued that what mattered was who mobilized first, not
who fired the first shot: ‘The undertaking of mobilization can no longer be
considered as a peaceful act; on the contrary, it represents the most decisive
act of war.’”
205-206: The
perfect German leader to ensure Germany’s defeat:
“Where the principal goal of Bismarck’s foreign policy had
been to avoid a two-front war and of Moltke’s military strategy to limit it,
Schlieffen insisted on a two-front war conducted in an all-out fashion…The
Schlieffen Plan saw to it that the initial battles would be fought in the West
between countries having next to no interest in the immediate crisis. Foreign
policy had abdicated to military strategy, which now consisted of gambling on a
single throw of the dice. A more mindless and technocratic approach to war would
have been difficult to imagine.”
206
: Former
Russian interior minister warns of the costs of WWI – unseen / ignored:
209: Franz
Ferdinand, odd events surrounding assassination:
“On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg
throne, paid for Austria’s rashness in having annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908
with his life. Not even the manner of his assassination could escape the
singular mix of the tragic and the absurd that marked Austria’s disintegration.
The young Serbian terrorist failed in his first attempt to assassinate Franz
Ferdinand, wounding the driver of the Archduke’s vehicle instead. After arriving
at the governor’s residence and chastising the Austrian administrators for their
negligence, Franz Ferdinand, accompanied by his wife, decided to visit the
victim at the hospital. The royal couple’s new driver took a wrong turn and, in
backing out of the street, came to a stop in front of the astonished would-be
assassin, who had been drowning his frustrations in liquor at a sidewalk café.
With his victims so providentially delivered to him by themselves, the assassin
did not fail a second time.”
212
: Britain
“passes” on a chance to avoid WWI:
“Great Britain, the country in the best position to arrest this chain of events,
hesitated…Had Great Britain declared unambiguously its intentions and made
Germany understand that it would enter a general war, the Kaiser might well have
turned away from confrontation. That is how Sazonov saw it later: ‘I cannot
refrain from expressing the opinion that if in 1914 Sir Edward Grey had, as I
insistently requested him, made a timely and equally unambiguous announcement of
the solidarity of Great Britain with France and Russia, he might have saved
humanity from that terrible cataclysm…’” (But without the war, Germany would
have not only remained strong, it would have continued to gather strength;
instead, it was destroyed. Other competing powers, as well, were destroyed.
Great Britain’s policy makers had no reason to interfere; except to ensure that
the war did not end too quickly.)
217
: WWI – Who
gained?:
“By the time events had run their course, 20 million lay
dead; the Austro-Hungarian Empire had disappeared; three of the four dynasties
which entered the war – the German, the Austrian, and the Russian – were
overthrown. Only the British royal house remained standing. Afterward, it was
hard to recall exactly what had triggered the conflagration. All that anyone
knew was that, from the ashes produced by monumental folly, a new European
system had to be constructed, though its nature was difficult to discern amidst
the passion and the exhaustion deposited by the carnage.”
219-220: German
disarmament:
“The allied side specialized in couching the war in moral slogans such as “the
war to end all wars” or ‘making the world safe for Democracy’ – especially after
America entered the war. The first of these goals was understandable…Its
practical interpretation was the complete disarmament of Germany. The second
proposition – spreading democracy – required the overthrow of German and
Austrian domestic institutions. Both Allied slogans therefore implied a fight to
the finish…Great Britain [would] no longer accept compromise and insisted on…the
permanent weakening of Germany, especially a sharp reduction of the German High
Sea Fleet – something Germany would never accept unless it were totally
defeated.”
222-224: Wilson
– League of Nations:
“Wilson’s doctrines of self-determination and collective
security put European diplomats on thoroughly unfamiliar terrain. The assumption
behind all European settlements had been that borders could be adjusted to
promote the balance of power, the requirements of which took precedence over the
preferences of the affected populations….Wilson entirely rejected this
approach…Wilson proposed to found peace on the principle of collective security.
In his view and that of all his disciples, the security of the world called for,
not the defense of the national interest, but of peace as a legal concept. The
determination of whether a breach of peace had indeed been committed required an
international institution, which Wilson defined as the League of Nations.
Oddly enough, the idea for such an organization first
surfaced in London, heretofore the bastion of balance-of-power diplomacy. And
the motive for it was not an attempt to invent a new world order but England’s
search for a good reason why America should enter a war of the old order. In
September 1915, in a revolutionary departure from British practice, Foreign
Secretary Grey wrote to Wilson’s confidant, Colonel House, with a proposal which
he believed the idealistic American President would not be able to refuse. To
what extent, asked Grey, might the President be interested in a League of
Nations committed to enforcing disarmament and to the pacific settlement of
disputes? ‘Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations
binding themselves to side against any Power which broke a treaty…or which
refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other method of settlement than that
of war?’
It was unlikely that Great Britain, which for 200 years had
steered clear of open-ended alliances, had suddenly developed a taste for
open-ended commitments on a global scale. Yet Great Britain’s determination to
prevail against the immediate threat of Germany was so great that its Foreign
Secretary could bring himself to put forward a doctrine of collective security,
the most open-ended commitment imaginable…
Grey knew his man. From the days of his youth, Wilson had
believed that American federal institutions should serve as a model for an
eventual ‘parliament of man’…Grey could not have been surprised – though surely
he was gratified – to receive a prompt reply falling in with what was, in
retrospect, his rather transparent hint. The exchange was perhaps the earliest
demonstration of the ‘special relationship’ between America and Great Britain…A
common language and cultural heritage combined with great tactfulness to enable
British leaders to inject their ideas into the American decision-making process
in such a manner that they imperceptibly seemed to be a part of Washington’s
own. Thus, when, in May 1916, Wilson advanced for the first time his scheme for
a world organization, he was no doubt convinced that it had been his own idea.
And in a way it had been, since Grey had proposed it in full awareness of
Wilson’s likely convictions.”
226
: Wilson’s
comment against balance of power:
“In an address at London’s Guildhall on December 28, 1918,
after the Armistice, Wilson explicitly condemned the balance of power as
unstable and based on ‘jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interests’”
228
: Germany’s
progress over France from 1850 – 1930
229
: France
wanted to break up Germany – was against the fall of Berlin Wall / 1989
unification
235
: Using
“world public opinion” and sanctions to control an aggressive nation
236
: Only
congress can declare war (legally / constitutionally)
“For a fleeting moment, Wilson seemed to endorse the concept [of a permanent
military commitment] by referring to the proposed Covenant as a guarantee of the
‘land titles of the world.’ But Wilson’s entourage was horrified. Its members
knew that the Senate would never ratify a standing international army or a
permanent military commitment. One of Wilson’s advisers even argued that a
provision stipulating the use of force to resist aggression would be
unconstitutional: ‘A war automatically arising upon a condition subsequent,
pursuant to a treaty provision, is not a war declared by Congress.’ Taken
literally, this meant that no alliance with the United States could ever have
binding force.”
