A Site for Moderate Realism and Interest-Based Policy
Michael F. Duggan
On February 22, 2015—seven years and two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—this article of mine appeared in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. I admit that I am a nobody in the world of foreign policy; Realism and Policy is a small online journal with a handful of readers on a good day. And yet it seems that if the article’s prescriptions had been followed, there would likely be no war in Ukraine today.
By Michael F. Duggan
“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”
-Prince Charles
The Prince of Wales got it right: on the whole, modern British architecture is pretty bad.
In recent years, I have become increasingly alarmed by the newfound verticality of London as it continues on its dubious adventure as Europe’s capital of finance and economic globalization. From the classic sprawling horizontal metropolis with few landmarks higher than St. Paul’s, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and Westminster Abby, the big money boys (and girls) of new Londontown are bent on making it just another nondescript 21st century copse of abominable high-rises. My guess is that this is the result of the misguided desires of new money types to trash history in favour of something approximating a less interesting version of New York City. Perhaps it is just an expression of the common human mania for the new.
Taken individually, some of the buildings are not so bad, as far as glass and steel go (although, as the Scarlet Pimpernel reminds us, “there is nothing quite so bad as something which is not so bad”), and I know that not all of them are products of British architects or firms. It is just that a modern vertical city has to work as an integrated collective work of art—a giant crystal garden—like Manhattan, if it is to work at all. Modern London, by contrast, looks like Old London with patches of Bahrain or Dubai pushing through the ground like mushrooms after a rain.
My revulsion at what London is becoming got me thinking back to an idea I had a number of years ago, that the historical phases of London and its development provides a kind of Rorschach or Myers-Briggs personality test, and the period of London that you like or most identify with tells a lot about you.
So, which is it? Are you the former classics major enraptured with archeological depictions of the Roman Old City of Londinium? Do you like the dirty, malororous, half-timber city of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period—the city of Shakespeare that burned in the Great Fire of 1666? Is it the rebuilt city of Charles II (who straddled periods of the city, among other things), Nell Gwynn, Lord Rochester, Christopher Wren, William Defoe, and Moll Flanders—the London of the Restoration and Augustinian period? Is it the imperial capital of the world of mercantilist globalization, the Georgian city of William Hogarth, William Pitt (both Elder and Younger), and Edmund Burke? Is it the teaming London of Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bill Sykes, the Artful Dodger, and Victoria and Albert and the Crystal Palace? Is it the diverse, gas-lit metropolis of Conan-Doyle, Holmes and Watson, and Jack the Ripper? Or is it Heroic London of Churchill and the Blitz or Swinging London of The Beatles, Stones, and Julie Christie?
Take you time answering this question; you may pick more than one or arrange them in descending order of preference. And in conversation, pay attention to the answers of other people and their reasons for their choice(s).
So, the next time you are at a party and you meet a historical or cosmopolitan type, ask him/her “what’s you period of London?” If they say “Jane Austen” (as opposed to “Lord Byron”) or “21st century,” make a polite break for the door.
By Michael F. Duggan
It is no exaggeration to report that Samuel Clemens died one hundred twelve years ago this past Wednesday (April 21, 1910), but that Mark Twain lives on. Mostly.
A dark and brooding man—an atheist who railed against God during his last years in works to be published after his death1—Twain transformed humor. He took the 19th century public lecture format and invented standup comedy. A Confederate deserter, he was an anti-racist (he sponsored the first African-American student to attend Yale Law School), an anti-imperialist, and is arguably the first modern American liberal. He practiced gonzo reporting a century before anybody had ever heard of Hunter S. Thompson or the New Journalism.2 As Arthur Miller observes, Twain always included himself in his criticisms of humanity. On that score and so many others, he was completely honest. By his own account, he was not “an American,” he was “the American.”
Although I cannot deny the greatness of his best novels, or that he is our greatest novelist, I have never been able to make it all the way through Huckleberry Finn. I prefer him as an aphoristic philosopher, a misleadingly folksy wit with depth—the “American Voltaire”—and I can (and have) spent hours browsing the three collections of his quotes and sayings that I own. He is as sharp as Dorthy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde, but with more resonance and heft; the point remains after the smile fades. Humor is the most fleeting of genres, and yet Twain remains as funny, thoughtful, topical, and damning as ever.
The only thing I don’t get about Twain is that he seems to have been free of all prejudices except against Native Americans. I suspect that he may have had a bad experience with an American Indian when he was young (see “Injun Joe”).
Another possibility is that he has to deny Indigenous Americans if his literature is to work (i.e. stories of an America with no past, no inconvenient previous owners). In the Ken Burns documentary on Twain, Arthur Miller (again) observes that Twain wrote about America as if it had no history. If the shores of the Mississippi that Huck and Jim drift on are crowded with the ghosts of dead peoples and civilizations who speak without a Missouri twang, it suddenly becomes distracting and complicated, like all true history. This, in my opinion, is the central problem with Twain.
But on the whole, Twain works. He hated shams and frauds and could see through to the underlying all-too-human motives, including his own (“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner”). He believed that the best punchline was often an honest straight line. He also loathed echo chambers and one can only wonder what pearls of wisdom he would have had about today’s social media.
Notes
By Michael F. Duggan
Disclaimer: This idea was suggested to me by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.
Wars are either decisive or not, and most of the great peace treaties of modern history are not what they purport to be.
