Right Reason

David Brooks writes about Western civilization

 

Over at The New York Times, David Brooks has penned an article titled, "The Crisis of Western civilization," about the rise of illiberal threats to Western civilization in the past couple of years. Although Mr. Brooks wisely begins by noting that the West is successful because of its ideas and institutions, he quickly degenerates into identifying the West with its heads of state.

If the West had been defined by its heads of state all along, it would not have been so successful. If the West could only be identified by its heads of state today, it would not not worth defending.

Here is the real crisis of Western civilization: Intellectuals and the clerisy are panicking about heads of state even as they neglect their duty to teach and defend the West's intellectual and moral foundations. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are not the West. Greco-Roman philosophy, Christianity, the rule of law, the scientific method, and the honest pursuit of income are.

Mr. Brooks is right that intellectuals need to regain faith in Western civilization, that they need to once again identify themselves as thinking within a particularly 'Western' tradition of thought. However, to have a reasonable conversation about Western civilization, we have got to stop beatifying heads of state we like, be they St. Obama or St. Thatcher, and talk about the ideas that inform the particularly Western tradition of thought. The West is not "Obama, Cameron and Merkel" and the anti-West is not "Putin, Erdogan, el-Sisi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump." (Side note: Does Mr. Brooks even recognize that Mr. Putin was President of Russia and Mr. Erdogan Prime Minister of Turkey before Mr. Obama was President of the United States? The world really hasn't changed that much...)

We should not prostitute Western civilization to serve our current political ends and fashionable social movements. I fear Mr. Brooks does both in what started as an excellent article. Then again, suiting the fashions of The New York Times' readers, Mr. Brooks couldn't even type 'Christianity'; instead, he typed the thoroughly bland and uninformative neologism: 'Age of Faith,' as if it did not matter if the Age of Faith were a Pagan, Christian, or Muslim Age of Faith. 

Change is Hard

 

Not a half-year out of his presidency, Barack Obama is already filing to the trough laid out by corrupt system of crony capitalism. This September, the former president will be paid $400,000 to address Cantor Fitzgerald’s healthcare conference. Matthew Yglesias reacts over at Vox:

That's so much cash, for so little work, that it would be extraordinarily difficult for anyone to turn it down. And the precedent established by former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, to say nothing of former Federal Reserve Chairs Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and a slew of other high-ranking former officials, is that there is nothing wrong with taking the money.

Indeed, to not take the money might be a problem for someone in Obama's position. It would set a precedent.

Obama would be suggesting that for an economically comfortable high-ranking former government official to be out there doing paid speaking gigs would be corrupt, sleazy, or both. He'd be looking down his nose at the other corrupt, sleazy former high-ranking government officials and making enemies.

Which is exactly why he should have turned down the gig.

There should be nothing wrong with a rich politician who has earned his wealth on the free market before entering politics. There is also nothing wrong with high-skilled politicians and bureaucrats alike being paid a wage that reflects their contribution to the general welfare. However, there is something gravely shameful about former politicians and bureaucrats using their influence in order to make profits by doing little more than providing their customers’ with prestige and influence than they would not have otherwise had. This is nothing less than prostituting out the presidency's prestige for Mr. Obama's own enrichment.

It’s very easy to speak eloquently about change. However, it’s very difficult to change when it’s your own skin in the game. We are now seeing how much Mr. Obama really cares about changing American politics when he's the one having to abstain from the champagne and luxurious vacations. 

Comparative Advantage at 200

 

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

-David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation

 

April 19th marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, and therefore of also his principle of comparative advantage.