237
: France
suggests Rhineland buffer zone to protect itself from Germany
238
: Guarantee
to France, against Germany, proves “ephemeral”
241
: “Self
determination” following WWI:
“Romania acquired millions of Hungarians, Poland millions of Germans and the
guardianship of a corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. At
the end of this process, which was conducted in the name of self-determination,
nearly as many people lived under foreign rule as during the days of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, except that now they were distributed across many more,
much weaker, nation-states which, to undermine stability even further, were in
conflict with each other.”
244-245: WWI
fought to “curb Germany” + “war guilt” clause:
“The paradox of the First World War was that it had been fought to curb German
power and looming predominance, and that it had aroused public opinion to a
pitch which prevented the establishment of a conciliatory peace. Yet, in the
end, Wilsonian principles inhibited a peace which curbed Germany’s power and
there was no shared sense of justice.
The gravest psychological blight on the Treaty was Article
231, the so-called War Guilt clause. It stated that Germany was solely
responsible for the outbreak of World War I, and delivered a severe moral
censure. Most of the punitive measures against Germany in the Treaty – economic,
military, and political – were based on the assertion that the whole
conflagration had been entirely Germany’s fault.”
247: Collective
security VS alliances:
“In subsequent American usage, alliances in which America
participated
were generally described as instruments of
collective security. This is not, however, how the term was originally
conceived, for in their essence, the concepts of collective security and of
alliances are diametrically opposed. Traditional alliances were directed against
specific threats and defined precise obligations for specific groups of
countries linked by shared national interests or mutual security concerns.
Collective security defines no particular threat, guarantees no individual
nation, and discriminates against none. It is theoretically designed to resist
any threat to the peace, by whoever
might pose it and against whomever it might be directed.”
248
: Great
Britain, the motherland of Balance of Power
249
: Weakness of
collective security:
“In the end, collective security fell prey to the weakness
of its central premise – that all nations have the same interest in resisting a
particular act of aggression and are prepared to run identical risks in opposing
it.”
251-252: It
wasn’t “appeasement,” it was Balance of Power:
“Their policy [the British] was based on the mistaken
belief that France was already too powerful…Many in Great Britain began to look
to Germany to balance France.”
254
: Geneva
Protocol, Great Britain to disarm France for “collective security”:
“The Geneva Protocol, however, failed…for the same reason
as the Treaty of Mutual Assistance and all the other schemes for collective
security...It went too far for Great Britain and not nearly far enough for
France. Great Britain had proposed it in order to draw France into disarmament,
not to generate an additional defense obligation. France had pursued the
Protocol primarily as an obligation of mutual assistance – having only a
secondary interest, if that, in disarmament…It was a preposterous state of
affairs. Resisting aggression had been made dependent on the prior disarmament
of the victim.”
257
: Germany’s
bill for WWI announced:
“It was not until 1921 – two years after the signing of the
Versailles Treaty – that a figure for the reparations was finally established.
It was absurdly high:
, a sum which would have
necessitated German payments for the rest of the century…no democratic German
government could have survived agreeing to it.”
258
: Bolshevik’s
stateless theory:
“The French revolutionaries had striven to change the
character of the state; the Bolsheviks, going a step further, proposed to
abolish the state altogether.”
263
: 264: German / Russian Rapallo Treaty:
“The Western Allies remained oblivious to the temptations
they were creating for both Germany and the Soviet Union by pretending that
these two most powerful countries on the Continent could simply be ignored.
Three requests by the German Chancellor and his Foreign Minister for a meeting
with Lloyd George were rebuffed. Simultaneously, France proposed holding private
consultations with Great Britain and the Soviet Union from which Germany would
be excluded. The purpose of these meetings was to resurrect the shopworn scheme
of trading tsarist debts for German reparations – a proposal which even less
suspicious diplomats than the Soviets would have construed as a trap to
undermine the prospect of improved German-Soviet relations. By the end of the
first week of the conference, both Germany and the Soviet Union were worried
that they would be pitted against each other. When [one of the Soviet Foreign
Minister’s aids] telephoned the German delegation at the conspiratorial hour of
one-fifteen in the morning on April 16, 1922, proposing a meeting later that day
at Rapallo, the Germans jumped at the invitation. They were anxious to end their
isolation as much as the Soviets wanted to avoid the dubious privilege of
becoming German creditors. The two foreign ministers lost little time drafting
an agreement in which Germany and the Soviet Union established full diplomatic
relations, renounced claims against each other, and granted each other Most
Favored Nation status. Lloyd George, upon receiving belated intelligence of the
meeting, frantically tried to reach the German delegation to invite them to the
interview he had repeatedly rejected. The message reached Rathenau, the German
negotiator, as he was about to leave for the signing of the Soviet-German
agreement. He hesitated, then muttered: ‘The wine is drawn; it must be drunk.’”
271
: Need the
right person to sell policy + Stresemann convinced Germany was lured into WWI to
preserve Great Britain’s power:
“Just as…it took a conservative American president to
engineer America’s opening to China, only a leader with the impeccable
conservative credentials of Stresemann could have even thought of basing German
Foreign policy on cooperating, however ambivalently, with the hated Versailles
settlement…A man of great conviviality, he loved literature and history, and his
conversations were frequently sprinkled with allusions to German classics.
Nevertheless, his early views on foreign policy reflected the conventional
conservative wisdom. For example, he was convinced that Germany had been lured
into the war by a jealous Great Britain eager to preserve its own primacy.”
274
: New World
Order and the Locarno pact:
“The Locarno Pact was greeted with exuberant relief as the
dawning of a new world order.”
279
: Rearming
Germany:
“The post-Locarno period witnessed France’s step-by-step
retreat from the Versailles settlement – against its better judgment – under
constant British
pressures to go even further. After Locarno,
capital – mostly American – poured into Germany, accelerating the modernization
of its industry. The Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, which had been
created to supervise German disarmament, was abolished in 1927, and its
functions were turned over to the League of Nations, which had no means of
verifying compliance.”
280
: Kellogg /
Briand pact:
“In early 1928, Secretary Kellogg ended his silence and accepted the draft
treaty. But he went Briand one better, proposing that the renunciation of war
include as many other nations as possible. The offer proved as irresistible as
it was meaningless. On August 27, 1928, the Pact of Paris (popularly known as
the Kellogg-Briand Pact), renouncing war as an instrument of national policy,
was signed with great fanfare by fifteen nations. It was quickly ratified by
practically all the countries of the world, including Germany, Japan, and Italy,
the nations whose aggressions would blight the next decade.
No sooner was the Pact signed than second thoughts began to
seize the world’s statesmen. France qualified its original proposal by inserting
a clause legalizing wars of self-defense and wars to honor obligations arising
out of the League Covenant, the Locarno guarantees, and all of France’s
alliances. This brought matters back to their starting point, for the exceptions
encompassed every conceivable practical case. Next, Great Britain insisted on
freedom of action in order to defend its empire. America’s reservations were the
most sweeping of all; it invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the right of self-defense,
and the stipulation that each nation be its own judge of the requirements of
self-defense. Retaining every possible loophole, the United States rejected
participation in any enforcement action as well.”
283
: Stresemann
dies, his objectives revealed
286
: Japan
invades Manchuria, League of Nations weakness revealed
292
: October 14,
1933, Hitler leaves the disarmament conference, then leaves the League of
Nations a couple weeks later
301
: Hitler
invades Rhineland, breaks Locarno and ignores League of Nations + Henry’s quote
on power:
“Foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards
actual power relationships and relies on prophesies of another’s intentions.”
306
: “Appeasing”
Hitler – Henry claims Great Britain “forgot” its balance-of-power roots:
“Once again, Great Britain had skillfully dodged a full
commitment to defend France…Great Britain, the mother country of the
balance-of-power policy, had totally lost touch with its operating principles.”
309
: The Munich
agreement:
“Having conceded that Germany would revise its eastern borders, would Great
Britain go to war over the timetable? The answer was self-evident – countries do
not go to war over the rate of change by which something they have already
conceded is being achieved. Czechoslovakia was doomed not at Munich but at
London, nearly a year earlier.”
310
: Mein Kampf quote + Hitler takes Austria:
“Mankind has grown
strong in eternal struggles…and it will only perish through eternal peace.”
314
: Germany
“throws off” of the restrictions of Versailles + Congress of Vienna VS
Versailles:
“By conceding that the Versailles settlement was
iniquitous, the victors eroded the psychological basis for defending it. The
victors of the Napoleonic Wars had made a generous peace, but they had also
organized the Quadruple Alliance in order to leave no ambiguity about their
determination to defend it. The victors of World War I had made a punitive peace
and, after having themselves created the maximum incentive for revisionism,
cooperated in dismantling their own settlement.”
316-317: The
“appeasers” of Hitler and the consequences of Hitler exceeding “moral” limits:
333: Henry on
Stalin “He was a monster, but…”:
“Stalin was indeed a monster; but in the conduct of
international relations, he was the supreme realist – patient, shrewd, and
implacable, the Richelieu of his period.”
337 - 338:
Stalin’s purges:
“On March 10, 1939…Stalin stepped forward with his own
authoritative statement of Moscow’s new strategy. The occasion was the
Eighteenth Party Congress, the first such meeting held since Stalin’s
endorsement of collective security and “united fronts” five years earlier. The
delegates’ feelings must have been dominated by relief at still being alive, for
the purges had decimated their ranks: only thirty-five of the 2,000 delegates
from the five years before were now in attendance; 1,100 of the remainder had
been arrested for counter-revolutionary activities; ninety-eight of the 131
members of the Central Committee had been liquidated, as had been three out of
five marshals of the Red Army, all eleven deputy commissars for defense, all
military district commanders, and seventy-five out of the eighty members of the
Supreme Military Council. The Eighteenth Party Congress was hardly a celebration
of continuity. Its attendees were vastly more concerned with the requirements of
their own personal survival than with the arcane subtleties of foreign policy.”
351
: Stalin /
Hitler pact:
“Stalin proposed a new deal to Germany less than a month
after completing the Nazi-Soviet Pact: swapping the Polish territory between
Warsaw and the Curzon Line, which, under the secret protocol, was to go to the
Soviet Union, for Lithuania, which was to go to Germany.”
364: Henry’s
contact with Stalin’s biographer + list of Hitler’s “irrational” moves:
“[Stalin’s] biographer Dmitri Volkogonov told me that
Stalin was keeping open the option of a pre-emptive war against German in
[1942], which may explain why Soviet armies were deployed so far forward in
1941.”
366: Stalin ruled from the shadows until 1941
370
: Praise for
FDR:
“All great leaders walk alone. Their singularity springs
from their ability to discern challenges that are not yet apparent to their
contemporaries. Roosevelt took an isolationist people into a war between
countries whose conflicts had only a few years earlier been widely considered
inconsistent with American values and irrelevant to American security…After
Roosevelt had restored hope at home, destiny imposed on him the obligation of
defending democracy around the world.”
371: Media hides
FDR’s paralysis
377
: Japan’s
invasion of Manchuria
378
: Mentions a
book called “The Road to War” which
explained a conspiracy to pull the US into WWI:
“Roosevelt’s first term coincided with the heyday of
revisionism about the First World War. In 1935, a special Senate
Committee…published a 1400-page report blaming America’s entry into the war on
armaments manufacturers. Soon thereafter, Walter Millis’ best-selling book,
The Road to War, popularized the
thesis for a mass audience. Under the impact of this school of thought,
America’s participation in the war came to be explained by malfeasance,
conspiracy, and betrayal rather than by fundamental or permanent interests…To
prevent America from once again being lured into war, the Congress passed three
so-called Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937.”
379: FDR’s “Quarantine” Speech + “off-the-record” information given
to the press:
“Roosevelt was careful not to spell out what he meant by
“quarantine” and what, if any, specific measures he might have in mind. Had the
speech implied any kind of action, it would have been inconsistent with the
Neutrality Acts, which the Congress had overwhelmingly approved and the
President had recently signed…Not surprisingly, the Quarantine Speech was
attacked by isolationists, who demanded clarification of the President’s
intentions. They argued [it was leading] to the abandonment of the policy of
nonintervention, to which both Roosevelt and the Congress had pledged
themselves…Roosevelt could have ended the controversy by simply denying the
intentions being ascribed to him. Yet, despite the critical onslaught, Roosevelt
spoke ambiguously enough at a news conference to keep open the option of
collective defense of some kind. According to the journalistic practice of the
day, the President always met with the press off-the-record, which meant that he
could neither be quoted nor identified, and these rules were respected.”
380: FDR versus
the majority of American public opinion:
“Roosevelt the political leader had to navigate among three
currents of American opinion: a small group advocating unambiguous support for
all “peace-loving” nations; a somewhat more significant group that went along
with such support as long as it stopped well short of war; and a vast majority
supporting the letter and the spirit of the neutrality legislation.”
382-383: “Great”
democratic leaders ignore the will of
the people:
“The interplay between leaders and their public in a
democracy is always complex. A leader who confines himself to the experience of
his people in a period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price
of condemnation by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who gets
too far ahead of his society will become irrelevant. A great leader must be an
educator, bridging the gap between HIS
visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk alone to enable
HIS society to follow the path HE HAS
selected. Roosevelt’s support for Britain and France was limited only when the
Congress and public opinion could neither be circumvented nor overcome.”
