NOTE: This was originally written on Easter Sunday but not published until Tuesday, two days later. You can thank Patriots’ Day in New England for that, as I was out yesterday cheering for the Boston Marathon runners as they went past my house….
Today is Easter 2022, which means that today is not only the date for “The Hell of the North” (which ended up being won by a Dutch cyclist on a British team), but it’s also a day of rebirth. This year it also happens to fall the day before Patriots’ Day is celebrated (and two days before the actual anniversary). But instead of focusing on the future, I’d rather look at the past, by going through some responses to my recent posts here. And I admit that this isn’t an area that I’ve thought as much about as some other areas, so any contradictory comments from others are welcome.
In response to my article Friday about the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (between 1945 and 1960), two of my friends, Ameek Ashok Ponda and Terry Logan, responded on Facebook. I’ve decided to respond to their comments in here, in part because I want to respond to the entire idea of Pax Americana, which Ameek brings up in his comment, reproduced below:
As you quoted in your piece: “The purpose of NATO is to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”. Pax Americana.
Ameek’s question inspired a question from Terry:
Over the past three decades a concern of mine has continued to grow. Does Pax Americana continue to exist because our commitment to individual freedom produces better outcomes? Or will it be primarily driven by a superior war machine?
Unquestionably, one of the intents of the postwar period was to create a “New World Order” (a very controversial term in its own right) that did not explode into worldwide conflict. And we sometimes see that referred to as the Pax Americana, with the claim being that the world is at relative peace under hegemonic domination by the U.S. (and perhaps a discussion about whether that is a positive development).
Pax Britannica (19th century)
The general model for this claim is the Pax Romana, generally viewed as running for the roughly two centuries from the rise of Augustus Caesar until the death of Marcus Aurelius. But the more immediate model for this claim was the century before World War I, from the end of Congress of Vienna (the Napoleonic Wars) in 1815 to the start of World War I in 1914, which has been referred to as the Pax Britannica. And there is little question that the British were clearly the dominant military power in the world. But did either actually bring world peace (Pax Mundi)?
During the “British Peace”, the British had to go to war several times, including the anti-piracy General Maritime Treaty of 1820, the First Anglo-Burmese War (1820s), the Battle of Navarino (1820s), the First Opium War (1830s-40s), the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1850s), the Crimean War (1850s), the Second Opium War (1850s), the First Boer War (1880s), the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1880s), the Anglo-Egyptian War (1880s), the Second Boer War (1890s-1900s), and the Boxer Rebellion (1890s-1900s), along with other, more minor conflicts. There were also a number of other wars in which the British played no role, such as the Franco-Austrian War (1850s), the American Civil War (1860s), the Austro-Prussian War (1860s), the Franco-Prussian War (1870s), the Spanish-American War (1890s), and the Russo-Japanese War (1900s). It’s clear from this that, whatever else the Pax Britannica may have been, it was not a time of pax. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this was also true of the Pax Romana.
Instead, the Pax Britannica can best be viewed as a period where the British exerted a global hegemony, which they then used to support the Conservative Order consisting of the old aristocracies, while suppressing global desires for self-determination, especially when accompanied by revolutionary actions. (A similar argument would apply to the Pax Romana.) During this period, and generally with Britain’s express consent, the global slave trade in individuals was extinguished, but the global colony trade in nations flourished. Non-European areas were generally enslaved by European powers, most often Britain but also other European empires, including France, the Netherlands, and even Germany (which didn’t exist at the start of Pax Britannica). And perhaps the worst offender was tiny Belgium in its brutal rule over the Congo, including absolutely dehumanizing atrocities.
Usually, these conquests were justified either as (1) helping the poor benighted locals to shed their moral (or sometimes intellectual) ignorance, or (2) an example of Social Darwinism or “survival of the fittest”, where the superior culture has won. But the result was that Britain ruled a world full of “colonies”, vassal states that generally were run by British aristocrats who were supported by British military might.
