“History is a cruel
step-mother, and when it retaliates, it stops at nothing.” Lenin
History is huge, given that by definition it encompasses the
story of the human race going back to before the existence of written records. We grapple with the challenge of history by
parsing it into digestible lumps on the basis of time periods, geographic
location, linguistic communities, etc.
In order to understand it as something more involved than the simple
accretion of facts in sedimentary layers, we use metaphors, such as the turning
of a wheel or the flowing of water in a river, my own preferred image. The message in the metaphor is that change is
the singular constant across history even as it may slow down or speed up.
“History is written
for schoolmasters and armchair strategists.
Statesmen and warriors pick their war through the dark.” Lord Esher
Journal, 15 March 1915
Given the time spanned by human history, it is not
surprising that people have long debated, and still do, whether or not history
repeats itself. The English historian G
M Trevelyan summed up the debate this way:
‘‘History repeats itself!’ and ‘History
never repeats itself’ are about equally true… We never know enough about the
infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by
analogy.” However, George Bernard
Shaw offered an interesting observation when he pointed out that “If history repeats itself, and the
unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from
experience!” For me personally, the
debate is moot because whether or not history repeats itself, it is more than
evident from history that people clearly do.
Nations are often seen to behave like people, which might be at least in
part attributed to the reality that they are made up of people and are governed
or led by people. Thus nations, like individuals,
can be perceived to be engaging in bad behavior which others then try to adjust
through punishments and/or rewards.
“What experience and history teach is
this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or
acted on principles deduced from it.”
GWF Hegel
The violence engulfing the Islamic world over the past decade
or more, with growing conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis, long ago brought to
mind the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when the emerging Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church
confronted each other across the courts, cathedrals, and battlefields of Europe. General Sir John Hackett, in “The Profession
of Arms”, described the Thirty Years War as “A period in which fervent
Christians were prepared to hang, burn, torture, shoot or poison other fervent
Christians with whom they happened to disagree upon the correct approach to
eternal life.” To me the parallel of a
religiously fueled, politically complex expanding conflict is self-evident.
As Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus observed of Europe’s
version, “all the wars that are on foot in Europe have been fused together and
have become a single war.” A parallel
conflict in the Islamic world today might reach from the Atlantic Coast of West
Africa to the islands of Indonesia or the Philippines, and from Central Asia to
the deep Indian Ocean.
Much has been made of the failure of the United States to
show evidence of national strategy in recent decades, and I have been among
those critics. A speaker at the Army War
College earlier this year rightly corrected us by pointing out that the US
today is a status quo power – and preserving that status quo has been our
strategy. Unfortunately, such an
approach places the US in the position of King Canute telling the tide to go
out when it’s coming in – both are doomed to failure.
I bought a copy of Peter H. Wilson’s “The Thirty Years War:
Europe’s Tragedy” to refresh my knowledge of that conflict. Wilson offers a thorough examination of the
Thirty Years War, with excellent elaboration of its background and
preliminaries. He promises to tell the
whole story of the war right down to its ending (often only summarized). With some 850 pages of text plus some 75
pages of notes, I believe he will fulfill that promise.
Whatever happens today need not be an Islamic reenactment of
the Thirty Years War, but the complexities of that past conflict resonate in
the one potentially confronting us. They
both reflect a complex interaction of religious and geo-political motivations
for conflict. They are contests between
both state and non-state actors. Individuals from around the world choose to
join the conflict in service of one side or the other, often in contradiction
of their own nation’s stance on the war.
Co-religionists end up in conflict with each other for political and
geo-political reasons even as they also fight others because they were not of
the same faith.
The principal players in Europe’s war were Spain, Holland,
France, the German principalities, the Holy Roman Empire and its Electors (both
Protestants and Catholics), and Sweden – with Lutherans, Calvinists, and
Catholics all pitted against each other in various and changing
combinations. Many soldiers became
mercenaries and fought for pay over religion or country. How might we look for lessons from their
experience to determine which nations might possibly play which original
roles? Is the USA in the role of France
or Spain? Is Russia or China the Ottoman
Empire? There is no papal style
structure in the Islamic world, but perhaps Saudi control of the holy places of
Mecca and Medina brings them close to such a role.
Reading Wilson’s chapter Pax
Hispanica, it quickly becomes evident that Spain was then, as the United
States is today, the principal status quo power – and almost the sole
superpower by wealth and military capabilities, attempting to keep things the
way they are. The challenges facing
Spain then echo those facing us today.
Both countries are the economic top dogs because of global reach and,
for Spain, the influx of silver from the mines in its American colonies. But this wealth led Spain to neglect
development of a balanced economy that promoted both manufacturing and
agriculture, and it contributed to inflation.
The US is struggling to deal with economic challenges intertwined
with philosophical battles over its social, economic, and even political future. These ongoing contests are preventing it from
effectively applying almost any remedies at the present time. Both Spain and the US were also spending
massive amounts on defense, fighting extended foreign wars, and debates over
perceived threats and responses dominated each nation’s strategic thinking. And both countries were suspected by other
nations of ambitious and expansionist intentions as they sought to shape the
world into the desired form. However, the
mere hypothesis that the US now is playing a role similar to Spain during the
Thirty Years War must be tested against events in the real world and measured against
the events of some 600 years ago played out for Spain. Spain began its decline as it failed to
maintain the world order which it had come to dominate and failed to adapt to
the new emerging world order.
The hard reality is that the American people have one choice
to make (among many decisions facing them):
Will the United States remain the sole superpower and by
definition the world’s policeman in pursuit of this imperial role as it seeks
to shape the world in its own image?
Or, will the US concede sufficient authority and capability
and autonomy to a supranational body that could act around the world without
the US or US forces and with the inevitable result of shaping a world to some
greater or lesser degree different from what the US might prefer?
“The future is hidden
even from the men who made it.” Anatole
France
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