Haunted by the Ghost of Woodrow Wilson

[wwolfe]

I'm not an interventionist. I'm not an isolationist. One frustrating aspect of political discussion in America is the tendency for the media and political figures to act as though those are the only two possibilities when it comes to foreign affairs

Comments

[wwolfe]

I actually meant to post this in the "polly sigh" journal, but I guess I made a wrong turn. If Kuzibah knows how to move it, or copy and paste it, I'll take it out of my journal, since it's more at home in a journal devoted to politics.

It's a hard balance I think.

[surleigh]

Isolationism puts us in that grey area of compliance. The atrocities of Darfur, the genocide in Rwanda...these neo-Holocausts beg for international response since the infrastructure of the hosting nations are/were unwilling or unable to stop the crimes against humanity. Failure to act can be seen as a tacit approval at worst and apathy in the very least

I'd buy your 2 cents for a dollar!

[thespice]

I do feel bad about the French. They suffered great losses in WWI; it's understandable to me that they would not have wanted to involve themselves in another war so soon after... Maybe that's just me being terribly naive, but I cannot begin to imagine what that part of the world suffered during the first World War - the world had never experienced anything like it

Imperialism by governments isn't so much a concern anymore.

[surleigh]

The after effects for sure.

Corporate and cultural imperialism though? A bigger problem and probably one of the bigger reasons we're not quite as beloved we were 60 years ago.

I cross-posted this for you

[kuzibah]

And I'll comment once I've had some caffeine.

BTW...

[kuzibah]

To post to polly_sigh (or any lj community) go to your info page and click on the polly_sigh link in the your communities section. This will take you to the info page for the community. Then click on the pencil icon to post to that community. (There may be an easier way, but I don't know it...)

The simplest way to post to communities...

[thecuckoo]

is to go to the "Update Journal" page, and click on the "post to" dropdown list. Your own journal is the default, but any communities to which you have posting access should show up as well. Select that one, but double-check that you chose the right one before going on with your entry.

As for the post itself, I think it could do with some definitions. Not every military action is created equal, and I'd like to see some of your own examples (beyond WWII and Iraq) of actions that were particularly supportable or otherwise. Until then, the conversation might be too broad to get far.

Re: The simplest way to post to communities...

[wwolfe]

Vietnam would be the most defensible choice for being put in the "Unnecessary intervention" category. The justification was always the Domino Theory, something I had a hard time believing even as a theory during the war (how do dominoes fall across 6,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean?), but which was proven to be false in reality when, between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989, no dominoes fell - or at least none that caused America any significant harm.

Given my conclusion that the Domino Theory was invalid when applied to Vietnam, I would by extension have to reach the same conclusion when considering the validity of the same theory, vis a vis the Korean War a decade earlier.

My opinion is that there have been four necessary wars in American history:

1.) The American Revolution, since it was needed in order for there to be an American history

Another case for interventionism?

[surleigh]

Our own Civil War. Europeans were interested in our war due to their own investments here. Certain nations (England, France, Spain (I think)) had their own agendas during our war and attempted aid to each side to further their own interests.

Compare that today. If a nation disolves into civil war, we (our policy makers) want to put an end to the war in the favor of whichever side is going to benefit us most, but rarely is the warring nation powerful enough to actually prevent most direct aid, which the Union was more or less able to do through a thorough (more or less) blockage of the coast. Sympathy in British Canada was primarily toward the Union anyway. I believe that formal British support for the Union came only after the Union's blockade of shipping from southern plantations.

What would our history have been had Britain or France intervened? It may seem cruel, but sometimes you have to learn the lesson yourself.

I tend to use a wider scope than that.

[thecuckoo]

I agree that the Korean intervention would not have affected our continued national existence. But as we have a natural counterfactual to compare to, I have a hard time discounting the outcome: the nearly 50 million South Koreans who are contributing to the global economy and regional diplomacy rather than suffering in famine or, pointedly, helping to assemble and test missiles. It could certainly be argued that the price paid for that was too heavy, but my point is that the cost did not come without some decided benefits for our nation and the world as a whole.

So I remain wary of forestalling those debates and analyses with a bar set at "immediate and compelling necessity for our continued survival." On the other hand, that does not excuse us from having those debates and constructing those analyses with all the gravity warranted, and I'll be the first to agree with you that some of our military choices over the past few decades did not meet that standard.

[kuzibah]

As E said, each case is different, but I think a general rule of thumb should be that we only intervene as a last resort, and then only with the clear support of our allies

I'm reading The End of Poverty right now.

[surleigh]

Tackle those very issues, you may be interested in it.

I'll look for it

[kuzibah]

I've pretty much been reading averything I can about the "micro-loans" system that won the Nobel Peace Prize this year. That idea really excites me, both because it isn't charity, per se, and thus preserves the dignity and self-sufficiency of the idividuals, and also because it will eventually become self-sustaining. Teach a man to fish, etc.

Thanks for the rec!

It's very fascinating.

[surleigh]

You may also be interested in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which is more of an explanation of why certain societies flourished and others didn't taking in factors like geography, resources, trade routes and available domesticatable animals.