The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Chapter 8

  GOING ABROAD

  A Creedal Nation in a World on Probation

  Man isn’t all one, after all—it takes so much of him to be American, to be French, etc.

  Henry James1

  In 1910, a twenty-five-year-old Missourian working on his family farm behind a horse-drawn plow, put in his pocket a copy of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,” which anticipated a world without wars, a world subdued by law:

  Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

  There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

  And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.2

  The Missourian carried the poem with him as an artillery captain when the war-drums throbbed in France. And he carried it on April 12, 1945, when the death of Franklin Roosevelt elevated him to the presidency, thirteen days before the opening of the San Francisco Conference at which the United Nations was organized.3 The UN has been less a parliament of man than an assemblage of regimes, less a federation for a kindly world than a cockpit for competition among nations. But then the Stele of the Vultures, the world’s oldest known historical document, is a carved limestone slab telling, in the Sumerian language, the story of a battle in what is now Iraq about twenty-five centuries ago. So, humanity’s oldest document is about war. And in the eleven decades since Harry Truman put that poem in his pocket, war has been much with us. Humanity has never been without it. Yet nine years after farmer Truman plowed that field, and one year after Captain Truman had commanded the US Army’s 129th Field Artillery Regiment in France, an American was determined to put an end to war. But Woodrow Wilson was sleepless in Paris.

  The president was awake all one night in 1919 because, he told his doctor the next morning, “my mind was so full of the Japanese-Chinese controversy.” An American president was attending a conference to end a war that began in Belgium and raged mostly within 220 miles of the English Channel. Yet Wilson’s sleep was troubled by Sino-Japanese relations. According to historian Margaret MacMillan, Wilson was worried about “what Japan was getting in China, right down to the composition of the railway police in Shantung. (They were to be Chinese with, where necessary, Japanese instructors.)”4 Where “necessary”? America’s president was struggling to measure the necessity of the Japanese component of the Chinese railway police. Such granular preoccupations were enough to give a man a stroke. And might have done so.

  While sailing to Paris, Wilson told his young secretary of the navy, thirty-seven-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, that the United States “is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”5 The idea of a disinterested nation must have been grimly amusing to the leaders of Europe’s blood-soaked continent. Because Wilson, unlike his French, British, and Italian counterparts at the Versailles peace conference, was a head of state, he was given a chair a few inches taller than those for France’s Georges Clemenceau, Britain’s David Lloyd George, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando. Not that Wilson needed that slight physical augmentation of his moral self-confidence. Potential pupils for this former professor came to Paris from far and wide. Or tried to come. MacMillan writes that “the Koreans from Siberia set out on foot in February 1919 and by the time the main part of the Peace Conference ended in June had reached only the Arctic port of Archangel.” However, some pupils were already in Paris when the conference convened—such as a twenty-nine-year-old Vietnamese working in a hotel kitchen: Ho Chi Minh. Many advocates of subjugated peoples and nascent nations came to Paris, drawn by the magnetism of the central Wilsonian principle: self-determination. What exactly Wilson meant by that was a mystery to, among others, Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who wondered: “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?”6

  Ethnicity makes the world go round. And bleed. This is a nasty surprise, not least to all the advanced thinkers who convinced themselves that modernity would mean the eclipse of ethnicity, among other sources of strife. What Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the “liberal expectancy” was that ethnic attachments would weaken, even disappear.7 Such attachments are (or so the theory said) anachronistic, primitive, transitional echoes of mankind’s infancy. Equally mistaken was the Marxist prediction that all preindustrial components of identity—cultural, religious, racial—would be superseded by components of social class. This did not happen: The breaking of nations by ethnic fragmentation dominates world polities today. Many an ethnic group thinks it is a “self” entitled to “self-determination.”

  The nineteenth century was a century of consolidations. The United States bound a continent together by steel rails and a strong central government. Germany unified, as did Italy. Americans, however, injected into the discourse of diplomacy the idea that “self-determination” is a universal “right.” Before the First World War ended, Woodrow Wilson told a cheering session of Congress that “self-determination” is “an imperative principle of action.” But self-determination by what sort of entities? Wilson said, “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.”8 He was sowing dragon’s teeth. He seemed to assume that the nouns “nations” and “peoples” are synonyms, or that these entities are coterminous. But in many cases they were not, and still are not.

  Six of Wilson’s Fourteen Points concerned self-determination. There was to be, for example, “autonomous development” of the “peoples of Austria-Hungary” and also of “other nationalities…under Turkish rule.”9 “Peoples.” “Nationalities.” And ethnicities, which are not the same thing as nationalities. The fact of ethnicity still disrupts the game of nations. The world would be calmer if history had caused ethnic groups to coincide neatly with national boundaries. But the distribution of peoples does not always fit political borders, particularly when those borders have been drawn by diplomats confident of their ability to tidy up the world and make it rational. Rationalism in politics is risky; when combined, as in Wilson’s statecraft, with moralism, it is explosive.

  Secretary Lansing said Wilson “is a phrase-maker par excellence,” but warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” While Wilson was enunciating this “imperative” principle, a German corporal, recovering from a gas attack, was planning a political career. And on September 26, 1938, the former corporal said, “[At] last, nearly twenty years after the declarations of President Wilson, the right of self-determination for these three and a half million [Germans] must be enforced.”10 So spoke Hitler as Czechoslovakia was dismembered. A nation was sacrificed for the “self-determination” of a “people”—Sudeten Germans.

  Lansing had seen such trouble coming. The “undigested” phrase “self-determination” is, he had said, “simply loaded with dynamite…It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives…What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered!”11 Undeterred, FDR and Churchill affirmed in their Atlantic Charter of August 1941 the rights of “peoples.” And the UN Charter endorses self-determination of “peoples.” In 1915, Walter Lippmann wrote, “When you consider what a mystery the East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in something like its true proportions.”12 But just two years later Lippmann, just twenty-eight years old, was an earnest arranger working for the Inquiry, a small, secret group serving Wilson. From the New York offices of the American Geographical Society, the Inquiry planned a rearrangement of the world that would, the rearrangers expected, make the twentieth century rational. Ronald Steel, Lippmann’s biographer, writes:

  The Inquiry, working from maps and piles of statistics, attacked the question of frontiers by drawing up charts showing the concentration of national groups within Europe. Lippmann then coordinated these charts and lists with national political movements to det
ermine how these ethnic entities could be granted self-determination without triggering new European rivalries. Then he correlated this blueprint with the secret treaties—deciding which territorial changes were acceptable and which defied justice and logic. Once the Inquiry team…had matched the aspirations of the ethnic groups with the geography and economics of each region, Lippmann organized the conclusions into…13

  Enough. Has there ever been quite such a spectacle of naïveté and hubris? Soon Wilson was off to the Versailles peace conference, from which a member of his delegation sent home a letter containing one of the twentieth century’s most telling vignettes: “We went into the next room where the floor was clear and Wilson spread out a big map (made in our office) on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to show us what had been done; most of us were also on our hands and knees. I was in the front row and felt someone pushing me and looked around angrily to find that it was Orlando, on his hands and knees crawling like a bear toward the map.”14 What were they working on? Perhaps that soon-to-be-born state of Yugoslavia, which lasted until ethnic conflicts dismembered it in 1992. Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat at the conference, wrote to his wife, “But, darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men [Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau] cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake.”15 Thus was rationality imposed upon the Middle East. With steady hands those men would redraw maps, relying on ethnic data. But the principle of ethnicity got out of hand. Again, Moynihan: “Fascism, Italian, then German, was much about ‘blood.’ The Second World War was as much a pogrom as anything else, and far the greatest incidence of violence since has been ethnic in nature and origin.”16

  There was a vast carelessness—an earnest carelessness—in the Versailles conference’s rearranging of the world. MacMillan, who is Lloyd George’s great-granddaughter, says that in 1916, he mused: “Who are the Slovaks? I can’t seem to place them.” Three years later, he was helping place them in a new—and perishable—nation, Czechoslovakia. Not until 1918 did Lloyd George discover that New Zealand is east of Australia. When, in Paris, he dramatically spoke of the Turks retreating eastward toward Mecca, Lord Curzon sternly corrected him: the retreat, said Curzon, was toward Ankara, not Mecca. Lloyd George breezily replied: “Lord Curzon is good enough to admonish me on a triviality.” Arthur Balfour, a laconic aristocrat who rarely seemed deeply stirred by anything, was angered by the spectacle of “all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents.” Harold Nicolson told his diary: “How fallible one feels here! A map—a pencil—tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people.”17

  Several thousands? Many millions, actually. The maps were large, the pencils busy. Turkey was on the conference’s agenda but was not auspicious clay for the experts to mold. Its recent rulers had included one who went mad and another who was so fearful of enemies that, when he desired a cigarette, he had a eunuch take the first puff. In polyglot Turkey, for the dockworkers in Salonika to function, they had to speak half a dozen languages. Never mind. Those experts in Paris, crawling on their hands and knees around those big maps, would fix Turkey in due time. When French officials invited Wilson to tour the scarred moonscape of the Flanders battlefields, he angrily refused to go, saying that the French were trying to arouse his emotions. Pure reason, he thought, must prevail. Yet Wilson perhaps included in his Fourteen Points the restoration of Polish independence because at a White House party in 1916 he had been stirred by the pianist Paderewski’s rendition of Chopin.