Kinda like this Beach Boys song from the group’s artistic (but not commercial) high point:
So in that sense there was peace, at least on Britain’s terms. Britain may have had to fight to maintain that peace, but it was almost always on the winning side in all of those wars, and so the Conservative Order continued to dominate the world. And the Conservative Order stood against the principles that had been expressed by the French Revolution: Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Revolutionary ideals conflict with the established order
But the United States had been founded on just those principles. Part of the American struggle in the 19th century was to reconcile those principles with the Conservative Order, with inconsistent results (illustrated best both by the struggle over domestic slavery, which was a clear implementation of a race-based caste system (embodied in the legal theory that one drop of black blood made you black) that stood in contrast to the longstanding “indentured servitude” system, and by the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, where the independence given to Cuba contrasted by the commonwealth status of Puerto Rico, and both contrasted with the colonial status of the Philippines). That’s the reason that American conservatism (except under The Former Guy) has embraced classical liberal principles, unlike most of the rest of the world, where conservatism supports aristocratic principles of leaving the old order unchanged.
The pivotal role played by the Americans in the two World Wars and the dominant position of America after WWII brought that conflict under a worldwide microscope. Would Pax Americana be different from Pax Britannica? If so, how?
The first question was whether there would even be a Pax Americana. The devastation of WWII led to worldwide challenges from the colonies of damaged European nations over their subordinate status. Also, as the NATO article illustrates, the Soviets had no interest in accepting a subordinate position in a world order dominated by America. And the Americans began throwing their weight around in a fashion very similar to the British, supporting its subservient allies and opposing their enemies, even if their enemies were former colonies seeking their own liberation.
Many of these former colonies had no history of self-rule for hundreds of years. And they developed in haphazard fashion. Some were wannabe pluralist democracies, similar to the United States. Some were strongman democracies that verged on kleptocracies. Some were dictatorships. And some were ostensibly communist. Yet even these communist countries divided, with some constructed in the image of the Stalinist Soviet Union and some in the image of the Leninist Soviet Union (in rough terms). It may have been easy for Americans to side with the newly-formed democratic state of South Korea against the invasion of the Stalinist North Korean dictatorship, but most cases presented much less clear differentiations.
Is a Pax Mundi an oppressor’s peace?
In the early post-WWII years, the United States adopted similar strategies to those that had been adopted by Britain during the Pax Britannia. American priority was on maintaining the existing national order, and doing so would maintain the existing international order. But fairly quickly, American priority shifted to all anti-Communist all the time. And this led to American commitments to some significantly repressive, and even totalitarian regimes, as long as they were anti-Communist. One particular example of the difficult choices for which the Americans were not prepared occurred on the island of Taiwan (previously known as Formosa) right after the war ended.
In 1895, under a treaty between China and Japan, China had ceded Taiwan to Japan. The Taiwanese weren’t at all happy about it and tried to set up an independent Republic of Formosa, but then the Japanese army landed and took the capital Tainan. The Japanese then gave the residents two months to decide whether to move back to China or stay on Japanese Taiwan, and fewer than 10,000 residents out of about 2.5 million chose to leave the island. Japan intended to govern Taiwan as a colony, because there was a split in views for about the first 20 years about whether Taiwan could ever be governed under the same laws as were applied on the Japanese home islands. This came to an end due to a change in Japanese tactics after a significant attempt at an anti-Japanese rebellion in Taiwan.
For around the next twenty years, the Japanese gave most of the Taiwanese increasing rights and increasing respect for their differences from Japanese systems — but continued the subordinate status of the Taiwanese in general and the “barbarian” status of the Taiwanese aboriginals, until a particularly egregious incident with the aboriginals caused the Japanese representatives to be recalled and replaced. After this, the final decade of Japanese occupation was largely focused on treating the Taiwanese as Japanese, including through usage of the Japanese language and elimination of restrictions on Taiwanese rights. But that all failed when Japan lost WWII, and the Americans took Taiwan and gave it back to China in August 1945 (although a treaty memorializing this transfer has never been signed).
Taiwan and China had both changed during Taiwan’s 50-year Japanese “exile” from China. The Republic of China (“ROC”) and the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) had engaged in a civil war going back to the 1920s, which was interrupted by the Japanese invasion during WWII, but no Taiwanese were part of that dispute, and so both parties still saw Taiwan as a colony that could be exploited. As a result, corrupt ROC officials wanted to go to Taiwan to make their fortunes. When locals became enraged at police action in Taiwan in early 1947 and rioted, the ROC army opened fire, and the subsequent protests led the ROC to suspend all rights on the island — and the imposition of martial law combined with large-scale brutality against the residents of Taiwan left at least 3-4,000 Taiwanese dead.
Yet when the Chinese Civil War tipped decisively in the CCP’s direction in 1949, two years later, Taiwan was still under ROC martial law (although the ROC official responsible for the mass killings had been arrested to quell the protests and was later executed). None of that, or the Taiwanese desire for self-determination, was taken into account by the Americans, who provided the naval support that permitted key ROC politicians to flee mainland China and establish a one-party dictatorship on Taiwan, with the original dictator being succeeded by his son (as in many totalitarian states).
Because of claims that the native Taiwanese night be sympathetic to the Communists, Taiwan remained under an ROC martial-law dictatorship for almost 40 years, until it was finally ended in 1987, shortly before the death of the son who had taken over as dictator. Instead of turning the country over to his children or his brother as he was approaching death and continuing the totalitarian dynasty, he appointed a Taiwanese native (Lee Teng-hui) as his successor and allowed other parties to exist, which led to the first contested elections in 1996 and the emergence of a second party, which won the 2000 elections.
In the entire martial-law period from 1945 to 1987, U.S. policy never recognized Taiwan as anything other than a mere colony of China — despite the fact that the total length of time that the same government controlled both mainland China and Taiwan in the prior 101 years was slightly under 4 years. During that 42-year period of martial law over Taiwan, we also made a diplomatic acknowledgement in the late 1970s that Taiwan was a part of mainland China, despite the fact that, in actuality, it was not.
In truth, Pax Americana was every bit as imperialistic as Pax Britannica until the late 1970s. With a stated goal of anti-communism, America intervened in several countries, sometimes on the side of the local government and sometimes against it, but more often on the side of oppression of anti-government movements. One of the darkest points during that era was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, where U.S.-backed mercenaries invaded Cuba to “liberate” it from a totalitarian communist government that had just overthrown a totalitarian kleptocracy; the only thing that the U.S. did in that entire misadventure that now can be considered without embarrassment is that it didn’t send in regular army troops after the mercenaries were routed.
The “human rights” era
But then things changed, and the reason can be stated in one word: Vietnam. As a consequence of Vietnam, a new American president, Jimmy Carter, was elected, and he adopted a policy that the U.S. should only support allies who embraced American values of democracy and individual freedom. Carter intended the principal illustration of this anti-imperialist policy change to be the Panama Canal. The U.S. had signed a treaty with Panama in 1903 that gave it the land designated as the Panama Canal Zone in perpetuity. Carter, however, signed a new treaty with Panama in 1977 that promised to return the land (and the canal) to Panama in 1999.
Of course, that date was two decades in the future, and there were rumors at the time that it wouldn’t actually happen (although . . . spoiler alert . . . it did). The real-time examples of the change in American policy that the rest of the world focused on took place in Iran and Nicaragua. Both were run by brutal and corrupt totalitarian and kleptocratic dictators who had established themselves as rulers for life and had little interest in Carter’s “human rights” agenda. Both of them faced rebellions from within that may also have been funded in part by countries that were hostile to American values. In the past, that would have justified U.S. support. But in both cases, under the new U.S. policy, the governments were allowed to fall to the insurgents without U.S. intervention (except to evacuate the despots before the rebels captured them). (This was also the period where the U.S. pulled its support of the totalitarian government in Taiwan.) Unfortunately for Carter, the Iranian insurgents were so grateful to him for pulling the rug out from under Reza Pahlavi and permitting his overthrowing that they almost immediately attacked the U.S. embassy in Iran and held 52 American diplomats there hostage for over a year, which was perhaps the most unfortunate example of Carter’s policy choices biting him in the behind and helping to ensure that he would be a “one-termer”.
But Carter’s changes outlasted his administration. When Ronald Reagan succeeded Carter, there were many commentators who wanted the U.S. to return to the previous policy. But generally Reagan did not, with the possible exception of Eastern Europe, where he steadfastly wanted to reverse the U.S.’s acquiescence in the post-WWII Soviet oppression. Reagan’s administration generally believed that the U.S. had an interest (really, a self-interest) in preventing existing democracies from becoming totalitarian (including Communist) states, but it also believed that the U.S. didn't have an interest in the interventionist goal of trying to turn a totalitarian state into a democracy (generally known as “nation-building”). In fact, Reaganites generally believed that nation-building was not possible. Instead, Reagan’s foreign policy generally defended democracies from falling to totalitarians but did not try to introduce democracy in places that had not previously had it (except for Eastern Europe).
Neocon fever — don’t catch it!
However, that revision in American policy provided fuel for a group of ideologues who wanted to use Pax Americana to introduce a further change: a zealous pursuit of the establishment of new democracies all over the world to advance human rights. and the use of U.S. military power to defend the new democracies. This idea became a cornerstone of a group known as “neoconservatives”, who were a prominent part of George W. Bush’s administration.
As I previously wrote, “neoconservative” was a term used to describe former liberals with relatively hawkish views who had been Democrats but became Republicans when the left moved toward straight pacifism after Vietnam. Some had been involved with the early stages of the Carter administration. For the most part, the neocons never abandoned their beliefs in foreign interventionism and regime change, which was generally accompanied by a type of one-world idealism.
Now there is a commonality between neoconservatism and Reaganite belief, but it's much weaker than the common usage of neoconservatism would imply. Reagan (and, for another example, William F. Buckley Jr.) came out of the largely libertarian and partially isolationist Goldwater movement in 1964, and to a large extent, they believed in letting other countries remain totalitarian until the citizens of the country forced change. By contrast, George W. Bush clearly sided with the neocons, and the Bush administration engaged in nation building in both Afghanistan and Iraq — quite unsuccessfully in Afghanistan (where, after tag-team blunders by TFG and Biden, the “democratic” government collapsed within a week of the U.S. withdrawal), and only somewhat better in Iraq.
Obama continued the neocon folly by intervening in the Arab Spring, with about the same caliber of results that Bush achieved in Afghanistan — and with a dead U.S. ambassador in Benghazi. After that, he generally shied away from foreign intervention, even in cases where he had established a “red line”. And “neocon” has since become a dirty word in D.C.
The art of fighting without fighting
The problem is that, because the differentiation between neoconservative and Reaganesque foreign policy was poorly understood by both parties, the U.S. is now trying a “hands off” version of Pax Americana, where the U.S. threatens consequences to other countries that refuse to abide by U.S. wishes, and then does . . . nothing. This directionless meandering seems to be a bipartisan strategy, because it started with Obama in Syria, but it has continued through the rest of Obama’s term, the the TFG morass, and currently the Biden confusion. In Ukraine right now, we unfortunately have to listen to Biden say something obviously true (such as “Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine”), and then wait for a few minutes to a day, before the administration qualifies or even disavows the claim so it doesn’t actually have to take action now or (perhaps) ever.
In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s character claims to practice the martial-arts style of “fighting without fighting”. But Lee also showed in the movie that he could fight and defeat anyone. “Fighting without fighting” also appears to be the strategy that the U.S. is trying to follow right now, where we supply allies with weapons but not with personnel — with the consequence that American allies such as Ukraine end up having to fight in our place in the name of Pax Americana. Frankly, this appears to be the most ludicrous variation of Pax Americana yet, and yet there have been no signs that the American people themselves want to see a change. To paraphrase the late musician Adam Schlesinger, after the recent misadventures in the name of Pax Americana, the strategy needs inspiration, not just another negotiation. International diplomacy always contains an inherent risk, and yet the current U.S. political environment supports only risk-free moves. Second spoiler alert: there are no such moves in international diplomacy; the only way to be risk-free is not to play.
The future of Pax Americana?