385: Hitler
invades Poland; FDR wants to revise Neutrality Acts because his deceit will be
exposed otherwise:
“When, in response to the German invasion of Poland, Great
Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, Roosevelt had no choice but to invoke
the Neutrality Acts. At the same time, he moved rapidly to modify the
legislation to permit Great Britain and France to purchase American arms…
Roosevelt had avoided invoking the Neutrality Acts in the war between Japan and
China, ostensibly because no war had been declared, in reality because he
believed that an arms embargo would hurt China far more than it would Japan. But
if war broke out in Europe, it would be formally declared and he would not be
able to resort to subterfuge to circumvent the Neutrality Acts…he prevailed. The
so-called Fourth Neutrality Act of November 4, 1939, permitted belligerents to
purchase arms and ammunition from the United States, provided they paid in cash
and transported their purchases in their own or neutral ships…The Neutrality
Acts had lasted only as long as there had been nothing to be neutral about.”
387
: Henry
admits FDR was “devious” and operated on the “fringes” of Constitutionality
388
: Lend-Lease
Act:
“Immediately after the election, Roosevelt moved to eliminate the requirement of
the Fourth Neutrality act – that American war materials could only be purchased
for cash. In a Fireside Chat, borrowing a term from Wilson, he challenged the
United States to become the ‘arsenal of democracy.’ The legal instrument for
bringing this about was the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the President
discretionary authority to lend, lease, sell, or barter under any terms he
deemed proper any defense article to ‘the government of any country whose
defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.’”
389
: The
isolationists:
“The isolationists organized themselves as the so-called
America First Committee, headed by General Robert E. Wood, Chairman of the board
of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and supported by prominent leaders in many
fields…The passion behind the isolationists’ opposition to Lend-Lease was
captured in a comment by Senator Arthur Vandenberg, one of their most thoughtful
spokesmen, on March 11, 1941: ‘We have tossed Washington’s Farewell Address into
the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and the
power wars of Europe, Asia and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a
course from which we can never hereafter retreat.’ Vandenberg’s analysis was
correct, but it was the world that had imposed the necessity…”
392
: Provoking
an attack, FDR crosses the line into belligerency:
“In September 1941, the United States crossed the line into
belligerency. Roosevelt’s order that the position of German submarines be
reported to the British Navy had made it inevitable that, sooner or later, some
clash would occur. On September 4, 1941, the American destroyer Greer was
torpedoed while signaling the location of a German submarine to British
airplanes. On September 11, without describing the circumstances, Roosevelt
denounced German ‘piracy.’ Comparing German submarines to a rattlesnake coiled
to strike, he ordered the United States Navy to sink ‘on sight’ any German or
Italian submarines discovered in the previously established American defense
area extending all the way to Iceland. To all practical purposes, America was at
war on the sea with the Axis powers.
Simultaneously, Roosevelt took up the challenge of Japan.
In response to Japan’s occupation of Indochina in July 1941, he abrogated
America’s commercial treaty with Japan, forbade the sale of scrap metal to it,
and encouraged the Dutch government-in-exile to stop oil exports to Japan from
the Dutch East Indies
. These pressures led to
negotiations with Japan, which began in October 1941. Roosevelt instructed the
American negotiators to demand that Japan relinquish all of its conquests,
including Manchuria, by invoking America’s previous refusal to ‘recognize’ these
acts…Roosevelt must have known that there was no possibility that Japan would
accept. On December 7, 1941, following the pattern of the Russo-Japanese War,
Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor…”
392: More praise
for FDR’s manipulation of US foreign policy + Pearl Harbor:
“In less than three years, Roosevelt had taken his
staunchly isolationist people into a global war…Roosevelt had achieved his goal
patiently and inexorably, educating his people one step at a time about the
necessities before them. His audiences filtered his words through their own
preconceptions and did not always understand that his ultimate destination was
war…”
396
: FDR wants
four policemen to control all nations:
“As early as the spring of 1942…Roosevelt sketched his idea
of the ‘Four Policemen’ to enforce peace in the postwar world. Harry Hopkins
reported the President’s thinking in a letter to Churchill: ‘Roosevelt had
spoken to Molotov of a system allowing only the great powers – Great Britain,
the United States, the Soviet Union, and possibly China – to have arms. These
‘policemen’ would work together to preserve the peace.”
411
: Stalin’s
“joke” to kill 50,000 officers:
“On one occasion, when Stalin urged the execution of 50,000
German officers, Churchill walked out and returned only after Stalin had
followed him to give his assurances that he had been jesting – which, in light
of what we now know of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, was probably not
true. Then, at a private meeting, Roosevelt outlined his idea of the Four
Policemen to a skeptical Stalin.”
412: FDR refers
to Stalin as “Uncle Joe”:
“The reinvention of Stalin, organizer of purges and recent
collaborator of Hitler, into ‘Uncle Joe,’ the paragon of moderation, was surely
the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. Yet Roosevelt’s emphasis on
Stalin’s goodwill was not a personal idiosyncrasy, but vented the attitude of a
people with more faith in the inherent goodness of man than in geopolitical
analysis. They preferred to see Stalin as an avuncular friend rather than as a
totalitarian dictator.”
424: Truman VS
FDR:
“Harry S. Truman’s background was as different from that of
his great predecessor as could be imagined. Roosevelt had been a member in good
standing of the cosmopolitan Northeastern establishment; Truman came from the
Midwestern rural middle class.”
425
: Truman: Let
Hitler and Stalin kill each other:
“...then Senator Truman rated the two dictatorships as
being morally equivalent, and recommended that America encourage them to fight
to the death: ‘If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and
if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many
as possible…Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.’”
431 - 432: Henry
pushes Realpolitik some more
“Truman was not ready to face the geopolitical realities
victory had wrought, or to jettison Roosevelt’s vision of a world order governed
by the Four Policemen. Nor would America yet concede that the balance of power
was a necessity of the international order and not an aberration of European
diplomacy.”
438
: Deaths
under Stalin:
“The number of Soviet war dead
was
over 20 million. In addition, the death toll in all of Stalin’s purges, prison
camps, forced collectivizations, and deliberately created famines has been
estimated at another 20 million…”
448
: Russian
rulers:
“From time immemorial, argued Kennan, the tsars had sought
to expand their territory. They had sought to subjugate Poland, and to turn it
into a dependent nation. They had regarded Bulgaria as being within Russia’s
sphere of influence. And they had sought a warm-water port on the Mediterranean,
mandating control of the Black Sea Straits.”
453
: My note on
choosing abstract / emotionally charged words with the intent to manipulate:
Kissinger wrote
: “Some protested that
AMERICA was defending countries which…were morally unworthy; others objected
that AMERICA was committing itself to the defense of societies which…were not
vital to AMERICAN security. It was an ambiguity which refused to go away…Ever
since, AMERICAN foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who
assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the
NATIONAL interest…”
454
: The “bible”
of containment policy published in the CFR’s
Foreign Affairs magazine, written by George F. Kennan:
“Though it was anonymously signed by ‘X,’ the author was
later identified as George F. Kennan, by then head of the Policy Planning Staff
of the State Department.”
