gauzy memories of World War II

West Point professor of English Elizabeth Samet argues, in Looking for the Good War, that Americans have fundamentally misremembered World War II. The standard narrative, she says, proclaims:

1.    The United States went to war to liberate the world from fascism and tyranny.

2.    All Americans were absolutely united in their commitment to the war effort.

3.    Everyone on the home front made tremendous sacrifices.

4.    American are liberators who fight decently, reluctantly, only when they must.

5.    World War II was a foreign tragedy with a happy American ending.

6.    Everyone has always agreed on points 1-5.

While it is obviously wrong that “Everyone” shared those views, her evidence is strong that many Americans did disagree with each of the points. Opposition to intervention was strong until Pearl Harbor, at which point revenge on Japan was a far greater motivation than fighting Hitler or fascism.

Many on the home front got rich in the booming economy. Far fewer made personal sacrifices.

Samet also documents atrocities by American troops and notes the opposition at the time to the bombing of civilian targets.

I agree that we have overdone the praise of the “greatest generation,” just as I cringe at the blanket label of military personnel as “heroes.” We should keep the distinctions differing Medal of Honor heroism from ordinary honorable service. World War II should be remembered in its complexity and contradictions.

Churchill, good and bad

 Like many Americans, I grew to admire Winston Churchill as I learned more about him. Early on, I bought a recording of some of his most famous speeches and marveled at his stirring words.  I happened to be in London at the time of his funeral and felt that I was part of a great historic moment. I have often quoted some of his witty sayings, even though many now seem to be apocryphal. I was thrilled to visit the Churchill War Rooms and see the actual place where so many consequential policies were formulated.

I have just read Geoffrey Wheatcroft's critical and revisionist biography, Churchill's Shadow, which adds a lot of negative facts to the ledger assessing Churchill's legacy.  Wheatcroft savages Churchill's reputation by quoting from letters and diaries by contemporaries, who point out his flaws -- inconsistency, hypocrisy, frequent inebriation,  social isolation, and so forth. He also repeats many statements which Churchill later disavowed or pretended he never said. [And he quotes Churchill as saying of war cabinet meetings, "All I wanted was compliance with my wishes after a reasonable period of discussion."]

There has been too much hagiography about Churchill. It's time for a fuller picture of his human qualities, including his failings, as well as his political accomplishments, including their blemishes. Like most successful politicians, he was vain, ambitious,  and self-centered, better at tactical adjustments than consistency or strategy. He was a loving though patriarchal husband, but a poor parent. He drank too much and stayed in power too long.

And he was a racist, demeaning all but white, Protestant, English-speaking people much of the time. Sadly, so were many if not most of his Victorian era contemporaries. Nevertheless, I am not ready to pull his statues down or shatter the busts simply because of those abhorrent views. His political accomplishments were world-historical and worthy of honor despite their flaws.

The most useful correctives I found in Wheatcroft's books  were on lesser points.

- He was a defender of the Empire to the bitter end.

- His own history books were group-written and fabricated to enhance his roles.

- He had some surprising and consistent policy views, including support for a national health service and other social programs and support for Zionism.

- He exaggerated his friendship with FDR and his areas of agreements with the Americans.

- Many of his wartime strategy proposals were profoundly unwise [Gallipoli, Norway, Greece, Singapore].

- He strongly favored terror bombing in World War  II, despite earlier and later misgivings.

And yet...in 1940 especially he rallied a defeated force and a demoralized nation -- and onlookers in America -- to fight back and join together in common cause. He did that, and it's unlikely anyone else could have.

a policymaker looks at history

 

 

Who needs another 549-page history of American foreign policy? Maybe you do. At least you should take a look at Robert Zoellick’s America in the World (Twelve, 2020). The author is not a trained historian, but a broadly experienced Washington policymaker who has served as U.S. Trade Representative, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and State Department Under Secretary, Counselor, and Deputy Secretary as well as President of the World Bank.

Zoellick has written an incomplete, episodic, but insightful history of the most significant American policies abroad.  Organized around key figures from Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams through John Hay and Charles Evans Hughes to recent U.S. Presidents, Zoellick sees economic and trade policies as important to his analyses as the traditional security narratives. That in itself is a useful corrective and valuable addition to our histories.

Time and again he offers personal anecdotes echoing his discussions of earlier events. For example, he concludes his analysis of the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s staff to warn him of their own doubts about Vietnam by citing times when his own bosses failed to give their presidents bad news. And he tells how Secretary of State James Baker paved the way for sensitive negotiations by making repeated face-saving concessions to another diplomat.

What I found especially new and valuable were his chapters on Charles Evans Hughes and Elihu Root. The first explains how America got into the diplomacy of arms control and the second is the best I’ve ever read about how legalism came to dominate U.S. foreign policy. His Cordell Hull chapter describes how the Tennessee lawmaker brought a radical change in trade policy. He uses Vannevar Bush to explain how the U.S. government embraced technological innovation for military security and economic prosperity.

He cites other historians with alternative views of post-1945 controversies and then adds his own assessments. He sprinkles his chapters with revealing incidents.

There’s not much about 21^st century foreign policy except passing references, but his perspectives on America’s first two centuries are quite worthwhile.

What happened in Afghanistan?

 

Who lost Afghanistan? is the wrong question. It assumes agency, when few complex events are monocausal, and it seeks to assign blame, where responsibilities are widely shared. Better to ask, why did things turn out that way?

In his wide-ranging and detailed study of the conflict in Afghanistan during 2001-2021, The American War in Afghanistan [Oxford University Press],Carter Malkasian finds many moments of missed opportunities for peace and many questionable decisions that made things worse. A Pashto-speaking civilian working in Afghanistan who later served as a special assistant to CJCS General Dunford, Malkasian knows both American and Taliban officials as well as the territory and culture of Afghanistan.

The war brought benefits to many Afghans, but it also built resistance to outsiders that has long been a feature of Afghan history. “Afghanistan cleaved into an urban democracy and a rural Islamic order,” Malkasian writes. He mentions the impact of government incompetence and corruption and the role of Pakistan support for the Taliban, but ultimately concludes that the Taliban fighters had a greater willingness to kill and to be killed than their opponents. [He notes that one Taliban leader proudly sent his own son as a suicide bomber.]

“[T]he Taliban stood for what it meant to be Afghan.…Tainted by its alignment with the United States, the [Kabul] government had a much weaker claim to these values and thus a much harder time motivating supporters to go to the same lengths.”

Malkasian documents many consequential choices made by the Americans:

- refusing to allow any power sharing with the Taliban;

- failing to do much to build up the Afghan army and police during 2001-5 [in part of course, because of the U.S. turn to fight a war in Iraq];

- U.S. military tactics that killed many civilians and alienated others;

- overly optimistic U.S. generals that their ways would work;

- insufficient U.S. air strikes in 2014-15;

- ruptured relations with the Karzai government;

- mishandled peace talks in 2019-20 that rewarded the Taliban while leaving many crucial issues unsettled.

Maybe we need to revise the adage and conclude that defeat, not victory, has 100 fathers in this case.