America’s dangerous amnesia about world order

In an unsettled time, with an unsettling president, many Americans are unsure of their conception of the world and their country’s role in it. What should the United States be doing – if anything – to shape the global order? To answer this question, we need to better understand ourselves and our history.
Americans regularly make three curious – and contestable – claims about peace, world order and their country’s role in achieving both. First, they often assume that they are a peace-loving people, and that our republic has been a force to promote amity and stability in the world. Second, they assume that peace is an unalloyed good, both a tool and product of progress, providing incontrovertible benefits; war and conflict, meanwhile, have brought nothing but misery and disaster. Third, they see peace and order as the natural state of the world, and view any actor or force that disturbs this harmony as both anomalous and deviant, to be identified, isolated and eliminated.
It is easy to understand why Americans embrace these views. If the US and its citizens and values are associated with peace and stability, then actions that might typically be understood through the narrow lens of self-interest can instead be translated into selfless policies that benefit mankind. This belief is of course at the heart of American exceptionalism: the idea that the U.S. has a unique and revolutionary history and mission. Seeking no gain for ourselves, we are different from empires and other states. Founded in liberty, the U.S. by its very nature spreads the blessings of its own political system when it acts in the world. As philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant made clear, a key blessing of a system of liberty is friendship amongst men, and peace amongst nations. Peace must therefore be in very nature of who Americans are, what they bring to the world and what should be prized as most good in the world.
Every historian knows this uncomfortable fact: War and great power competition have generated both misery and extraordinary human progress in the modern era. As William McNeil explained in his classic, The Pursuit of Power, “a profound ambivalence inheres in warfare and organized violence.” The need to protect your people and advance your interests in a dangerous world drove extraordinary advances in technology, improvements in governance, and great increases in wealth and prosperity. Whether improved medical techniques to save the wounded or the mass education provided to produce literate armies, progress and war went hand in hand in the West. Perhaps even more uncomfortably, the celebration of war and its memory shapes a nation’s sense of itself, its patriotism, its cohesion. Imperial China’s isolation and relative security during the same period as Great Britain’s bloody rise may have prevented similar innovation and national unity, and left the once great power vulnerable to European powers tested by more than a century of intense military competition.
We know and hate the cost of war. Yet we must acknowledge our present age of technological marvels and political progress emerged from conflict. More importantly, war is sometimes needed to protect our people and our values. Dangerous states and evil leaders can exploit the admirable desire for peace. Even in more recent times, efforts to maintain peace at all costs can be viewed with disdain, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler at Munich are remembered with scorn.
This leads to the final assumption most Americans make: that peace and stability are and always have been the most desired goal of peoples and states. We are also told that the world has moved inexorably to a more peaceful, ordered condition, following the inalterable arc of history. By that same logic, peace should be easy to keep and requires little effort, save for isolating and defeating the unusual states or forces that seek to interrupt it.
This last belief is perhaps the most dangerous. The relative peace of the last eight decades has been the exception, not the rule. It has been hard won and could be easily lost. An accurate understanding of that period is therefore all the more important, especially since the U.S. was the key actor in making it happen.
The first half of the 20th century proved that the hellish suffering of unrestrained war far outstrips its benefits. War, revolution and instability killed, maimed and dislocated tens of millions between the start of the First World War and the end of the Second.
For the first time in its history, the U.S. mobilized and deployed abroad a large peacetime military and entered into political and security alliances with nations around the world. It committed to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and reducing the likelihood of their use. And it demonstrated a willingness to use force, at great national cost and controversy, in conflicts where national interests were not immediately and obviously at stake.
This postwar American behavior was hardly inevitable. After all, the US has possessed the world’s largest economy for more than 125 years, and the U.S. share of world GNP in 1900 was not much different than it was in 1980 or today. Before 1950, the U.S. generally avoided international institutions, eschewed permanent alliances, demobilized during peacetime, had strong civilian control of the military, and allowed Congress an equal and sometimes greater voice in determining America’s foreign relations. The need to guarantee peace in the nuclear age caused the U.S. to transform every one of these traditions and policies.
Other causes of peace must doubtless be taken into account and nurtured. States around the world understand the power of nuclear deterrence – no great power war of conquest is worth the risk of atomic annihilation. Norms and international law have played a part as well. Economic interdependence and flattening demographic patterns are important. Yet history tells us that global peace is neither natural nor inevitable. Peace is the unusual, unnatural state, for the world and especially for Americans. This is what makes the post-1945 world so remarkable, and America’s crucial role in building it so important. At this crucial moment, when US relations with the world are unfixed and uncertain, we forget this history at our peril.

— Bloomberg

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Inaugural Director of the Henry A. Kissinger
Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced
International Studies (SAIS)