In his magnum opus, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume observes that in order for justice to prevail in the law, there must be a condition of approximate equality between the parties involved. This concept translates seamlessly into the negotiations that end wars: in order for there to be a genuine diplomatic resolution to conflict, there must be relative parity between the belligerents. Even with Western military hardware and economic assistance, this observation does not bode well for the Ukrainians.
In the real world, there are two kinds of peace settlements: there are formal acknowledgements of victory and defeat in which the victors divvy up the spoils and the losers take what is given to them (e.g. the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Congress of Vienna (1815), Yalta (1945), Potsdam (1945)), and there are diplomatic bargains to end the hostilities between more-or-less equal adversaries in which both sides achieve some or all of their war aims. The second of these rarely if ever happens (Westphalia? (1648), Utrecht? (1714)). Rather, closely-matched adversaries often fight wars that bog down into a stalemate and either peter out or else one side capitulates and the winners dictate the peace and divvy up the spoils (Versailles (1919)). In addition to the two kinds of treaties, there are also tenuous ceasefires, like the truce that halted hostilities in the Korean War without a genuine resolution, but let that go.
The Yalta and Potsdam conferences are especially telling: the two, relatively-equal victors divided the spoils, not on the basis of morality or the fair consideration of the smaller nations involved or as the result of the give-and-take of good faith negotiation, but on the basis of where the Allied armies were when hostilities ended. Because pf this, historian Robert Dallek has called the Yalta conference “the most overrated event of World War II.”1
Some of the summits between the United States and Soviet Union during the 1970s achieved mutually acceptable results because of relative parity and the looming omnipresence of the nuclear standoff and the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction. These were not peace treaties, and insofar as they dealt with the Arab-Israeli wars, they were inconclusive. But they achieved important arms control agreements. The gentlemen’s agreement that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning hot is the paragon example of diplomacy making a dangerous crisis go away by allowing both sides to come away with something they wanted.2
By contrast the Paris Peace Accords (1973) that ended the American-Vietnamese War was a delaying action, a surrender that allowed the United States a modicum of face saving cover over a lost war. Anybody who doubts this need only recall images of the U.S. departure from Saigon two years later. Likewise, the Malta Summit (1989) that ended the Cold War was followed a decade later by a 25-year expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s western borders in spite of early promises of “not one inch eastward.”3
So what does this mean for the war in Ukraine? The situation there may be summarized as such: the Ukrainians are understandably determined to defend their nation and retain its prewar borders even though the odds of the throwing the Russians out of eastern Ukraine are small at this point. Putin is committed to winning in Ukraine—“winning” presumably defined as the annexation/consolidating the Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and some adjacent areas, perhaps some of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and a land corridor between the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas (greater autonomy—but not independence—for the Donbas region was a provision of the Minsk II agreements, which Ukraine chose not to enforce).4
Given that a Ukrainian victory seems unlikely and that the war aims of the two nations are fundamentally incompatible, we may conclude a number of things:
If we accept a realistic great powers/sphere of influence interpretation of events, as I do, then the time to cut a deal with Russia guaranteeing a fully intact, geopolitically neutral Ukraine was probably in 2008 when Russia announced that a westward-leaning Ukraine was a direct threat to its national security. It is too late for such a deal now.
As long as there are large and powerful nations, there will be spheres of influence in which the interests of the local power trump those of outsiders. This harsh geopolitical fact is a lesson that was forgotten or unlearned by the U.S. foreign policy establishment during the years of unchallenged American hegemony of the post-Cold War period. It seems that that era is waning. The sooner that the U.S. foreign policy establishment accepts these realities, the better things will be for this country and for the rest of the world. Perhaps then we can focus on the problems of the environment that threaten us all.
Notes
By Michael F. Duggan
Thescelosaurus neglectus—mark the name well. It is a notable discovery in the history of paleobiology. The species itself is not especially noteworthy, novel, or newly discovered; Thescelosauruses were a common, small, bipedal dinosaur of the late Cretaceous period. It is a particular fossil that is important.
Scientists at the Tanis dig site in the Badlands of North Dakota might have found the mineralized remains of an individual animal that was killed on the exact day that a 12-kilometer wide asteroid punched a 180-kilometer-wide hole in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula (the Chicxulub Crater) almost 66 million years ago. Debris found with the fossil indicate that it is a snapshot of the instant that the Cretaceous Period became the Paleocene (and, more grandly, when the Mesozoic Era became the Cenozoic). It is the moment that the reign of the dinosaurs ended.
Tanis has been famous as a dig site for more than a decade because its fossils date from the precise time of the Cretaceous die-off.
Depending on how you measure them, over the past 540 million years, mass die-offs have occurred about about every 27 or 28 million years. Since the Cambrian Explosion that created the diverging categories of the phyla of biology, there have been at least five cataclysmic die-offs (the ones that ended the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and yes, the Cretaceous period). Our own period appears to be the sixth mass extinction of the Earth’s living history.
Sometimes I feel a little like the animal represented by this fossil: after about 7,500-15,000 human generations, I happen to live in the time when the existing world is falling apart (although, to be fair, dinosaurs were around for about 180 million years where modern humans have only been here for about 300,000 years—and perhaps as little as 150,000-200,000 years—or around one 600th of their tenure at most).
I guess the difference is that humans are both the asteroid and its victim.