Here, as elsewhere, the question as to which method of avoiding war in fact tends to produce the desired result and which turns out to be counterproductive receives remarkably little empirical examination from the anointed visionaries. It is the quest for peace, like the quest for cosmic justice, that exalts them morally—irrespective of whether their strategy actually reduces the dangers of war or even increases those dangers. Here, as in other expressions of cosmic visions, results are not the test. Taking a moral stand is the test, as economist Roy Harrod discovered at a 1934 rally of the British Labour Party. A Labour Party candidate proclaimed that Britain ought to disarm “as an example to others”—a very common argument at that time.
‘You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Roy,’ she said, ‘have you lost all your idealism?’17
Personal exaltation, not empirical consequences for other people, has long marked cosmic visions and their advocates, however much they may proclaim their love of humanity, peace, the environment, the poor, or other ostensible beneficiaries of their activities.
While those with the opposite vision—advocates of military deterrence—typically see other human beings as rational decision-makers like themselves, and accordingly seek to present potential aggressor nations with sufficient counter-force to deter military action, those with the cosmic vision of the anointed visionaries are more likely to define the problem psychologically as hostile emotions and irrational behavior that may get out of hand and thereby lead to war. This second and more psychological explanation casts the visionaries in a superior—almost therapeutic—role as they seek to “relieve international tensions,” to dispel “misunderstandings” through more contact with both the leaders and the peoples of adversary nations, and to portray these potential enemies as “human beings like ourselves.” Two of the great conflicts of the twentieth century—first between the Western democracies and the Nazis and then between the Western democracies and the Communists—both illustrate this pattern, which can be seen in the events that lead up to World War II and in the events of the later Cold War.
The Road to World War II
During the period between the two world wars, the terms of the competition between deterrence theories and disarmament theories were very uneven within the Western democracies. The latter vision was clearly in the ascendancy, both in theory and in practice.While the policies and statements of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain epitomized this conciliatory approach in the years that led up to World War II, that vision was pervasive in Britain before he ever achieved that office and it was a political force to be reckoned with in the United States and in other Western democracies.
Accordingly, a whole series of international disarmament agreements and mutual security conferences and agreements marked the two decades between the world wars. As in other contexts, the actual specifics of the disarmament agreements received remarkably little critical scrutiny by the morally anointed visionaries, who welcomed these treaties’ symbolism and their presumed psychological efficacy in relieving international tensions. For example, one of the earliest of these disarmament pacts, the Washington Naval Agreement of 1922, inhibited the growth of British and American navies but presented no practical barrier to the growth of Japan’s navy, since the permissible limits on Japan were no less than Japan’s current capacity to build warships—and, after the point was reached when the treaty limits would have become a practical barrier, Japan simply ignored the agreement, as Nazi Germany would later ignore a similar naval treaty with Great Britain.18
The inherent asymmetry of disarmament treaties between democratic and despotic governments—violations by the latter being far less constrained by public opinion or even public knowledge—were glided over by disarmament advocates.
The Washington Naval Agreement was followed by a series of much-heralded international conferences at Locarno (1925) and Lausanne (1932), among other places, spawning such euphoric phrases as “the spirit of Locarno” and declarations that the Lausanne conference had “saved Europe” and opened “a new era” for the world.19 The same euphoria would later greet Neville Chamberlain’s famous pronouncement after the Munich conference of 1938 that there was now “peace in our time.”
In the vision of the disarmament advocates, armaments themselves are the enemy. “Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!” cried France’s foreign minister, Aristide Briand,20 co-author of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renouncing war. Bertrand Russell in 1936 declared, “disarmament and complete pacifism is indisputably the wisest policy” and urged “the gradual disbanding of the British army, navy and air force.”21 This was not an isolated individual opinion but one echoed in Parliament. British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee declared, “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists.”22 While the British government did not disarm, its expenditures on its military forces, which had declined from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, rose much less than those of Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
There was a similar pattern in the United States, where the American army had less than a quarter of a million men and was only the sixteenth largest army in the world, behind the armies of Greece and Portugal. Moreover, even this skeletal force lacked enough military equipment to go around. Some American soldiers had to train with wooden rifles and with mock-ups of tanks and cannon. Probably no great nation in all of history was so completely disarmed as the United States. Nevertheless, even the modest military spending of this era was attacked by those who considered themselves part of “the peace movement.” In a 1936 article in The Atlantic Monthly titled “We Militarize,” Oswald Garrison Villard dismissed “bogies as to our ‘coming’ war with Japan.”23 Perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas declared: “A prospective victory by Hitler over most of Europe is highly unlikely.”24
Nor were such sentiments confined to the intelligentsia. They found echoes in the Congress of the United States. Influential Senator Gerald Nye, for example, denounced “the new insane armament race,” declared that “the masses of Japan are no more desirous of a conflict with the people of the United States than our own citizens are desirous of a war with the people of Japan.” But, even if war came, Japan “couldn’t get within several hundred miles of our shore” and “neither could we get within striking distance of the Japanese coast.”25 A whole literature of this era argued that war fears were being whipped up by military suppliers, the “merchants of death” in the phrase of the time. In short, those who advocated military deterrence were not even granted the small dignity of being honestly mistaken, much less any possibility of being right.