 

In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises rechristened Ricardo’s principle as the ‘Ricardian Law of Association’ and enshrined it as one of the fundamental principles for understanding how material progress is possible through social cooperation: “The law of association makes us comprehend the tendencies which resulted in the progressive intensification of human cooperation” (Mises 1998: 159). In the History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter never seemed all that much impressed with Ricardo’s accomplishments; on the topic of comparative advantage, which he never explicitly mentions, Schumpeter notes that Robert Torrens “baptized the theorem, [Ricardo] elaborated it and fought for it victoriously” (Schumpeter 1994: 607). Schumpeter’s unenthusiastic sentiment towards Ricardo is explained elsewhere in his History when he asserts that it was “neither his advocacy of winning policies per se, not his theory per se, that, to this day, makes of [Ricardo], in the eyes of some, the first economist of his time, but a felicitous combination of both” (Ibid: 473). Paul Samuelson was much more enthusiastic towards Ricardo and his exposition of economic theory. He is said (I must confess I cannot find the citation online) to have said that Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage was an idea in economics that was simultaneously both universally true and not obvious.

However, I do think that a problem can be had with that principle and that, from the side of probability, that problem can be universally true and not obvious to the economic way of thinking, as it manifests in classrooms the world over. Whenever economists teach the lessons of comparative advantage, they do so in realized numbers alone. They write out the context of comparative advantage as if the comparative advantage of each individual element of their system is entirely known and can be pin-pointed to a single number. Although such an elucidation of international trade may be aided by the use of single numbers, the use of those numbers alone suppress the second-order effects of the variability in prices and their nature as random variables in the real-world.

 

The brilliance of the principle of comparative advantage is the way that it disentangles opportunity-costs from nominal costs. The economic way of thinking properly educates us that individuals, as well as nations, should look at the opportunity costs to the patterns of specialization and trade they participate in, not their nominal costs.

In The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo introduces comparative advantage by introducing the celebrated example of exchanging corn and wine:

The quantity of wine which [Portugal] shall give in exchange for the cloth of England, is not determined by the respective quantities of labour devoted to the production of each, as it would be, if both commodities were manufactured in England, or both in Portugal.

England may be so circumstanced, that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make the wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth.

To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England. Though she could make the cloth with the labour of 90 men, she would import it from a country where it required the labour of 100 men to produce it, because it would be advantageous to her rather to employ her capital in the production of wine, for which she would obtain more cloth from England, than she could produce by diverting a portion of her capital from the cultivation of vines to the manufacture of cloth.

Thus England would give the produce of the labour of 100 men, for the produce of the labour of 80. Such an exchange could not take place between the individuals of the same country. The labour of 100 Englishmen cannot be given for that of 80 Englishmen, but the produce of the labour of 100 Englishmen may be given for the produce of the labour of 80 Portuguese, 60 Russians, or 120 East Indians. The difference in this respect, between a single country and many, is easily accounted for, by considering the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another, to seek a more profitable employment, and the activity with which it invariably passes from one province to another in the same country.

Through free trade, both nations can consume both more corn and wine through nations specializing in their comparative advantage and then obtaining commodities they desire to consumption through exchange. For England, international trade becomes a miraculous technology for transmuting corn into wine. For Portugal, it becomes a miraculous technology for transmuting wine into corn.

 

In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter provides an exposition of comparative advantage more familiar to students who have sat through an Econ 101 class:

Take two countries, England and Portugal, and two commodities, wine and cloth. Portugal, being the more efficient than England in both lines of production, can produce a certain quantity of wine by the labor of 80 men and a certain quantity of cloth by the labor of 90 men, whereas in England the production of the same quantities of wine and cloth takes, respectively, the labor of 120 and 100 men. Under these circumstances, Portugal will advantageously ‘specialize’ in wine and import cloth, while England will ‘specialize’ in cloth and import wine provided, of course, that wine and cloth exchange on terms between the limits of one unit of English cloth for 9/8 of a unit of Portuguese wine and one unit of English cloth for 5/6 units of Portuguese wine. In the former case, all the advantage goes to England, and Portugal is no better off than she would be without trade; in the latter case all advantage goes to Portugal, and England is no better off than she would be without trade. So far as this goes, any intermediate exchange ratio is possible with advantage to both countries, and if traders in both countries acted as monopolists, the exchange ration would be indeterminate between those limits. (Schumpeter 1994: 607).