457-458: 1948
Communist coup in Czechoslovakia provides “impetus” for NATO, every effort made
to project the image that NATO wasn’t established to protect the balance of
power / status quo:
“Amazingly, the State Department document asserted that
NATO was not designed to defend the status
quo in Europe, which was surely news to America’s allies. The Atlantic
Alliance upheld principle, it was said, not territory; it did not resist change,
only the use of force to bring about change. The State Department analysis
concluded that the North Atlantic Treaty ‘is directed against no one; it is
directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting
balance of power but to strengthen the balance of principle.’…No history
graduate student would have received a passing grade for such an analysis.”
464: Lippmann on
containment, US forced to prop up regimes at an incalculable cost – only
“interests” matter:
“Lippmann stressed the importance of establishing criteria
to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American
interest. Without such criteria, the United States would be forced to organize a
‘heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets,’ which
would permit America’s newfound allies to exploit containment for their own
purposes. The United States would be trapped into propping up nonviable regimes,
leaving Washington with the sorry choice between ‘appeasement and defeat and the
loss of face, or…[supporting US allies] at incalculable cost.’”
466: Churchill
asks: “what happens when Russia gets the bomb?”
468
: Henry
Wallace “Private and public moral principles should match”
“A product of America’s populist tradition, Wallace had an
abiding Yankee distrust of Great Britain. Like most American liberals since
Jefferson, he insisted that ‘the same moral principles which governed in private
life also should govern in international affairs.’ In Wallace’s view, America
had lost its moral compass and was practicing a foreign policy of ‘Machiavellian
principles of deceit, force and distrust…’”
471
: Henry
justifies his moral ambivalence:
“A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a
test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.”
475
: Korean War:
“Thus, the Korean War grew out of a double
misunderstanding; the communists, analyzing the region in terms of American
interests, did not find it plausible that America would resist at the tip of a
peninsula when it had conceded most of the mainland of Asia to the communists…”
477: Defending
“principles” not “power”
“Though Truman had powerful geopolitical arguments in favor of intervention in
Korea, he appealed to the American people on the basis of their core values, and
described intervention as a defense of universal principle rather than of the
American national interest: ‘A return to the rule of force in international
affairs would have far-reaching effects. The United States will continue to
uphold the rule of law.’ That America defends principle, not interests, law, and
not power, has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of America’s rationale in
committing its military forces, from the time of the two world wars through the
escalation of its involvement in Vietnam in 1965 and the Gulf War in 1991.”
488
: Don’t
surrender “negotiating assets” in war:
“Because of their conviction that peace is normal and
goodwill natural, American leaders have generally sought to encourage
negotiations by removing elements of coercion and by unilateral demonstrations
of goodwill. In fact, in most negotiations, unilateral gestures remove a key
negotiating asset. In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already
rendered – especially in wartime.”
512
: George
Keenan’s thoughts:
“The psychological strain of an era of confrontation
without issue was evidenced by the changed attitude of George F. Kennan.
Realizing that his original approach to the Soviet Union was turning into a
rationale for endless military confrontation, he developed a concept for
negotiating an overall settlement very similar to what Churchill had seemed to
have had in mind in 1944 – 45…The principal goal of Kennan’s so-called
disengagement scheme was the removal of Soviet troops from the center of
Europe.”
517
: Geneva
summit of 1955, optimism about USSR
519
: Soviet
leaders who lived under Stalin:
“The second generation of Soviet leaders had been shaped by
a past that would have been unimaginable in the democracies. Apprenticeship to
Stalin had guaranteed psychological malformation. Only the salve of boundless
ambition could have made tolerable the pervasive sense of terror generated by
the penalty of death or life in the Gulag for the slightest misstep –or even for
a shift in policy by the dictator himself…Stalin’s subordinates were aware of
the atrocities being committed in the name of communism. Yet they assuaged their
consciences, which in any case were not terribly highly developed, by ascribing
Stalinism to the aberrations of an individual rather than to the failure of the
communist system.”
523
: 525: Finally mentions overthrow of
democratically elected Iranian government in 1953:
“To the applause of the first generation of the newly
independent countries, Iranian Prime Minster Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil
industry in 1951 and demanded the withdrawal of British troops protecting the
oil complex at Abadan. Great Britain no longer felt strong enough to undertake
military action so close to the Soviet border without American support…The
challenge posed by Mossadegh ended two years later when the United States
encouraged a coup to overthrow him.”
“The leaders of the independence
movements were of a different type than America’s Founding Fathers. While using
the rhetoric of democracy, they lacked the commitment to it of the drafters of
the American Constitution, who genuinely believed in a system of checks and
balances. The vast majority of them governed in an authoritarian manner.”
527
: Notes on
Egypt’s Nasser, dies of “heart attack” at age 52
(CIA “heart-attack” gun?)
[3]
531
: Middle East
borders drawn by Imperial Powers after WWI:
“The analogy to Hitler was not really on the mark. Implying that Nasser’s Egypt
was determined to conquer foreign nations, it ascribed a validity to Middle
Eastern border that the Arab nationalists did not recognize. The borders in
Europe – except for those in the Balkans – reflected in the main a common
history and culture. By contrast, the borders of the Middle East had been drawn
by foreign, largely European, powers at the end of the First World War in order
to facilitate their domination of the area. In the minds of the Arab
nationalists, these frontiers cut across the Arab nation and denied a common
Arab culture. Erasing them was not a way for one country to dominate another; it
was the way to create an Arab nation, much as Cavour had built Italy, and
Bismarck had created Germany out of a plethora of sovereign states.”
540: Scheme to
regain Suez Canal:
“Even though Great Britain and France had many
understandable reasons to go to war, they imposed a fatal burden on themselves
by using a ridiculously obvious stratagem as a pretext. Concocted by France, the
ploy required that Israel invade Egypt and advance toward the Suez Canal,
whereupon Great Britain and France would demand, in the name of freedom of
navigation, that both Egypt and Israel withdraw to a distance of ten miles from
the Canal. In the event of Egypt’s refusal, which was fully expected, Great
Britain and France would occupy the Canal Zone.”
541
: Mentions
1954 US-directed Guatemalan coup
546
: Henry
mentions Saddam Hussein’s rise to power; doesn’t mention the suspected
CIA-assisted coup that facilitated it
551
: Effect of
Russia ruling its satellites:
“Imperial rule, which was complicated enough under the tsars, grew even more
problematic under the communists, who compounded their subject populations’
hatred of foreign rule by imposing an untenable economic system…Soviet-style
central planning proved intolerable in the long run, even in the Soviet Union;
in the satellite orbit, it was disastrous from the star.”
554
: 557: Radio Liberty:
“Dulles had been a principal patron of institutions such as Radio Free Europe
and Radio Liberty, the major purpose
of which was to keep the principles of freedom alive in Eastern Europe while
encouraging sentiments capable of igniting revolt.”
Imre Nagy in Hungary:
“It was too late to ask the Hungarian people to entrust the
hated Communist Party with rectifying its own transgressions. What happened next
was straight out of a movie in which the main character is induced, reluctantly
and perhaps even uncomprehendingly, to undertake a mission he did not choose
that then turns into his destiny. A staunch, if reformist, communist his entire
life, Nagy seemed determined in his initial appearances during the uprising to
salvage the Communist Party…But as the days passed, he was transformed by the
passions of his people into a living symbol of the truth laid down by de
Tocqueville a century earlier:
‘…experience suggests that the most dangerous moment for an
evil government is usually when it begins to reform itself. Only great ingenuity
can save a prince who undertakes to give relief to his subjects after long
oppression. The sufferings that are endured patiently, as being inevitable,
become intolerable the moment it appears that there might be an escape. Reform
then only serves to reveal more clearly what still remains oppressive and now
all the more unbearable.’
Nagy was to pay with his life for the vision of democracy
that overtook him so belatedly. After the Soviets crushed the revolution, they
offered Nagy the opportunity to recant. His refusal and subsequent execution
assured him a place in the pantheon of those martyred to the cause of freedom in
Eastern Europe.”
[4]
566: “Insistence
on principle carries the unavoidable risk of war”
568
: German
management after the war:
“At the Potsdam Conference, the three victors had decided
that Berlin would be governed by the four occupying powers –the United States,
Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – which would jointly administer
Germany as well. As it turned out, the four-power administration of Germany
lasted little more than a year. By 1949, the Western zones were merged into the
Federal Republic, and the Russian zone became the German Democratic Republic.”
579
: “Advisors” playing their chief:
“When presidential advisers or cabinet members disagree
with their chief, they have to decide whether to make their case while the
disagreement is still largely theoretical or to wait for the moment of actual
decision. The answer determines future influence because presidents are
generally personalities of strong will that can be crossed only so often. If
advisers choose to challenge hypothetical cases, they may generate unnecessary
acrimony since the president may change his mind on his own. On the other hand,
if they wait on events, they run the risk of being stampeded.”
581
: The spirit
of Camp David, more optimism turns to naught
588
: Henry and
the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer
594
: Recap 1945
– 1958:
“The Berlin crisis marked the final consolidation of the
two spheres of influence that had, for nearly two decades, been jostling each
other along the dividing line partitioning the European Continent.”
598: Power
behind the thrown:
“It was under Macmillan that Great Britain completed the
transition from power to influence. He decided to embed British policy in
American policy and to expand the range of British options by skillfully
handling relations with Washington. Macmillan never contested a philosophical or
conceptual point, and rarely laid down an open challenge to key American
policies. He readily conceded the center stage to Washington while seeking to
shape the drama from behind the curtains.”
602
: US
productivity post cold war + difference between US and Europe:
“The United States had been presiding over world affairs
since the end of the Second World War in a manner not previously available to
any nation. With only a small portion of the world’s population, it was
producing nearly a third of all the worlds’ goods and services. Reinforced by an
enormous edge in nuclear technology, America basked in a vast margin of
superiority over any conceivable rival or combination of rivals…For several
decades, this surfeit of blessings had caused American leaders to forget how
unrepresentative the attitudes of a devastated, temporarily impotent, and
therefore pliant Europe were compared to Europe’s conduct when it was dominating
world affairs for two centuries. They failed to recall the European dynamism
which had launched the Industrial Revolution, the political philosophy which had
spawned the concept of national sovereignty, or the European style of diplomacy
which had operated a complex balance-of-power system for some three centuries.
As Europe recovered, with America’s indispensable help, some of the traditional
patterns of its diplomacy were bound to recur, particularly in France, where
modern statecraft had originated under Richelieu.”
605: De Gaulle
cannot accept a subservient France
608: Nuclear
weapons as an effective deterrent; yes or no?
“The Nuclear Age turned strategy into deterrence, and
deterrence into an esoteric intellectual exercise. Since deterrence can only be
tested negatively, by events that do not
take place, and since it is never
possible to demonstrate why something has not occurred, it became especially
difficult to assess whether the existing policy was the best possible policy or
a just barely effective one.”
612: De Gaulle’s
response to being rebuffed: Leaves NATO and demands US remove nuclear weapons +
Kissinger makes it sound like the term “New World Order” originated with Kennedy
when, in fact, it can be traced back
to the time of Wilson.
618
: A single
unifying threat needed:
“The Wilsonian vision of a community of democratic states operating on the basis
of a common purpose and a division of labor was appropriate to the international
order of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized as it was by the overriding external
threat of a totalitarian ideology and of America’s nuclear near-monopoly and
economic superiority. But the disappearance of a single, unifying threat and the
ideological collapse of communism, together with a more even distribution of
economic strength, impose on the international order the need for a more subtle
balancing of national and regional interests.”
623
: Henry
claims “America” goes to war “mostly on behalf” of perceived moral
obligations…he cannot possibly believe this, even ignoring the vast majority of
“regime-change” operations
[5]
625
: Problem
with intervention in “French” Indochina / Vietnam
626
: Domino
theory as pretext
629
: and
639: Guerrilla war VS Conventional
war:
“In a conventional war with established front lines,
superior firepower usually carries the day. By contrast, a guerrilla war is
generally not fought from fixed positions, and the guerrilla army hides among
the population. A conventional war is about control of territory; a guerrilla
war is about the security of the population. Since the guerrilla army is not
tied to the defense of any particular territory, it is in a position to
determine the field of battle to a considerable extent and to regulate the
casualties on both sides.
The guerrillas’ initial goal is to prevent the
consolidation of stable, legitimate institutions. Their favorite targets are the
worst and the best government officials. They attack the worst in order to win
popular sympathies by ‘punishing’ corrupt or oppressive officials; and they
attack the best because it is the most effective way of preventing the
government from achieving legitimacy and of discouraging an effective national
service.”
637
: and
639: Secret societies in Vietnam:
“The existing authorities consisted of a combination of
French-trained civil servants and a maze of secret societies…”
638
: 639: Dinh Diem supported by US
648
: Idea of
“nation building” enters the lexicon
649
: Vice
president sent for PR:
“The Kennedy Administration embarked on its journey into
the Vietnamese morass in May 1961 with a mission to Saigon by Vice President
Johnson in order to ‘assess’ the situation. Such missions almost invariably
signal that a decision has already been reached. No vice president is in a
position to make an independent judgment about a decade-old guerrilla war in a
visit of two or three days…Vice presidential overseas missions are generally
designed to stake American prestige, or to supply credibility for decisions that
have already been made. Johnson’s trip to Vietnam was a textbook example of
these rules.”
651
: Greatly
underestimated the number of troops needed in Vietnam
655
: Diem
overthrown / killed at US urging:
“By encouraging Diem’s overthrow, America cast its
involvement in Vietnam in concrete. Ultimately, every revolutionary war is about
governmental legitimacy; undermining it is the guerrillas’ principal aim. Diem’s
overthrow handed that objective to Hanoi for free…in the end, legitimacy involves an acceptance
of
authority without
compulsion.”
