Western governments have accused China of ‘giving cover’ to Russia for its aggression against Ukraine.
Chinese and Russian (and other) governments have accused the West of ‘giving cover’ to Israel for its war crimes in Gaza.
It’s
funny how Cold War-style dialectics have stayed with us for so long.
Maybe because the accusations are not really dialectical but refer to
separate actions that only appear connected once they began. Separate,
yet related. For they all follow from the vanished concord amongst the
world’s major powers over the rules of their game, which wasn’t the case
during most of the Cold War.
Talleyrand
has no good answer to those questions. However, there is something that
is more & more certain: one day a big war will come. Not because of
anything intractable. But instead because the arts of diplomacy are now
almost totally lost. Few governments even appear to know what diplomacy
is anymore.
It’s that simple. What to do? We may turn once more to the historian John Lukacs, here in dialogue with himself:
At
the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue in New York, on the walls facing the
elevators on the upper floors, are a few old photographs in plain black
frames, mostly of famed Yale football teams of the past. I am not a
Yale man, and I have no interest in football, but there is one picture I
have gazed at more than once. It is a wide, panoramic photo of Company
A, Battalion C – Yale men at the Plattsburg camp in 1916, in uniform,
putting themselves into readiness for service to their country. There
are matters in that picture that attract my historical imagination –
well as I know how that kind of imagination is broad and narrow at the
same time. One of these matters is how modern
those men look. By this I mean their leggings and puttees and excellent
boots and especially their wide-brimmed, felt U.S. Army campaign hats,
half-Boy Scout, half-Western. Yes, the twentieth century began in 1914,
but the only soldiers who looked truly modern then were Americans and
Australians – and not only because of their campaign hats but also
because of their wide smiles. There are smiles on most of those
fifty-odd faces, thin-lipped as they are but by no means grim – perhaps
self-conscious but also quite confident. It is a sunny photograph, in
more than one way. It must have been taken in midsummer 1916, but the
scene is light-years removed from the Somme. It is characteristic of
American optimism, meaning that it is vague but strong. The strength
matters more than the vagueness, in the short run at least. It reflects
the belief of this company of men that their duty to their country and
their duty to their class and their duty to themselves are completely
and unquestionably in accord. That belief is the source of their
confidence, and the Plattsburg camp is a perfect fit for that.
Plattsburg embodies the ideals and standards of Athletic Christianity,
American Patriotism, and such Teddy Rooseveltian nouns as Zip and Pep.
The Plattsburg experience had much that was Boy Scoutish about it, but
there was more to it and more to those campaign hats, too (the style was
created for the army in 1912 and called the Montana Peak). That
concordance at Plattsburg of camping and soldiering, scout life and army
life, came easily at that time, both being preparations, predicates,
essential elements for a manly comportment. It was but an extension of
the Boy Scout motto ‘Be Prepared’ – yes, prepared even for war, if need
be. But what kind of war? That is where the vagueness comes in.
There
are reasons, many reasons, to ask questions about the ideas of the men
of Company A, Battalion C, at Plattsburg in 1916. But intentions must be
judged from acts. It is not their ideas, it is their behavior that may
have been unexceptionable, by and large. There may be no reason for us
to admire them, but there may be reasons enough to respect them. ‘What’s
good for us is good for America’, they seem to think; ‘what’s good for
America is (well, it may be) good for the world’. There was a
contradiction between these two sets of beliefs, connected as they seem
to have been in 1916 and for a long time thereafter; but it has marked
much of the twentieth century, and the fading of these beliefs, even
when they were wrong, may perhaps be regretted now….
So
many of the monumental matters in this country are tinted illusions
that often fade the more quickly the more the eye seeks them. I suppose
that is what the famous green light at the end of the The Great Gatsby means – a meaning that, I fear, has been misunderstood and sentimentalized by most of its commentators. But The Great Gatsby
brings me back to my original argument, which involves both the sources
and the consequences of that war, in which America and Americans
suffered infinitely less than any of the warring nations of Europe and
yet it created the habits and it stayed in the minds of every one of the
characters in The Great Gatsby, which is supposed to be a book about the Roaring Twenties.
‘Including
Tom Buchanan, the villain, whom I can very easily imagine – I can see
him – in that photograph of those beefy Yalies. They were not
aristocrats (perhaps precisely because some of them thought that in
America they were). The true American aristocrat was someone like John
Jay Chapman, who in 1913 went to Coatesville, aghast at a horrible
lynching there – worse, the burning alive – of a black man and then the
kicking of the remains of his skull through the streets. “What I have
seen”, Chapman wrote, “is not an illusion. It is the truth. I have seen
death in the heart of this people”.’
Now you are the
devil’s advocate. Those Yalies knew nothing of Chapman and Coatesville,
and I will say that if they had, some of them wouldn’t have cared much,
but at least some would have, and that is what matters, though perhaps
only in the long run. And that is why I gaze at that photo in the Yale
Club – perhaps especially because I’m a European.
‘Is
it because of your Europeanness that you know that the devil is not the
enemy of God but one of His instruments? Will you allow me that?’
Of
course; and I think that I may also be American enough to allow that
the trouble in this world is not so much with the Devil as with his
lawyers.