A problem with this elucidation of comparative advantage is that it simplifies prices as a single realization, rather than treating them as random-variables. Surely, prices may be a matter of trucking, bartering, and exchanging in this hypothetical case, but Schumpeter still assumes that the prices is going to be fixed, largely relegated to the position of institutional data in the economist’s reasoning.

 

However, prices are variable. That variability is a second-order phenomena that largely gets entirely neglected in the economist’s reasoning. Especially along the time-frame we speak of when speaking of comparative advantage in international trade, prices are probably best treated as being variable and their manifestations at any moment of time as being a realization of a probability-distribution.

When economists’ treat of comparative advantage as simply being matter of, to quote Samuelson, “four magic numbers”, they erase that ubiquitous element of all human action from their narrative: Uncertainty. If the prices of corn and wine are both measured by distributions with fat tails, then there is the chance of a tail-event wreaking havoc on a pattern of specialization and trade, maybe even proving it unsustainable in the long run. To continue with Ricardo’s bucolic theme, nations are very rarely monocultural: When they specialize in only a single crop, let alone a single variation of a crop, then bad harvests and other sun-spot events can be lethal, see the Irish Potato Famine for an example. Some ‘inefficiency’ in the system from the point of view of the realization of prices at any one moment may actually prove to be integral for maintaining a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade.

 

This probabilistic view of comparative advantage does not undercut the significance of comparative advantage per se. This view reminds us that comparative advantage is a phenomenon that emerges from the free interactions of individuals and nations alike. Comparative advantage is generated by people tinkering with different patterns of specialization and exchange and by people being free to fail when their experiments do not work out. Through those free interactions, people gain knowledge about the probability-distributions of the goods and services being exchanges so as to efficiently factors of production to their most urgent uses. Out of each person's pursuit of economy in his own affairs, Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage emerges, not as a product of the human intellect, but out of the actions of a population of producers and consumers alike.

Ultimately, Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage is a product of human action, not of human design. Yes, for the purposes of black-board economics, it is useful to teach the principle through a mathematical presentation using real numbers for the sake of simplicity. Although Mises is correct in asserting that the wider Ricardian law of association is a fundamental principle of all social philosophy, let alone social science, I do think that Schumpeter is also correct in asserting that we cannot divorce Ricardo’s principle from the free-trading politics he sought to advance.

 

James Buchanan once quipped that order is defined by the process of its emergence. In this fashion, the welfare consequences of Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage cannot be divorced from the liberal system of natural liberty that Adam Smith advocated in The Wealth of Nations. They are generated by individual-level bricolage, not by national central-planning.

 

 

Sources

Mises, Ludwig von. 1998. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1994. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Propagandacast 1413: Precipice of steel

 

 

 

 

 

In Review: Episode VIII Teaser Trailer

 

 

 

Am I the only person to think that the line "it's time for the Jedi to end" is extremely insulting to the original trilogy? The original trilogy ended with The Return of the Jedi, and the destruction of the Sith order for good. Why is this trilogy so willing to simply not care about the the fact that, in the last trilogy, the Jedi were promised to return?

Plots progress through the statement of the problem and the resolution to that problem. One of the best parts about the prequel trilogy is the fact that it respected the mythos that came before it and at least tried to further explore the origin of the original trilogy's problem. Rather than exploring the consequences of the solution to that problem, this new trilogy acts as if nothing came before it. We don't get to explore the consequences of the return of the Jedi, we're simply told that (once again) the Jedi are all but extinct, and, this time, need to remain so. This kind of storytelling doesn't expand the mythos, it destroys it. 

