“The chief practical use of history,” James Bryce wrote, “is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” That fairly summarizes the dim view the profession has of analogies that reduce complex issues to, say, another Vietnam or Munich. If two events seem similar in one way, the determined polemicist is sure to insist they agree in others. As historian David Hackett Fischer noted, when they fall into the wrong hands, analogies become dangerous weapons, employed as substitutes, rather than auxiliaries, to proof.
And yet, when applied wisely, analogies can clarify. In fact, as supplements to reasoned argument or tools of amplification and illustration, they are useful to historical writing, and, when handled with care, often illuminate.
Donald and Frederick Kagan, historians at Yale and West Point respectively (and father and son), use an analogy to illuminate our present situation in While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today. Their comparison of Britain during the interwar period with America now, is meant to be a wake-up call. “America is in danger,” they warn in the opening sentence. But theirs is a polemic that manages, through meticulous detail, careful qualification, and absence of exaggeration, to avoid twisting the historical record.
Still, the parallels between the two eras are meant to alarm, and they do. If recent history has confounded the expectation that the post-Cold War era would be a period of international harmony, this vision, a staple of British thinking in the period after the First World War, was not so easily shaken then. Just as U.S. policymakers in recent years have been assuring Americans that their future will reduce to a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement, so too did British officials insist a new era would abolish the complexities of international politics.
In place of strategic thinking, they embraced instead the serene conviction that commercial relations and treaties were properly a cause rather than an effect of peace — a belief that should have been repudiated decisively at the Marne. As the Kagans summarize the thinking of those years, “The conventional wisdom of the past must be rejected; strategy, alliances, armaments, military forces had been the causes of wars in the past. The rejection of these things and the way of thinking that went with them is what would bring peace.”
This line of thinking, neatly exemplified by the Locarno agreements of 1925, which essentially forbade war between Europe’s major powers, also responded to multiple needs unrelated to Britain’s faith in the power of treaties. To begin with, England’s leaders, and even more so its public, were understandably determined to recover from the carnage of the war that had just ended. The Kagans allude to our “Vietnam syndrome,” but, as they concede, that scarcely captures the price that the Somme and Passchendael had exacted from Britain’s soul. As Lloyd George put it, the task for England now was “to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” And the policy implications were clear: England should curtail its strategic commitments abroad and, as George McGovern would advise America to do a half century later, come home.
Though understandable, the impulse to turn inward was misguided. At the time, Britain was, like the United States today, a hinge of world order. Were it to wash its hands of the world’s problems, those problems would soon enough multiply and imperil England directly. But absent in London was even the inclination to attend to Britain’s imperial obligations. In what has since become the favorite cliche of American politicians, British conservative leader Bonar Law declared in 1922 that “we cannot act alone as the policeman of the world.” Rather, peace would be guaranteed as a result of three things: international law, military technology, and appeasement.
As to the first of these, from the Versailles treaty to Munich twenty years later, the worthless and unenforceable accord was a leitmotif of the interwar period — just as it has become a staple of Clintonite diplomacy in North Korea, China, and the Balkans. The terms of Versailles, for example, harsh on Germany and difficult to enforce, were progressively watered down and eventually abandoned altogether. Then, too, the League of Nations, which, like the United Nations, was to preserve international order through collective security, fared no better than its successor.
True, many British officials, particularly those in the defense establishment, harbored suspicions about the power of the parchment. Fortunately, England fielded a powerful insurance policy in its armed forces. But just like their American counterparts in the early 1990s, British leaders during the 1920s seemed to view the country’s military establishment less as an instrument of strategy than a burdensome drain on the national treasury.
Intent on reaping a “peace dividend,” officials pared the military to the bone and tailored strategic forecasts to reflect their parsimony. Notoriously, they devised successive “ten-year rules,” which justified paltry defense expenditures on the basis of predictions of a lasting peace. These rules were abandoned only in 1932 — seven years prior to the outbreak of another world war.
What is less well known, and what the Kagans recount in devastating detail, are the Panglossian assumptions about military technology that governed British military planning — assumptions that are being revived today as if nothing had been learned and nothing remembered. The most notable parallel is the conviction that airpower offers a tool to unshackle decisionmakers from war’s iron logic. The Clinton administration has, for example, shown a clear preference for what are known as “stand-off attacks” — missile strikes launched from a suitably safe remove or, if necessary, from manned aircraft. At the same time, it underfunds the army, rarely permitting it to venture far from home and even then, keeping it on a tight leash to preclude it from causing embarrassment.