  Speaking to Lloyd George’s mistress, Frances Stevenson, over a luncheon plate of chicken, Clemenceau said: “I have come to the conclusion that force is right. Why is this chicken here? Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!”18 What shaped Clemenceau’s dark realism was life on a continent that included such countries as Albania, in parts of which one man in five died in blood feuds. A story, perhaps apocryphal but certainly plausible, is that when Wilson asked Clemenceau if he did not believe that all men are brothers, Clemenceau exclaimed: “Yes, all men are brothers—Cain and Abel! Cain and Abel!” Clemenceau certainly did say to Wilson, “We [Europeans], too, came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.”19

  Most of the political calamities through which the world has staggered since 1919 have resulted from the distinctively modern belief that things—including nations and human nature—are much more malleable than they actually are. It is the belief that nations are like Tinkertoys: They can be taken apart and rearranged at will. It is the belief that human beings are material that can be sculpted by the tools of political artists. In the one hundred years since 1919, many more than 100 million people have perished in violence intended to force the world into new configurations. The violence has served ambitious attempts at social engineering—attempts to create racial purity or a classless society or the New Soviet Man.

  When Lenin and Wilson died ten days apart in 1924, the structure of twentieth-century conflict was in place. Twenty-eight years later, on June 2, 1952, in Fulton, Missouri, where six years earlier, at Westminster College, Winston Churchill had fired the opening rhetorical shot of the Cold War with his “iron curtain” speech (“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent”), a politically engaged Hollywood actor gave the commencement address at William Woods College. He told the graduates: “America is less a place than an idea…the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people.”20 Twenty-eight years after that, the speaker, Ronald Reagan, would be elected president and proceed to put in place the policies that led to the end of the Cold War without military shots being fired. The idea that America “is an idea,” and that the idea is about principles of universal validity, has always had foreign policy consequences.

  “Sometimes people call me an idealist,” Wilson said. “Well, that is why I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.”21 Wilson had a piece of a point. He would, however, have been more accurate if he had said that America is the only nation whose relations with the rest of the world are shaped by the universalism of its creed. As Walter Berns wrote, because American patriotism is inextricably entwined with those principles, “ours is not a parochial patriotism.”22 This must, and should, have a profound continuous effect on the conduct of American foreign policy. When Henry James wrote, in a letter to his fellow novelist William Dean Howell, “Man isn’t at all one, after all—it takes so much of him to be American, to be French, etc.” he was affirming a truism: Humanity never has had, and likely never will have, a common culture.23 Therefore, national differences must be acknowledged and prudently accommodated. This does not, however, refute the American premise that humanity is one in this sense: In just societies, under legitimate governments, all persons have certain rights that are respected. The question, which is of particular urgency for the conduct of US foreign policy, is how should this premise condition the intercourse of the United States with other Nations? This intercourse has always had and should always have an indelible color of idealism. Conservatism should embrace this, but should leaven it with an unsentimental, almost bleak realism.

  Reflection about foreign policy, as about all other spheres of politics, should begin with this basic question: What is the essential, unchanging nature of human beings? Conservatism’s answer is: Human beings are desirous and competitive, hence they often are anxious, and hence they were given to conflict. Man is indeed “born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”24

&n
bsp; In foreign policy, as elsewhere, one of conservatism’s functions is to say some things that people do not want to hear, such as this: War, which always has been part of the human story, always will be. More than ninety years ago, and more than that many wars ago, the United States took the lead in another effort to make war a thing of the past. On August 27, 1928, representatives of fifteen nations met in Paris to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, thereby renouncing the use of war as an instrument of national policy. Today Kellogg-Briand seems like something written on water in ink of smoke. But it is wrong to regard the pact banning war as just another example of the feather-headedness typical of an American nation that was then also struggling to enforce a ban on alcohol. The pact was more than a pale flame of idealism in the closing dusk of American innocence. It expressed an aspect of the American temper that still exists. Specifically, Americans are temperamental optimists about the power of understanding to defuse conflicts. It is, however, when we achieve real understanding of the world that we understand that it is and ever will be a dangerous place, full of conflicts. Neither cameras nor commerce nor even more intimidating weapons will change that.

  SEVERAL GRAND ILLUSIONS

  In September 1862, two men worked their way across some dark and bloody ground in northern Maryland. They were armed with devices of profound importance for the future of war, and hence of politics: cameras. They had been sent by Mathew Brady, at whose Manhattan studio there soon opened an exhibit called “The Dead of Antietam.” The New York Times reported: “The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams…Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”25 But the civilian world would not soon look war in the face. In World War I, no photo of a corpse appeared in a British, French, or German newspaper. It was not until 1943 that Life magazine created controversy, and a new era in journalism (and, in time, in the conflicts between nations), when it published a photograph, which had been held back for many months, of three dead Americans on a New Guinea beach. By the time of Vietnam, graphic journalism was ascendant in a wired world, as was the hope that the impact of such journalism would give war such disturbing immediacy that the world would flinch from violence. The twentieth century was, however, replete with bitter surprises for optimists, such as the editors of the renowned eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1910–11. Its entry on “torture” said that “the whole subject is one of only historical interest as far as Europe is concerned.”26