I Call Bullshit

 I read this interview with Stephen Wertheim and was left incredibly unconvinced by his argument. It very much feels to me like he's conflating the very bad decision by Bush to invade Iraq with American military hegemony. Since the rise of a global world around 1750, either Britain or the United States has served as a sort of global hegemon. The presence of both US and NATO ships off the coast of Somalia or in the South China Sea is important and not a role that anyone can play. Yes, there is a burden that American tax payers have to bear because the US is patrolling the Indian Ocean or insuring that Saudi Arabia doesn't get invaded, but that is repaid by the US dollar being the unquestioned global currency. 

Wertheim acknowledges that this grew out of World War II, but he seems to miss the almost immediate efforts to demobilize after the war, followed by the shock of the Korean War and NSC-68. Americans wanted to retreat into the Western Hemisphere after the war, but Britain announced - in response to the crises in Turkey and Greece - that it could no longer afford to play a stabilizing role in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Truman administration acted to replace Britain and the Truman Doctrine was born. The Marshall Plan only passed because of aggressive Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia; NATO only happened because of the Berlin Blockade. America assumed the role of global superpower because of the lesson of trying to appease aggressive expansionist dictators that World War II taught us.

Was that lesson overlearned? How many great power wars have occurred since 1945? The only one that remotely comes close was the Sino-Soviet border wars in the 1960s and if anything they prove the utility of American global security arrangements, sitting as they do outside of them. The first Gulf War was important. If anything, American reluctance to get involved in Rwanda and Bosnia made the world worse.

Now, if Wertheim suggests that the relationship between Europe and the US should be more equal in terms of responsibility, there is some merit there. NATO sort of needs a new mission, but Russian expansionism suggests it's hardly obsolete. 

Despite the handwringing, the world really is safer from interstate military conflict than at any time in it's history. If we look at post-World War II interstate wars with high deaths and exclude civil wars and wars of independence, in declining number of deaths there is the Second Congo War (1998-2003) which began as a civil war in Congo, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq War, the Iran-Iraq War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Everything else has occurred as civil wars, wars of independence and collapsing states. 

In other words, the post-war order put in place largely by the United States and predicated on American military ability, has done what it was designed to do: prevent immensely damaging interstate wars. If the argument is that America and the rest of the global North should work harder to prevent internal conflicts...ok. But that is not Wertheim's argument. 

It has been 75 years since World War II ended. It seems clear that we have forgotten what great power wars can do. Wertheim certainly forgot.