Rearview Mirror

Limit Your Sense of Relief:

With President Trump's apparent climb-down at Davos, the most dangerous phase of the recent crisis he provoked seems over. I can't add much to the eloquent denunciations of our president's globally destructive behavior that editorialists across the western world (and my friend Art Goldhammer close to home) have not already recorded. We have been watching a child-like creature --pure Id, as Freudians might have said when Freudian analysis held weight -- indulge his unconstrained impulses. "Play my game or I will knock over the global order that has benefited the United States so greatly over the last 80 years along with the constitutional balances within the United States."

But let me try to accent some lessons that some of us hitherto complacent liberals should draw from this episode whose consequences will be unfolding for a long time. First, institutions -- domestic as well as international -- aren't as robust as we'd like to think them. Gifted leaders, sometimes virtuous, sometimes malevolent, can stretch them or shatter them. The statutes are open to interpretation. We can't really have a government of laws without a government of men (and women) who tell us what the laws now intend or originally intended when they were crafted. And therefore character, that old-fashioned concept along with virtue, matters.

History, too, has to be interpreted. It doesn't teach by itself. The past is the storehouse of what might prove useful knowledge, but we're less certain of what makes it useful. We know how its analogies fall short or are imperfect. As a "science" or type of knowledge, it is like the Delphic oracle, which gave ambiguous messages to priestesses in a trance. Interpreted imperfectly the predictions lead to catastrophe: remember Croesus of Lydia who did not stop to think that the kingdom he was told would be destroyed would be his own. We look for "trends," that is predictable trajectories of events. Only future outcomes, however, will reveal what was a trend and not a dead end. We honor historians who seem to be successful trend spotters at the time they produce their work. And since we can only see trends in the rearview mirror, we discern them, like Benjamin's angel of history, as a stream of events or wreckage unfolding behind us.

Analogies or "parallels' are to history as metaphor is to poetry and fiction: They breathe life into discussions of the past and present, but they cannot provide absolutely congruent situations. If one element of the parallel is discordant, the utility of comparison with the past can be shattered. Nonetheless partial parallels can still be illuminating. As I reflect on possible analogies, given my own field of study, I am struck by German hybris in the early twentieth century -- not Hitler's Germany, but Imperial Germany in the years before World War I, when its ruling class could not understand why the other European powers thought it reckless and arrogant. Its policy makers and intellectuals saw each of their initiatives as justified defensive responses: Britain had a large fleet, hence Germany needed one too -- not really to surpass England, but to make it too risky for Britain to use its own aggressively. Russia and France had formed an alliance and enlarged their armies, therefore the Germans must as well, although the French and Russians were themselves reacting to German enlargement. Kaiser William II (1890-1918) had the habit of stretching the relatively cautious public role that European heads of state had come to adopt, and his successive advisers came to indulge his willful statements or even to adopt his risky behavior as their own. German policy makers thought they were being "encircled," and losing out in the competition for overseas empire. Germany, they claimed, only wanted its own "place in the sun." When the French who ruled Algeria moved to dominate the policy of independent Morocco -- a policy that Marshall Lyautey likened to the capillary spread of a spot of ink -- the Germans ostentatiously supported the Moroccans, which only prompted closer Anglo-French defensive arrangements. Berlin repeated the challenge in Morocco a few years later, once again to provoke even more binding Anglo-French coordinated policy. At home the Kaiser believed that his constitutional role as commander in chief should be endorsed by his ministers and recognized by the opposition. There was no supreme court to deter him; but then, had there been, it might well have recognized his prerogatives, much as the U.S. Supreme Court's majority has so far deferred to the American executive. The major party on the Left, the Social Democrats, was growing sufficiently strong to worry the governments of the center and right and to denounce the Kaiser's rashness, but when the crisis of summer 1914 broke, it also could not resist the pressure for a German military response.

There are lessons to be learned -- not ones that allow reliable prediction, but those that inspire caution. First, individuals or small groups may make meaningful decisions, but all decisions tend to limit future options, and those limitations tend to present themselves as "structural" as we look back on them. Structures are events in the rear-view mirror. But as such they exert a fateful constraint. Crises are cumulative. As they pile up, they make future crises harder to solve. History is not subject to a statute of limitations. Those who yielded at the brink in 1905, or 1910-1911 may not be ready to yield again lest their credibility be sacrificed.

There is another way in which a sense of structure emerges, namely the interlocking of different arenas of potential conflict that may seem to be safely compartmentalized. The First World War was ultimately triggered not by Anglo-German-French competition, but Austro-German-Russian frictions in the Balkans. Because of the interlocking alliances these regions of rivalry could not be hermetically sealed from each other. So, too, by the 1930s, crises in East Asia and in Europe powerfully influenced each other. Today, Ukraine and Taiwan are linked in a geopolitical intersectionality. Finally, there are structures perhaps of human behavior, choices that we ascribe to inherited traits or to mental compulsions that we cannot discern but which every trial judge, indeed which every human must try to take account of in choosing intimate partners, raising children, and entrusting the public spheres to political leaders.

We cannot guard against all contingencies but we can take reasonable precautions and try to correct egregiously dangerous errors. Contemplating Russia's assault on Ukraine, Israel's destructive campaign in Gaza, and Trump's willful performances of hegemony in the Western hemisphere as well as his demands for Greenland, the temptation is to think that somehow a providential justice will finally operate to humble these excesses. "The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small." Unfortunately they grind masses of relatively innocent actors along the way. If there is a providence at work, it leaves us to our own devices. Humanity makes its own history -- but that doesn't mean it makes it well. To cite someone who thought about these issues and understood the value of metaphor, it doesn't make it out of whole cloth. Even more fatefully, majorities can turn their history over to those who give all signs of making it disastrously. We are still in the midst of that experiment.