The British, too, embraced airpower (and a doctrine of “distant attack”) without condition and regardless of consequence. RAF chief Frederick Sykes argued, “In air power we possess a rapid and economical instrument by which to ensure peace and good government in our outer empire.” Reeling from the casualties of the First World War and unwilling to expend ample funds to maintain large ground forces, the British government proved an easy sell for the RAF. It even devised a doctrine of “air policing,” which was employed to put down insurrections in, among other places, Iraq.
“Air power,” the Kagans write, “became a panacea that cured the host of ills caused by military weakness — right up to the time the nation faced a serious test of strength.” Important as airpower, and particularly strategic bombing, would prove to be, the resources devoted to its development exacted a steep price from Britain’s air defense forces. Languishing from years of neglect, these forces would perform unevenly in the next war.
The most commonly noted, but nonetheless most important, similarity between the two eras pertains to the practice of appeasement. Today, appeasement is a dirty word. But between the wars it was a policy whose worth had yet to be disproved — not unlike the current mantra of “engagement.” In fact, the Kagans find engagement, especially in the case of North Korea, to be nothing more than appeasement clothed in new-age rhetoric. They also locate in America’s stance toward Iraq echoes of allied fecklessness toward Germany between the wars and reveal some intriguing similarities between 1998’s Operation Desert Fox and France’s ill-fated occupation of the Ruhr.
What distinguishes the book’s treatment of appeasement from hundreds of others before it — and what is sure to be its most controversial aspect — is the chronology it offers. In the conventional telling, British appeasement commences with the decision to turn the other cheek when Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland and Mussolini invades Ethiopia. True, the inclination was evident even before Hitler takes power. Germany had by that point been rearming for at least six years with little complaint from Britain. But the Kagans go further, contending that the practice dates back to the Locarno accords of 1925, of which the liberal Weimar Republic was the German signatory. “Every day that went by hardened in the minds of successive German governments the desire to overthrow the [Versailles] treaty and strengthened their vast and complex arrangement to subvert it in time.”
Clearly, America today lacks a rival on the scale of Germany. China, to be sure, may soon pose such a threat, and the United States has certainly been appeasing it. But the Kagans focus instead on the practice as applied to Saddam Hussein (the chapter on Iraq is entitled “Another Versailles”), Serbia, and North Korea, which, however unseemly, has not been nearly in the same league as Britain’s appeasement of Germany. As the Kagans demonstrate, Britain was by the late 1930s appeasing from a position of weakness. Folly though the practice may be, America appeases rogue regimes from a position of strength. This makes the American version all the more inscrutable.
After all, Britain’s unwillingness to shoulder its responsibilities was born of economic hardship and unimaginable bloodshed. What’s America’s excuse? The Kagans correctly reply that there is none. The United States is in the midst of its longest ever period of economic growth. Its political creed has enjoyed near-universal vindication. Far from resenting American power, other nations implore the United States to maintain an active global role. “America has suffered no such recent calamity as World War I,” the Kagans add. “The continued wounds received from the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ are self-inflicted and unnecessary. There is no reason whatsoever why America should not accept the burden fate laid upon her in 1991.”
And, yet, it has not. The Kagans do not offer an explanation and seem genuinely puzzled by America’s loss of will. But in noting America’s unprecedented fortunes, and how sharply this state of affairs contrasts with Britain’s misery, they suggest a possible answer: that America’s vulnerability derives from its very prosperity. For wealth seems to have dulled Americans’ awareness of the threats beyond their shores. It has also had a giddy and sometimes narcotic effect on otherwise sober-minded policymakers who seem convinced that a thriving international economy will suffice to sweep up the detritus of the last century.
But it is a fanciful conceit to imagine that prosperity can be relied on to achieve the foreign policy aims of the United States. Contentment can just as easily undermine America’s vigilance. And, measured by the Kagans’ indictment of the Clinton years, this is exactly what it has done. America may be repeating Britain’s mistakes for very different reasons. But, as the Kagans convincingly demonstrate, it is repeating them nonetheless.
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