 

As much as I love and respect the free markets and the pursuit of honest profits, I also love and respect the artistic genius. I think Star Wars emerged from George Lucas' artistic genius, as well as the efforts of an entire army of artists surrounding him, and I do respect how uncompromising Mr. Lucas was with how his vision had to be revealed. Under Disney, I fear that Star Wars is being Marvel'ed to death. However, unlike Marvel's comic books, Star Wars is a continuous mythos. Unlike comic books, that restart consistently with entirely new universes and premises, there is no reset button after Disney has destroyed the Star Wars mythos in a pursuit of spoon-feeding audiences the nostalgia-laced entertainment they crave and are willing to pay and pay and pay to receive. Yes, The Last Jedi will make Disney ever richer, but will it enrich the Star-Wars mythos? Myself, I very much doubt the latter. 

Hunter S. Thompson and The Great Gatsby

Today is the 92nd anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. One of the lesser known factoids about The Great Gatsby is Hunter S. Thompson's inspiration from the work and this is covered in an article about him from The New Yorker, "Believer": 

There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called “The Death of the American Dream,” a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling “Gatsby” “The Death of the Red White and Blue.”

The Blood of Martyrs Irrigates the Egyptian Soil

 

St. Mark's Cathedral in Alexandria, outside of which a bomb exploded.

 

2017 Holy Week is a Holy Week of Christian unity. More often than not, the Western and Eastern churches celebrate Easter on different dates and so their respective Holy Weeks do not coincide. It is not the case in 2017, in which both the East and the West will celebrate Easter on April 16th. It is thus particularly tragic for Christians that there were two terrorist attacks orchestrated against the Coptic Church on Palm Sunday, yesterday.

The Economist reports:

 

WHEN Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the bomb that killed nearly 30 worshippers at the Coptic cathedral in Cairo in December, it vowed to continue its “war against apostates”. When IS murdered seven Copts, as members of Egypt’s main Christian sect are known, in northern Sinai earlier this year, the group said there would be “many more [attacks] to come”.

So there was little doubt who was responsible for the explosions that tore through two Coptic churches on April 9th, as worshippers celebrated Palm Sunday, a week before Easter. Within hours, IS claimed responsibility for the attacks. The first blast hit St George’s church in the city of Tanta, 80km (50 miles) north of Cairo, killing at least 27 people and injuring 78 more. Hours later a second blast hit the main church in Alexandria, where Pope Tawadros, the leader of the Copts, had just celebrated mass. At least 18 people died and dozens were wounded in that attack, according to the health ministry. Pope Tawadros was unharmed.

'The Copts make up about 10% of Egypt’s population, which is mostly Sunni Muslim. Tension between the communities has long been high. After Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, then a general, now president, booted the Muslim Brotherhood from power in 2013, the Islamist group’s supporters burned dozens of churches. Mr Sisi, a devout Muslim, promised to heal the wounds, and he has even attended Christmas mass. But the violence has not stopped. Last year Pope Tawadros, who supports Mr Sisi, said Copts were attacked about once a month. Others say that the rate is higher.

The attacks on Palm Sunday come at a particularly bad time for Mr Sisi. On April 28th the president is scheduled to welcome Pope Francis to Cairo. The visit was meant to show progress in the relationship between Christians and Muslims and, according to the Catholic archbishop of Egypt, act as a sign that Egypt is safe.

 

After the supposed Arab Spring, the Levant has become a land irrigated with the blood of minority martyrs. Maybe Western commentators shouldn't have been so blindly in love with their obedience to democracy and so willing to foment revolt in nations with entirely different histories than those of Western commercial societies.

However, even as Arab Spring has turned to to Arab Winter, Westerners’ willingness to foment revolt has continued in the form of sympathy towards the rebels in Syria and talk of régime change in the nation. However, if we are to learn from the history of the Middle East and the experience of the Copts in Egypt, it’s that the military may be a force for liberalism in the region and that military-dictatorships may be a progressive force. Western commentators need to take seriously the fact that Arab Spring may have done more harm than good by stirring up illiberal movements in the region.

Liberalism is not democracy and democracy is not liberalism. Democracy may be a necessary ingredient to a robust liberal society, but it can also generate illiberal outcomes. Western citizens do not enjoy the liberty they do because they get to elect their leaders. They have liberty because of the rule of law, the protection of individuals’ private spheres against encroachment, and the enforcement of commutative justice in general. In short, they are free because of the idea of Adam Smith’s”obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Democracy is a means towards that end, not an end per se.

Furthermore, this is this about the treatment of Christians in particular. If we are to take John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty seriously, then one of the barometers of liberalism in any nation is how freely minorities may go about their lives. The violence against Chrsitians, Yazidis, and even Shi’a in the aftermath of so many Arab-Winter revolutions evidence their illiberal nature.

 

The West can actually do something here for Western nations are not entirely innocent of foul play in the region. To help the region, Western nations can stop supporting Saudi Arabia and House of Saud. The problem isn’t ‘radical Islam,’ the problem is the Wahhabist and Salafi factions that House of Saud has actively supported in the region. Due to their support of a, frankly, evil régime, Western nations therefore deserve some of the blame in the rise of Wahhabism in the region. Even Canada’s politically correct Trudeau-administration has not refrained from selling weapons to the nation. Making matters even worse is that the hostility that should be pointed towards Saudi Arabia is instead pointed towards Iran, further cementing Western support for the Wahhabist régime.

Rather than actively trying to make the situation across the Levant better, Western nations should think about removing the harmful impact they now have on the region. 

National Geographic on Early Human Cannibalism

 

National Geographic has a fascinating, if not macabre, article about cannibalism in human evolution. The article starts with a discussion of a recent findings about the nutritional value of a human carcass and then questions why, given those findings, cannibalism would ever be as endemic as it seems to have been in the archaeological record: 

A new look at the nutritional value of human flesh shows that, compared with other Paleolithic prey animals, humans weren’t especially packed with calories for their size.

“When you compare us to other animals, we’re not very nutritional at all,” says study author James Cole of the University of Brighton, who published his work Thursday in Scientific Reports.

According to his estimates, boars and beavers pack about 1,800 calories into each pound of muscle compared with a measly 650 calories from a modern human. That’s about what would be expected based on our overall size and muscularity compared to other animals, he says.

So, Cole asks, if humans aren’t especially valuable in terms of prey, why eat them? After all, unless they are sick or dying, they wouldn’t be easy to hunt.

“You have to get together a hunting party and track these people, and then they aren’t just standing there waiting for you to stab them with a spear,” says Cole.

Instead, Cole argues that perhaps not all ancient cannibalism was for filling bellies; it may have also served various social functions for early humans and their ancestors.

Homo sapiens is an animal that was able to evolve by virtue of recognizing the evolutionary gains offered by taking up a diet of roasted animal flesh. Considering that most of those gains came from becoming a species capable of exploiting both a cooperative, that is moral, nature and culture, it isn't all that surprising that ritual cannibalism is a part of our evolutionary history.

Our ancestors may not have been all that disgusted by cannibalism, they may have seen individuals from other bands or chiefdoms as entirely other and therefore to be consumed much like a fallen beast. It is one of the great achievements of civilization to extend man's moral sphere across the entire species. 

The Centenary of American Intervention in WW1

 

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

-Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress on April 2nd

 

 

Yesterday, April 6th, marked the centenary of the American intervention in the First World War. After three years of armed neutrality, the United States entered that conflict and thereby rejuvenated the Entente’s strength, which had been drained after three years of great bloodshed. Within a year of American troops arriving on the continent, the Entente had achieved a decisive victory against Germany and the other Central Powers.

Although the United States ostensibly declared war due to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare that January, the purpose of American intervention took on a rational constructivist intent even before war was declared. When he had addressed a special joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war on April 2nd, Woodrow Wilson announced that the intent of American policy would be “to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.”

As emphasized by the fourteen points that Wilson promulgated in January 1918, American aims in the war were not restricted to guaranteeing the safety of the nation and of American shipping. Instead, those aims were to rationally construct a new era of international relations, much as the Treaty of Westphalia had done. In this new order, self-determination was to be the ruling principle of this international order and a new League of Nations was to be the means of arbitrating international disputes. No longer would national borders be drawn by a clique of aristocrats, but instead by the general wills of distinct nationalities. No longer would nations need to go to war to achieve their ends, but they would have recourse to international arbitration. Rather than arms-races and autocracies, there would be peace and democracy.