658
: Henry
admits Gulf of Tonkin deception, says it didn’t matter though because, if not
Tonkin, something else would have been used; the decision for war had already
been made
659
: USS Greer
also “put in harm’s way”
666: Critiques
of Vietnam
671
: Media turns
against the Vietnam War
(As if the Network didn’t give this new narrative the green light…like sending
the vice president abroad to discuss what has already been decided on, this was
little more than an announcement of the new policy.)
675
: Support for
Vietnam collapses, major backlash against LBJ:
“By the end of his presidency in 1968, Johnson could no
longer appear in public except on military bases or at other locations from
which violent protesters could be physically barred. Although he was an
incumbent president, he did not even find it possible to appear at the 1968
national convention of his own party.”
678
: Ho Chi Minh
Realpolitik:
“A practitioner of Realpolitik, Ho was
not about to concede at a negotiating table [to America] what he expected blood
and bullets would win him on the battlefield.” (So, I suppose you approve, ehh,
Henry?)
683
: Regarding
Vietnam, Henry claims there were “no simple choices”:
684: Averell
Harriman involved in secret talks
686
: Le Duc Tho
uses Realpolitik against
“imperialists”
697
: Piece of
paper can’t defend itself + more of Henry’s spinning:
“The peace agreement was not self-enforcing; no such
agreement could have been. North Vietnam still aimed for the union of Vietnam
under its rule, and a piece of paper signed in Paris was not going to alter
Hanoi’s permanent goals.
The communist victory rapidly settled one of the perennial
debates of the Vietnam War era – whether the specter of the expected bloodbath
in the wake of a communist takeover was a figment of the policymakers’ search
for pretexts to continue the war…In Cambodia, of course, genocide did occur…In
Vietnam, the suffering was less drastic. Still, hundreds of thousands of South
Vietnamese were herded into ‘re-education camps,’ another name for concentration
camps. In early 1977, communist authorities admitted to holding 50,000 political
prisoners, though most independent observers believed the true figure to be
closer to 200,000.”
702: Henry
claims the world is looking to America to construct a New World Order
“By the 1990s, free peoples everywhere were again looking
to America for guidance in constructing yet another new world order. And their
greatest fear was not America’s overweening involvement in the world but, once
again, its withdrawal from it. This is why the sadness of the memories of
Indochina should serve to remind us that American unity is both a duty and the
hope of the world.”
704: The
Establishment didn’t like Nixon and Nixon didn’t like the Establishment:
711
: Writing
Nixon’s foreign policy reports, authorship not important:
“Four such annual reports on American foreign policy were
issued starting in 1970. Drafted by my staff and me, these reports reflected the
President’s views and were issued in Nixon’s name. As with all such statements,
authorship is less significant than the president’s assumption of responsibility
for them.”
717 - 718: The
foreign policy bureaucracy and “leaks” to the press:
“The American foreign policy bureaucracy is for the most
part staffed by individuals who have dedicated themselves to what is, in
American society, a rather unorthodox career so that they may promulgate and
implement their views of a better world…Nixon’s attempt to tie the opening of
strategic arms negotiations to progress on political issues ran counter to the
passionate conviction of both the arms controllers…and the Kremlinologists…The
bureaucracy chipped away at the policy outlined in the President’s letter by
emphasizing arms control as an end in itself in leaks to the press…In The
New York Times of April 18, 1969,
‘officials’ described arms agreements with the Soviet Union as “an overriding
goal of the Nixon foreign policy.’ On April 22, the
Times had ‘American diplomats’ predicting Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks
in June. On May 13, The
Washington Post quoted Administration sources to the effect that, by May 29,
a date for the opening of talks would be set. These cumulative pressures to
progress on modifying Nixon’s stated position of linking arms control to
political issues were never posed as a head-on challenge; instead, a series of
tactical, day-to-day comments were used to edge matters toward the position
preferred by the bureaucracy.”
--- 719: Chess
analogy:
“Generally, the more squares a player dominates, the
greater his options and the more constrained become those of his opponent.
Similarly, in diplomacy, the more options one side has, the fewer will be
available to the other side and the more careful it will have to be in pursuing
its objectives. Indeed, such a state of affairs may in time provide an incentive
for the adversary to seed to end his adversarial role.”
721
: Nixon’s
outreach to China
724: Read
between the lines; what they really mean:
“When a country abjures its intention of exploiting a
conflict between two other parties, it is in fact signaling that it has the
capacity to do so and that both parties would do well to work at preserving that
neutrality. So too, when a nation expresses its ‘deep concern’ over a military
contingency, it is conveying that it will assist – in some as yet unspecified
way – the victim of what it has defined as aggression. Nixon was unique among
American presidents in this century by thus showing his preparedness to support
a country with which the United States had had no diplomatic relations for
twenty years…It marked America’s return to the world of
Realpolitik…In February 1970 – before
there had been any direct contact between Washington and Beijing – the report
called for practical negotiations with China and stressed that the United States
would not collude with the Soviet Union against China. This was, of course, the
reverse side of the warning to Moscow; it implied that Washington always had the
option if driven to it.”
726: Henry goes
secretly to China – seems quite impressed by its leaders
728
: Mao
dismisses his anti imperialist pronouncements as “empty cannons”
739
: 1973 Arab
Israeli War; Kissinger lies through his teeth
“In 1973, Egypt and Syria went to war against Israel. Both Israel and the United
States were taken completely by surprise, demonstrating how preconceptions often
shape intelligence assessments.” (This is nonsense. The Network, which obviously
included Kissinger, knew exactly what was coming. See William Engdahl’s
A Century of War, starting on page
135, for more information. Here is a brief summary: “Contrary to popular
impression, the ‘Yom Kippur’ War was not the simple result of miscalculation,
blunder or an Arab decision to launch a military strike against the state of
Israel. The entire constellation of events surrounding the outbreak of the
October War was secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the
powerful secret diplomatic channels developed by Nixon’s national security
adviser, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger effectively controlled the Israeli policy
response through his intimate relation with Israel’s Washington ambassador,
Simcha Dinitz. In addition, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and
Syrian side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical
elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo…US
intelligence reports, including intercepted communications from Arab officials
confirming the buildup for war, were firmly suppressed by Kissinger, who was by
then Nixon’s intelligence ‘czar.’” Realpolitik…)
741
: The
President and foreign policy
“The essence of foreign policy is precisely the ability to
accumulate nuances in pursuit of long-range goals.”
744: Hell hath
no fury like a bureaucrat scorned:
759: Helsinki
and Basket III:
“The most significant provision of the Helsinki Agreement
turned out to be the so-called Basket III on human rights…Basket III was
destined to play a major role in the disintegration of the Soviet satellite
orbit, and became a testimonial to all human rights activists in NATO
countries.”
