Winning or Losing World War III

It must have been a slow news day. The eminent economic historian, Niall Ferguson has regaled us with speculation of what will happen when we start losing wars. What will life look like when the Red Army is camped out in central London or the Chinese Communist Party has set up a surveillance state in New York City? 

Of course, it’s all fiction. And Ferguson refers to fictional accounts to explain what might happen. It’s called counterfactuals. It’s an historian’s exercise, one that you might have seen on television in a series called The Man in the High Castle, an account of what might have happened if Nazi Germany had won World War II.

Ferguson is trying to gin up support for Ukraine, on the grounds that, if we do not arm Ukraine, Russia will soon be invading the rest of Europe. 

In truth, the much vaunted Russian army-- or, what is left of it-- has had its hands full in Ukraine. Surely, it is not capable of attacking a NATO country. 

Yet, Russia has a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, and who can guarantee that it will never use them. Then again, if it does use them the end result will be that there will not be anyone left to rule.

As for whether China will choose to invade Taiwan, the better to take control of the semiconductor industry, perhaps it will find a cheaper way to do so. Are our enemies complete fools, willing to undergo any sacrifice in order to assert their hegemony?

I suspect that the Chinese government would much rather find a more peaceful way to absorb Taiwan. 

And besides, for reasons that completely escape me, Ferguson ignores the ongoing invasion of Third World peoples through our Southern border. Millions of illegal migrants are surely a massive problem, even if Putin does not invade Italy.

Moreover, while he is catastrophizing, Ferguson ignores the simple fact that we possess nuclear weapons, and that our leaders, if they were faced with an armed invasion, might prefer to use them rather than to admit defeat. Of course, that also implies that, by the calculus of mutually assured destruction, we can protect ourselves, or better, we can exact a price that no aggressor will be willing to risk.

Those are not the only problems here. Suggesting that our failure to resupply Ukraine will cause European calamity-- idem for Israel and Taiwan-- ignores the simple fact that the current worldwide conflicts were provoked by a failure of the American administration. 

It was not an historical inevitability.

Perhaps cultures clash. Perhaps cultures compete for wealth and influence. But, that does not mean that it will always end up with a war. It take a special level of political incompetence to turn a competition into an all-out war.

Seeing the weak and feeble and feckless Biden administration, bad actors around the world decided to take advantage. Some of them want to do so in order to boost their flagging self-esteem. Some want to annex more land. 

And yet, what if things do not end up in the worst of all possible worlds. What if the nations of the Middle East want nothing more than to modernize and to engage in fruitful commercial and industrial ties? What if China is more interested in doing business than in conquering new territory? As Henry Kissinger once said, modern China has never been an expansionist state. 

What if the future of the Middle East lies in the Abraham Accords, not in the Iran nuclear deal or the horrors produced by Hamas? 

As it happens, Ferguson has indulged in catastrophic thinking. One recognizes it easily. It will be familiar to those who know something about cognitive therapy. In his book, Anxiety Disorders and Phobias, famed cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck recommended that people treat anxiety disorders by using controlled catastrophic thinking. 

What is the worst that can happen, the therapist asked his anxious patient. Once the patient imagined the worst outcome he could ask himself whether it was realistic. Or whether he was exaggerating the risk.

Of course, Ferguson wants us to believe that the fictions he trots out can become real. And yet, fictions do not become real. They are structured differently. The same applies to counterfactuals.

To use one of Ferguson’s examples, what would happen if Iran gets nuclear weapons. One needs to mention that this would be the direct consequence of Obama and Biden administration policies. Of course, as long as Israel possesses nuclear weapons and the will to use them, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction ought to keep the situation under control.

On the other hand, if the Iranians believe that the Biden administration has turned against Israel and is trying to restrain it, we might see a different outcome. 

In the largest sense, we should ask whether we want to see our administration conduct foreign policy through negotiated compromise or whether it should involve itself in constant struggle. In the long run, the former will probably prevail, but that requires a certain amount of diplomatic skill. If we run around the world playing tough someone is going to call our bluff.In it for the drama or for the business.

As it happened, we have both won and lost wars. We established a new world order by winning two world wars in the twentieth century. And we lost the wars of Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Ferguson considers these losses to have been contained. They did not involve mass mobilization and produced failure. True enough. Nevertheless, can we really measure the impact on the national psyche, on American pride and confidence, that came about when we failed in those places?

The current national malaise is all the more intractable because no one has really been willing to take responsibility for our failed military adventures. As a result, we have torn ourselves apart trying to fix the blame. We have wallowed in guilt and set about to cleanse our psyche of all of our sins. We imagine that we failed in those wars because we were bigoted. Thus, rather than rebuild, we have engaged in non-stop therapy, the kind that is designed to make us get in touch with our bigotries, the better to engineer a kingdom of justice. 

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