However, benevolent his ambitions for rationally constructing a new international system out of the First World War’s debris may have been, Wilson’s efforts were never met with success and would actually do quite a bit of harm. By intervening in the war, the United States could grant the Entente powers a decisive victory, but it could not prevent them from demanding a Carthaginian peace from Germany that the would not be capable of enforcing. Moreover, the American war-effort brought with it a form of the closed society that willingly treaded on liberty in order to organize all of society towards the single end of fighting the war. Alas, Wilson should have known better because the American Founding Fathers had recognized how dangerous a policy of meddling into European affairs as and had admonished posterity to never do so.

There was no more forceful expression of those principles in foreign policy than in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In that letter, which served as a collection of the classically republican principles motivating the foundation of the American notion, Washington had advised against just the course of action that Wilson led America into: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” John Adams, perhaps the most underrated of all the Founders, himself emphasized those principles. In an 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson, he expressed his resentment of European political order and why America should have no part in it: “The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of.” Jefferson himself had expressed similar sentiments about the dangers of European entanglements in a 1815 letter to Thomas Leiper: “It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better.”

 

 

While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms.

-William Pitt, 1762 Speech in the House of Commons

 

Of course, around a century had passed since the Founders provided that advance and American intervention in the First World War. So, it is possible to argue that the American Founding principles were entirely unsuited to the First World War. After all, one might be inclined to think that, as the war’s name does imply, the First World War was the first war at a global scale. Being so, it is reasonable enough, at least prima facie, that the United States could not be neutral because the war had global implications that the American people would eventually have an interest in.

However, this argument neglects the fact that the First World War was not the first global war nor the American Founders have inexperienced with the challenges posed by global war waged by European belligerents. Instead, the American Founders lived in an era in which the American colonies and early republic were encompassed all about by the global wars of European belligerents, particularly the Seven-Years’ War and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Although the First World War may have gone into history as the first ‘world war,’ it was really not the first such war. Instead, the Seven-Years’ War (1756-63) is most properly the first of a long line of wars on a global scale. If anything, the Seven-Years’ War was more properly a world war than the First World War, as William Pitt had purposefully used the opportunity to secure extensive colonial gains in North America and India that would guarantee Great Britain a colonial empire for generations to follow.

Similarly to the Seven-Years’ war, most of the First World War’s bloodshed was in Europe and its hostilities were to be entirely decided in battles on the European continent, unlike, for example, the Second World War’s Pacific theater. In this sense, the First World War was much like the Seven Years’ War (1756-63): There may have been theaters of war across the world, yet those theaters were largely European violence spilling over into the rest of the world. Just as the French and British fought in North America in the Seven Years’ War (a theater known to American schoolchildren as the French and Indian War), so did the Germans and British fight around the African Rift Valley.

All the world-wide maneuvering in the First World War was largely an attempt by one power or another to tie down resources of its enemies that could otherwise be allocated to Europe. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrilla campaign required the British army to station battalions that could have otherwise buttressed the Western front just as Maximilian von Spee’s mischief in the South Pacific required the Royal Navy to dispatch two battlecruisers there, including HMS Invincible, that would have otherwise been stationed in Britain. Although, the First World War was a global war in scope, it was still fundamentally a European war similar to the war that America’s Founders had experienced in Seven Years’ War’s North-American theater.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were another set of European conflicts that spilled out into the wider world and which the Founders actually had to create concrete policies in response to. When the Revolutionary Wars broke out in 1792, George Washington wisely kept America neutral, whatever may have been people’s sentiments over the political principles entangled with that war. For example, when the French ambassador Citizen Genêt beat the drums of war for the revolutionary government on American soil, Washington asked for the French to recall him, which they did. His administration also negotiated the Jay Treaty, which diffused tensions with Great Britain that might have led to another war.