765
: Henry’s
thoughts on Reagan
769: Reagan note
to Brezhnev
773: Pinochet
and Marcos:
“The Reagan team was consistent: it pressed both the
conservative Pinochet regime in Chile and the authoritarian Marcos regime in the
Philippines for reform; the former was induced to agree to a referendum and free
elections, which replaced it; the latter was overthrown with American
cooperation.”
774: Henry
loving Realpolitik + exaggerating the
Soviet threat
“The high-flying Wilsonian language in support of freedom
and democracy globally was leavened by an almost Machiavellian realism. America
did not go ‘abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’ in John Quincy Adams’
memorable phrase; rather, the Reagan Doctrine amounted to a strategy for helping
the enemy of one’s enemy – of which Richelieu would have heartily approved. The
Reagan Administration dispensed aid not only to genuine democrats…but also to
Islamic fundamentalists
in Afghanistan, to
rightists in Central America, and to tribal warlords in Africa. The United
States had no more in common with the mujahideen than Richelieu had had with the
Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Yet they shared a common enemy, and in the world
of national interest, that made them allies…
Reagan had deplored the inadequacy of the American defense
effort, and had warned of approaching Soviet superiority. Today we know that
these fears reflected an oversimplification of the nature of military
superiority in the Nuclear Age. But, whatever the accuracy of Reagan’s
perception of the Soviet military threat, it managed to rally his conservative
constituency far more than Nixon’s evocations of the geopolitical perils.”
780: Reagan’s
missile defense system
783
: Reducing
nuclear weapons
“The Reagan Administration pursued that part of the
Reykjavik agenda that was immediately realizable: the 50 percent reduction in
strategic forces, which had been envisioned as the first stage of an overall
agreement banning all missiles. Agreements were reached to destroy American and
Soviet intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missiles in Europe. Because this
agreement did not affect the nuclear forces of Great Britain and France, the
interallied disputes of twenty-five years earlier did not break out again.”
786: Washington
wanted Gorbachev to help build the NWO:
“Until well into 1991, Gorbachev was considered in Washington to be an
indispensable partner in the building of a new world order – to such an extent
that President Bush chose the Ukrainian Parliament as the unlikely venue for a
forum in which to extol the Soviet leader’s qualities and the importance of
keeping the Soviet Union together.”
788
: Gorbachev
on coexistence / perestroika
794
: Gorbachev
on ending spheres of influence:
Quoting Gorbachev: “Social and political order in one
country or another changed in the past and may change in the future. But this
change is the exclusive affair of the people of that country and is their
choice… Any interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the
sovereignty of states – friends, allies or any others – are inadmissible…It is
time to deposit in the archives the postulates of the cold war period, when
Europe was regarded as an arena of confrontation, divided into ‘spheres of
influence.’”
797
: Soviet
political structure – power center:
“Gorbachev miscalculated…Since Lenin, the Communist Party
had been the sole policymaking body. The government was the executive organ
implementing, but not designing, policy. The key Soviet position was always that
of the general secretary of the Communist Party; from Lenin through Brezhnev,
the communist leader rarely held a governmental office. The result was that the
ambitious and enterprising gravitated to the communist hierarchy while the
governmental structure attracted administrators without policy flair or even
interest in designing policy. By shifting his base from the Communist Party to
the governmental side of the Soviet system, Gorbachev had entrusted his
revolution to an army of clerks.”
798: Yeltsin
abolishes Soviet Union
801: Fear of an
outside threat is needed:
“Regardless of how accommodating a policy the West might have conducted, the
Soviet system had needed the specter of a permanent outside enemy to justify the
suffering it was imposing on its people and to maintain the armed forces and
security apparatus essential to its rule.”
804 +: Chapter
on the New World Order
806
: New World
Order is still decades away
“Both Bush and Clinton spoke of the new world order as if
it were just around the corner. In fact, it is still in a period of gestation,
and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century. Part
extension of the past, part unprecedented, the new world order, like those which
it succeeds, will emerge as an answer to three questions: What are the basic
units of the international order? What are their means of interacting? What are
the goals on behalf of which they interact?
807
: Postcolonial nations
810
: American
citizens need to realize that “national interests” trump moral considerations:
“Richelieu’s concept of
raison d’état – that the interests of
the state justify the means used to pursue them – has always been repugnant to
Americans. That is not to say that Americans have never practiced
raison d’état – there are many
instances.”
“Americans have never been comfortable acknowledging openly
their own selfish interests…American leaders always claimed to be struggling in
the name of principle, not interest.”
“In the next century, American leaders will have to
articulate for their public a concept of the national interest and explain how
that interest is served…by the maintenance of the balance of power. America will
need partners to preserve equilibrium in several regions of the world, and these
partners can not always be chosen on the basis of moral considerations alone.”
813: Any nations
that can match our strength must be weakened, benevolent or not:
“The domination by a single power of either of Eurasia’s
two principal spheres – Europe or Asia – remains a good definition of strategic
danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War. For such a grouping would have the
capacity to outstrip America economically and, in the end, militarily. That
danger would have to be resisted even were the dominant power apparently
benevolent, for if the intentions ever changed, America would find itself with a
grossly diminished capacity for effective resistance and a growing inability to
shape events.”
(There are multiple problems with this. First: it’s absurd
to suggest that we must spread the nation’s resources across the entire globe in
an effort to dominate every other nation on the planet – whether they’re friend
or foe – in order to “protect” America. It’s never worked and it never will
work. As the corruption and abuse inherent in any such coercive system begins to
grow, so too will the resentment and inevitable combination of powers that
retaliate against it.
Second: you seem incapable of realizing that it is the
deceptive and immoral policy makers of
the world – men like you, Henry – who are responsible for the greatest
atrocities inflicted on mankind. The majority of people do not want war; they
must be manipulated and / or terrified into accepting and funding it…technology
will make this model increasingly difficult to sustain. Mass political
awareness, and dissatisfaction with the kind of world that your thinking has
created, is exploding. There is an emerging opportunity to expose and overthrow
what you falsely refer to as the “new” world order, and millions of individuals
around the world are working toward that goal.
Last but not least, you ignore the most glaring weakness in
your own “security” argument: you suggest that the intentions of a benevolent
nation in Eurasia might change, but give no thought to the possibility that the
intentions of those who control the hegemonic machinery that you intend to build
might change. In other words: assuming you successfully established absolute
dominance, how would the citizens of the world, foreign and domestic, protect
themselves from such a power? I can’t imagine any greater risk to liberty in the
world than what you propose.)
821
: Might
brings entitlement:
“Germany will insist on the political influence to which
its military and economic power entitle it…”
835: Henry
claims America knew no threat to its survival until it emerged during the cold
war…How about when the British burned the Whitehouse down in the War of 1812, or
when the Civil War was tearing the country in two, or when the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor? I guess those threats don’t fit the narrative…