Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 From: "Jerry F. Hough" <jhough at duke.edu>
My main course at Duke in recent years has been the American presidency, with a focus on electoral strategy from Jefferson to the present. By coincidence, I finished Wilson last week. A true disaster. If he had used Amercian power to force a cease fire (and that was easily within American economic power at the time) instead of tilting to England in 1915, there never would have been a Bolshevik Revolution and there either would never have been a Hitler or the US could have organized collective security against him without ethnic vetoes in the US.
But the striking thing about Wilson today is how all the lessons learned at that time have been totally forgotten by those who think they are following a Wilsonian foreign policy. "National self-determination," we forget, meant for Wilson forcing the Balkan peoples into a new Yugoslavia to prevent a future war. He was the one who had a key role in creating that country. More important, the universal lesson of Wilson for the four decades after World War II was that the treatment of Germany at Versailles and afterwards was a disaster.
It is eerie to read and hear what is being said about Russia today. The McFauls of the early 1930s were talking sagely about the transition to democracy, to be sure a troubled one, that had taken place in Germany and how the key thing to get out of the depression was a balanced budget and a neo-liberal economic policy. But, in any case we had nothing to worry about. Germany was economically and militarily too weak to cause the West any trouble. Indeed, it was disarmed, and the Kellogg-Briand pact had created a regime that outlawed war and economic interdependence ensured the Pact would work.
It is a shame that the Holocaust and Hitler's foreign policy has made it a taboo to look at Hitler's economic policy, which was strikingly successful. Nazi meant National Socialist. He was serious about both words. The socialism did not mean nationalization, but state direction of a capitalist economy. He couldn't get out of depression with foreign trade because of the world depression, he received no foreign aid. Yet, while the West remain mired in depression, it is astonishing how quickly Germany became economically prosporous--and even at a time when it was conducting an utterly stupid as well as utterly evil policy with its highly productive Jewish population.
The notion that Russia could not follow the same path is crazy. Indeed, if Primakov is serious about serious agricultural reform of the type he just advocated (and anyone who takes any words uttered in Russia seriously is a fool), he is finally on the right path. The notion that Russia is impotent in Serbia is crazy. It probably won't do anything in the bombing, but I can't imagine why the foreign policy establishment thinks Russia will let the West conquer Serbia with ground troops. And with the favorite scenario of putting big ground troops in Hungary where there were not going to be meaningful, let alone offensive, American forces and having a blitzkreig to Belgrade!!! Russia is going to let NATO Hungary be used in this way??? All it takes is one division of Russian troops flown to Serbia and put on the road to Belgrade. There is no way that European opinion will send European troops against Russian ones to win a war against Kosovo it never wanted. It is hard to believe that American opinion would be all that supportive of such an action either.
McFaul always seems an infallible bellweather of Administration thinking. When he shifts as rapidly as he did from the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor to the New York Times pieces, we really have to worry about an Administration that is close to panic. The Administration really needs to learn the lesson of the Holocaust and repeat the words "Never Again." Once the Holocaust started in earnest, there really was little the US could do but take more refugees. It certainly should have done so, and it ultimately may find itself in a similar position today with hundreds of thousands of Kosovars. But the difficulty in advocating such a position today with the Kosovars reminds us of the difficulties in the 1930s as well--and reminds us how easy it is to use moral condemnation, economic sanctions, and bombing as a substitute for taking real actions that are politically uncomfortable for oursleves.
The lesson of the Holocaust is that the time to stop it was in 1919 and the early 1920s. The time to stop the disaster in Kosovo was at the time Slovenia and Croatia started to leave Yugoslavia. If the US and Europe had offered progressive European membership for Yugoslavia as the inducement and guarantee for a different solution, a horrible decade of ethnic cleansing and death could have been avoided. Now is the time to prevent the next disaster, if it is not already too late. Abstract neo-liberal economists did not know how to stop a depression in the early 1930s and don't know how to do it now in Russia, and the lesson of the Holocaust is the danger of mixing offended nationalism and prolonged economic troubles. It is that the maintenance of democracy and a pro-Western policy for a decade in a country guarantees nothing. My friends in Yaroslavl talk about an economic situation getting progressively worse. When Russia blows, there are going to be ugly political consequences, and the Administration and its spokesmen seem to believe in stoking up the fire under the boiler.