John Adams showed similar restraint in dealing with the scandal of the XYZ affair and in navigating American diplomacy through the Quasi-War without having to get involved in the wider war between Britain and France. Adams certainly did trample on American liberty by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, but a sympathetic historian could very well give the president some credit for trying to keep America out of war by signing them. Grievous mistakes like the Alien and Sedition Acts notwithstanding, the American Founders provided an example of how the American republic should interact with European wars, and that is with disinterested benevolence towards all.

During the First World War, America should have observed to the wise principles of the American founding and avoided committing the nation to a European war. By 1917, the First World War had devolved into a nationalistic struggle for existence that a nation founded on America’s principles should have had any role in. When Pope Benedict XV had asked for the belligerents to enumerate their war-aims, none could actually do so, because they really had no specific war-aims. For all belligerents, the only option worse than continuing the war was losing it. If the Entente won, Germany expected to be humiliated and dismembered. If the Central Powers won, France and Great Britain expected Germany to establish an autocratic hegemony over central Europe and thus control over the wider continent. The war was therefore a death-spiral, in which nations had no conscious policy but to commit themselves to the struggle.

 

 

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

-Ferdinand Foch

 

Wilson led the United States into the conflict with the view that America could provide a conciliatory solution to the conflict and mitigate other powers’ more unsavory interests. However, just as Washington’s principle of honesty being the best policy made American entirely unsuited to politics of late 18th century Europe, so should have it prevented the nation entirely unsuited to those of early 20th century Europe. Wilson had proclaimed “open covenants of peace” as the first of his Fourteen Points, but he should have known that Europe diplomats would have none of that. Britain, France, and Italy had signed secret treaties, including the London Pact and the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement,that had motivated the fighting. Self-interested as they were, British, French, and Italian diplomats and politicians were not going to happily, or even willingly, agree to having the spoils of the bloodiest war their respective nations have ever fought be denied to them.

 

The tragedy of the Treaty of Versailles, which ultimately failed to provide any lasting resolution to the First World War’s carnage, was that it was simultaneously too harsh and too lenient. For whatever Wilson may have intended to happen at the Paris Peace Conference, the United States was still but a single nation at the table. Primus inter pares, yes, but still but a single nation. The United States could decisively turn the fortunes of war in the Entente’s favor, but it could not prevent the Entente powers from demanding the kind of victory that the kind of treaty that such a victory would normally prescribe. The Treaty of Versailles was therefore too harsh of a treaty. Moreover, as that decisive victory came from an overseas source, when it came time for the European Entente powers to enforce the treaty they had inflicted upon Germany, they could not. Although Wilson would have liked to have America play a larger role across the world, the American public did not yet have an appetite for such a victory.

The Paris Peace conference was indeed a circus and it was a circus because the United States really had no place at the table. The reasons why the war had been so long and so bloody was that its motivations, to quote John Adams, were “deeply tainted with prejudices.” The problems and predicaments posed by the war had solutions and outcomes that could probably only be decided by Europeans and for Europeans. American involvement only pushed those solutions and outcomes back a generation, and unfortunately they would involve two foreign powers, America and the Soviet Union, establishing two competing empires over the continent.

 

Although it is possible to explain the harm done by Wilson’s foreign policy as a consequence of starry-eyed idealism, Wilson’s domestic policy during the war demonstrated a robust authoritarianism entirely contradictory to America’s Founding principles. The United States was going to go to war one and indivisible. Those who dissented would be singled out and dealt with. As Wilson warned in his April 2nd speech: “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And repression there was. The 1917 Espionage Act provided the federal government the ability to jail and punish those who interfered with recruitment or prevented enthusiasm for the war. Eugene Debs, who had previously been a Socialist candidate for president, was arrested and convicted for having “obstructed recruitment.” This systematic use of repression to control dissent was a radical departure from the polycentric mode of governance that Alexis de Tocqueville had lauded in Democracy in America. It was a rejection of the Founding ideals of a nation, rooted in dissenting Protestantism, that had formulated those ideals, in part, through protracted debates in pamphlets and other printed means.