The irrelevant argument that the people of various countries did not want war proved to be as politically indestructible as it was fallacious as an indicator of what the governments of those countries were likely to do. This same argument was repeated on many occasions on the other side of the Atlantic by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and was to re-surface a generation later during the Cold War and be repeated innumerable times once again, as if it were a new and deep insight. In September 1938, Chamberlain spoke of “the desire of the German people for peace,”26 less than a year before the most catastrophic war in history was unleashed by Hitler. Similarly, Chamberlain spoke of “the passionate desire of the Italian people for peace,”27 which was no doubt equally true and equally irrelevant to Mussolini’s actions.
Like many others during the years between the two world wars, Chamberlain warned of the dangers of an “arms race”—what he called “this senseless competition in rearmament which continually cancels out the efforts that each nation makes to secure an advantage over the others.”28 This echoed what Bertrand Russell had said in 1936, that “every increase of armaments by one Power is met by an increase on the other side, which requires a further increase by the first Power.”29 Such neutral assessments from above the struggle—a favorite
position for anointed visionaries—overlooked two crucial facts in the life-and-death decisions that have to be made about military preparedness.
First of all, an obviously aggressive nation, such as Nazi Germany during the 1930s, launches a military buildup in order to accomplish its goals by force or the threat of force, while those who build up counter-force are seeking to avoid being attacked or forced into surrender. If a defensive military buildup—an “arms race”—fails to secure any net advantage whatever against the aggressor, it is nevertheless a huge success if it prevents aggression or the need to surrender. From the standpoint of the non-aggressor nation, it is not trying to gain anything at the expense of anybody else, but simply recognizes the grim reality that military preparedness is part of the price of maintaining the peace, independence, and freedom that they already have.30 If military deterrence permits that to be done without bloodshed, it is not a “waste” because the arms are never used, but instead is a bargain because they were formidable enough that they did not have to be used, nor lives sacrificed in the carnage of war.
The anti–“arms race” argument often also includes the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy—in this case, that arms races lead to war because wars often occur after contending nations have built up their military capacity.31 Empirically, it is certainly true that, as nations see the prospect of war approaching, they tend to arm themselves. This can hardly be surprising. Nor does it indicate the direction of causation.
Implicit in all this is the self-congratulatory notion that other people are behaving irrationally and that one’s own superior understanding and virtue are the answer. From here it is but a short step to the therapeutic approach of seeking to manage other people’s emotions, assuming that wars occur because those emotions get out of hand, rather than because some political leaders deliberately choose courses of action that threaten evil consequences for others because those same actions seem to offer good prospects for themselves in the form of territorial aggrandizement, political glory, and the like.
To those with the opposite vision, this all looks radically different. If one assumes that other human beings are basically rational, like oneself, then potential aggressors—whether international or ordinary criminals at home—can be expected to calculate the prospects of success and to be more inclined to take a chance where one’s potential victims are weakest. From this perspective, arming potential victims reduces the dangers of aggression and especially of successful aggression.32 But this approach offers no special role for those who presume themselves to be morally superior.
Another fallacy in the “arms race” argument is that, like so much else in the vision of anointed visionaries, it overlooks the intractable economic reality of scarcity. No country has the unlimited resources implied in the argument that an unending upward spiral of armaments will ensue. Moreover, some countries will reach their economic limits before others.
In a later era, President Ronald Reagan understood this very clearly when he explained to a horrified group of Washington Post journalists that he intended to win the arms race with the Soviet Union, because American resources greatly exceeded those of the U.S.S.R., so that Soviet leaders would ultimately be forced to the bargaining table to begin reducing their threatening nuclear arsenal and scale back their international aggressions. To the equal disbelief and disdain of many, he likewise said on more than one occasion that we were seeing the last days of the Soviet Union,33 which could not take the combined strains of their own counterproductive economic system and foreign military adventures. The fact that events proved him right has done absolutely nothing to rehabilitate President Reagan in the eyes of those to whom evidence has never been more important than the vision on which their own egos depend.
In the years between the two world wars, as in other eras, the argument that military preparedness meant a wasteful arms race was supplemented by the argument that war is futile. As Chamberlain put it, war “wins nothing, cures nothing, settles nothing.”34 This long-standing staple of pacifists, like many other self-congratulatory pronouncements, has almost never been subjected to any empirical examination.
If war is so futile, why then were there tears of relief and gratitude when the peoples of Western Europe were liberated from their Nazi conquerors by the invading Allied armies and when those in slave labor camps and extermination camps were freed? Was it futile to occupy a defeated Germany and Japan, rooting out their centuries-old traditions of militarism that had brought such terror and havoc to their neighbors? Was the American Civil War futile in freeing millions of human beings from slavery? The “futility of war” is an exhilarating set of sounds rather than a serious statement to be tested seriously against facts. Some wars are indeed futile. Some are not. Sweeping a priori pronouncements on the subject serve little purpose other than self-exaltation.
Along with the military disarmament of the interwar years went a moral disarmament. Despite the savagery in word and deeds of the Nazis in Germany and the warlords in Japan, Chamberlain again epitomized the spirit of the times in speaking neutrally of “both sides” as if there were some moral equivalence. Thus he spoke of Japan’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of China as “the outbreak of hostilities” there and “the unhappy conflict” that ensued.35 During periods of friction between Nazi Germany and Great Britain, he called for “restraint and toleration by the Press of both countries.”36 Hitler’s orchestrated violence through manipulation of the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was referred to as “a succession of serious incidents in the unhappy Sudetenland” and later Chamberlain spoke of “the present controversy” there and condemned “extremists on both sides.”37
These were not clarion calls, from either a moral or a self-defense point of view. In such a climate of opinion, where war itself was seen as the enemy, widespread opposition to military preparedness was hardly surprising. At Oxford University, students pledged never to fight for their country—a pledge that spread to other students at other universities. Bertrand Russell declared: “The purpose is peace, and the way to achieve it is to say: We will not fight.” 38 Pacifism was strong in the United States as well. France, as the country nearest to Germany, was better armed but, as Churchill noted in 1932: “France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core.”39
At the heart of the spiritual disarmament behind the military disarmament was the cosmic vision of anointed visionaries. Both the rhetoric and the foreign policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reflected virtually every aspect of that vision. First, there was the therapeutic vision of war, that “if you want to secure a peace which can be relied on to last, you have got to find out what are the causes of war and remove them.”40 Among these causes were “misunderstandings,”41 “grievances, differences and suspicions”42 and other psychological problems such as “enmities”43 and “an atmosphere of ill will.”44 Given this therapeutic vision of the causes of war, Chamberlain’s incessant repetition of the theme that “personal contacts”45 between heads of state were the way to dissipate this psychological malaise and defuse emotions was perfectly consistent.
We now know that Hitler and Mussolini developed contempt for Chamberlain, as a result of the prime minister’s willingness to fly repeatedly to meet with them—they never flew to England to meet with him—even under humiliating conditions. Nor was this contempt an incidental sidebar to history. The Axis powers risked war with countries whose military potential they fully understood to be greater than their own, because they did not think that these countries had the guts to fight or the good sense to build up sufficient military forces in time to fight effectively.
Contempt for the weak-kneed leaders and timid policies of the Western democracies were essential parts of that calculation which led the dictators to unleash war. Yet, at the time, little of this was understood in the West beyond the ranks of a very few like Winston Churchill, who was then a back-bencher in Parliament, alienated from his own party and often an object of disdain and ri
dicule, when he was noticed at all.46 By contrast, when Chamberlain prepared to fly to Munich for his historic meeting with Hitler in 1938, he left amid tumultuous cheers and applause and the virtually unanimous support of all parties in the House of Commons—and was similarly welcomed back with great acclaim in Parliament and in the country, as he proclaimed “peace in our time.”
Both the material and the moral disarmament of the West were crucial to their vulnerability to attack by nations whose military potential was not as great, but who counted on having a decisive series of victories before the democratic nations could build up their armaments and their resolve. This Axis strategy came dangerously close to success.
A stunning, swift, and unbroken series of major military victories by the Axis powers dominated the first half of World War II, whether in Europe, Asia, or North Africa. Poland and France fell to the blitzkrieg of the Nazi armies in a matter of weeks, and Norway was overrun in a matter of days. The Japanese swept down across Southeast Asia to capture the Philippines, Malaya, and the East Indies after bombing Pearl Harbor. When the British finally won a battle in North Africa near the end of 1942, Winston Churchill declared frankly, “We have a new experience. We have victory.”47 The war was already three years old at that point. The only miscalculation of the Axis powers was in believing the Western democracies incapable of continuing to fight the war for years, in the face of repeatedly devastating defeats, retreats, and mounting casualties.
Whether this would have been a miscalculation a generation later, at the time of the Vietnam war, is another question. But, in World War II, once the Western countries, and especially the United States, finally mobilized their resources—which supplied not only their own military forces but also those of the Soviet Union—the tide turned as decisively in their favor in the second half of the war as it had been in favor of the Axis powers in the first half. Nevertheless, despite an overwhelming victory at the end, the Allies were desperately close to defeat earlier. When Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister of Britain in May 1940, he said in reply to his chauffeur’s congratulations: “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.” He had tears in his eyes.48
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