Vladimir Putin has made it very clear that the goal of his current aggression against Ukraine is to end Pax Americana. In the statement from Kremlin propagandist Petr Akopov intended to be published in RIA Novosti after Russia’s blitzkrieg victory in Ukraine, which didn’t materialize (but which nevertheless was briefly published and then withdrawn), is the following:
A multipolar world has finally become a reality – the operation in Ukraine is not capable of rallying anyone but the West against Russia. Because the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well – this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia’s return of its historical space and its place in the world.
China and India, Latin America and Africa, the Islamic world and Southeast Asia – no one believes that the West leads the world order, much less sets the rules of the game. Russia has not only challenged the West, it has shown that the era of Western global domination can be considered completely and finally over.
The new world will be built by all civilizations and centers of power, naturally, together with the West (united or not) – but not on its terms and not according to its rules.
Based on this, it appears that Russia and its allies intend to market a Russian victory in Ukraine as the end of Pax Americana. The truth is that Pax Americana emerged after the Allied victory in WWII and has remained only because other countries believe it to be true and so do not challenge it. Whether the Ukraine battle will mean the end of Pax Americana remains to be seen, but America’s “fighting without fighting” stance doesn’t provide a great basis at the start for its continuation. Then again, if Ukrainian troops fighting largely with NATO weapons can defeat the Russians, Pax Americana will continue until the next crisis.
Three questions and their answers
To turn specifically to Terry’s questions from the start:
Does Pax Americana produces better outcomes? In the previous sections, I noted how the definition of the steps that the U.S. was willing to perform in the name of Pax Americana have varied over time. Part of the reason for the variances were the failures produced by the variation then being employed. Conversely, Pax Americana has kept most of the world’s democracies at peace since WWII. If I fly to Warsaw, Prague, or Taipei, I don’t expect to encounter any problems unless I create them myself. Thus, despite the erratic nature of its implementation, I would not be in any hurry to jettison Pax Americana.
Does our commitment to individual freedom produces better outcomes? Right now, I’d argue that America is only applying Pax Americana in situations where the country involved embraces the same values. That’s why we see America willing (at least on paper) to stand up for Taiwan, which has been a multiparty democracy for over 30 years, against China — but not willing to commit anything in other world conflicts. Whether the U.S. would actually be willing to use American lives to defend Taiwan in the event of a conflict is something that China may want to establish, but we can hope that cooler heads prevail in Beijing before Chinese aggression gets to that point.
Will the future of Pax Americana be primarily driven by a superior war machine? Well, no country is able to defend a world peace around its order unless it has a superior war machine. Sometimes we consider war machines to be a negative. For example, President Dwight Eisenhower railed against the “military-industrial complex”, which he felt had a tendency to drag us into war for its own purposes. Sometimes we use the name to mean something else. For example, in the Marvel Comics movies, “War Machine” is the name given to superhero James “Rhodey” Rhodes. But I admit that I’m comfortable trying to defend existing democracies in the world, along the lines of the Reaganesque policy choices, and I don’t see any current conflicts in which the U.S. is involved simply because it has a “superior war machine”.
From Russia without love
One final comment came from one of my friends who chooses to support Russia in its current war of aggression against Ukraine. In answer to my piece on the war, he wrote:
The most important aspect of the current situation in Ukraine to be realized is that if the US were in Russia's shoes they would have basically done the same thing with two exceptions. They would have done it a lot sooner and would have killed a lot more people in the process. It really is that simple.
All I can say in response to this is “wow”. Has the U.S. really been going around the world attacking countries that haven’t attacked us or our allies during the post-Vietnam phase of Pax Americana? The Iraq War started because Iraq attacked and conquered Kuwait. The Afghanistan War started because Afghanistan permitted al-Qaeda to operate openly within the country while it was planning its attacks on American targets.
The ending tag (“It really is that simple”), which treats this very controversial assertion about American aggression and brutality as if is so obvious that even a caveman could see it, seems to me to illustrate that a serious amount of dubious propaganda underlies the creation of this viewpoint. And I don’t have the time or the inclination to undertake a deprogramming effort. But it helps to remember that this is the degree of loyalty that TFG’s supporters constantly provide to him.
Be seeing you.