 

Just as in medicine, the best maxim in politics is to first do no harm. The abandonment of Founding principles in foreign policy did much harm. At its best, Wilson’s enthusiasm for war was a naïve attempt to make the world better, at its worse, that enthusiasm was a prideful attempt to impose a political system on the wider world through central planning. Either way, Wilson’s intervention did very little good and a whole lot of harm. The Treaty of Versailles did not secure Wilson’s aim of “really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles” against “selfish and autocratic power.” Rather than making the world safe for democracy, Wilson’s attempt to rationally construct a new world order made it a petri dish for various mutations of the closed society, whether it be Bolshevism in Russia or Nazism in Germany. Rather than securing liberty at home, the American war-effort trampled on American liberty; the 1917 Espionage Act is still one of its reverberating effects.

When look at from a distinctly historical point of view, the American intervention in the First World War was a blunder that, like much else in the Progressive Era, corroded the Founding ideas of the American republic. It would have been better to take George Washington's words to heart and to avoid "interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe." The First World War was a European war that could have only reached a suitable resolution with a distinctly European solution. 

Punitive Attacks in Syria

 

Vox reports: 

The United States has just intentionally bombed a Syrian regime target for the first time since the country’s civil war began in 2011. So far, it has been a limited cruise missile strike targeting one Syrian airbase, causing an as-yet-unknown number of casualties.

"Dozens of Tomahawks were launched against a single Syrian regime airfield,” a Department of Defense official told Vox.

The decision to attack was a direct reaction to the Syrian regime’s Tuesday gas attack that claimed 85 lives, including about two dozen children. Images of the Syrians who suffocated to death seemed to shock President Trump, who spoke Wednesday of the “beautiful little babies” killed in the attack, which he described as “an affront to humanity.”

 

Although ill-advised on the Founders' enduring principles of foreign policy, I think that the Trump administration's response makes tactical and, in more general, game-theoretic sense for those who share the administration's end of enforcing treaties prohibiting the use of certain weapons.

I don't think the United States' policy should really care about another power's use of chemical weapons. But if one think American policy should care, this is the kind of punitive response that should be used: Sudden, gratuitous, and clearly tied to the behavior being punished. It is the kind of policy that one can expect a military to actually be able to successfully carry out. Saving Syrian children? No so much. 

The perverse irony of Trump's punitive attacks in Syria is that they coincided with American entry in the Great War. These kind of policies are not only ends-means compatible with a Wilsonian world-system limiting national sovereignty through international treaties, they are necessary for sustaining such a régime. 

 

However, in my thought about the tactical nature of the president's decision, I should not neglect to point out that it is unconstitutional. GMU's Ilya Somin provides commentary:

Earlier tonight, the United States launched cruise missiles against a Syrian military base in retaliation for the Assad regime’s brutal use of chemical weapons against civilians. Assad’s atrocities are appalling. Perhaps they even justify US military intervention. Nonetheless, it is essential to remember the constitutional requirement that initiating war requires congressional authorization. That is both legally necessary, and the right choice from a prudential point of view.

Article I of The Constitution very clearly reserves to Congress the power to start a war. The Founders sought to avoid a dangerous situation in which a single man could take the nation to war. Even Alexander Hamilton — the strongest supporter of sweeping presidential power among the framers of the Constitution — recognized that “the Legislature have a right to make war” and that “it is . . . the duty of the Executive to preserve Peace till war is declared.”

The situation would be different if Assad attacked us first. In that event, Trump would be merely waging a war already begun by the enemy. But for all of its many sins, the Syrian government was not previously at war with the United States, and Assad did not attack us. Indeed, just a few months ago, Donald Trump spoke of cooperating with Assad and his Russian allies in waging war against ISIS.