Doomed to Repeat

If it were not for the seriousness of the consequences, it would seem hardly sporting anymore to continue attacking the present administration’s foreign policy (whatever in the way of “policy” one can find). The five-year pile-on from the Right has been well-warranted, but occasionally one wants a bit wilier game than fish in barrels.

Still, the critiques continue coming, because the matter is so important. Two pieces that have cropped up recently are worth noting. Last weekend, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson published in the Wall Street Journal an article on America’s “geopolitical taper” and its global consequences (not-so-fun fact: “It is now almost certain that more people have died violent deaths in the Greater Middle East during this presidency than during the last one.” Has America’s resident Nobel Peace Prize recipient noodled that lately?). It’s familiar enough stuff, but he notes the president’s first-semester-of-International-Relations-101 approach to the global landscape: “balance of power” sounds knowledgeable in a New Yorker interview, but the mullahs are not much impressed by textbook learning.

Over at National Review Online, another historian, Victor Davis Hanson, contextualizes Ferguson’s observations by examining the lessons of World War I. The supposed causes and effects of the Great War, he observes, have been confused by the years; a clearheaded account, despite the complexity of the details, shows that the global situation that facilitated the Kaiser’s aggression is not so different from—in fact, is in certain ways alarmingly similar to—the situation we face now.

There is a particular contemptuousness abroad toward American leadership. In Syria and Iran, in China and Russia—and likely in future-hotspots that are only just heating up—there is a new attitude of defiance toward American power. And unfortunately for this president, some things you just can’t blame on George W. Bush.