War. What is it good for? In the second episode of Modern Age’s new video series, editor-in-chief Dan McCarthy explores the question many Americans are again asking themselves as they contemplate the prospect of the United States getting involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran.
Selections from the video are excerpted below:
President Trump came to office as someone who is seen as being an opponent of failed American wars, forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and potentially other wars in the future that might involve nation-building and prolonged occupations and the same sorts of regime change operations that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and that really have proved to be extremely difficult to accomplish if they can be accomplished at all.
A number of people who support a more active foreign policy like to point to the example of World War II. They say America had successful regime change attempts in Japan and Germany after the Second World War. A major difference, of course, between what happened in those countries after World War II and what’s happened more recently is that both Japan and Germany faced a choice, and they made a choice for themselves. . . .
We like to tell ourselves that regime change is something that can succeed, because people will simply like to live under liberal democracy. And there is this widespread belief among American intellectuals that liberal democracy is the end of history—and what that means is that it’s the goal of history. It’s not that the wars stop happening, but rather that history has a goal and a purpose, and that purpose is to live under a liberal democracy of the kind that these intellectuals believe that America itself has. This view, which is promulgated by Francis Fukuyama and others, is very much mistaken. In fact, what we see in the twenty-first century is that it’s not regimes, it’s not ideas, it’s not intellectual notions of communism or capitalism, it’s not liberal democracy versus dictatorship or other abstractions. What is most important in terms of war in the twenty-first century are people and place, territory and populations. Peoples all around the world—and this has been true for over a century—do not want to be ruled by foreigners, and they do not want to be ruled by puppet governments at home that are in fact controlled by foreigners. . . .
In the pages of Modern Age and on our website, we try to discuss the deeper layers of foreign policy, of the nature of not only our own government but of regimes all around the world: why it is so difficult to try to change these things by force and why one people has a great deal of difficulty trying to impose its vision of the good on another. The world is divided up into nations. There is a reason why the Bible tells us the story of the Tower of Babel, where human hubris tried to create a universal order by building a tower up to Heaven. And God took these people and gave them different languages and posed different languages on them—that’s the babble of Babel. As a result, God separated them into nations, and the idea of ever reconstituting a tower of Babel, a single unitary order, even a single abstract unitary order such as liberal democracy, to be instantiated in every part of the world, is just as hubristic as a construction of the Tower of Babel in the first place.
Watch the rest here:
