Historical Overview of 20th‑Century Conflicts and America's Role

violence, like the scale of the industry that produced it, defied anything even the wisest minds could foresee. Eventually the entire world was pulled into the fire. “In the autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote after the Paris Peace Conference settled The Great War, dimly aware that an even deader season lay somewhere in the future in the form of another war*®. During this murderous 75 year run, in the reviving of European and then global fortunes, America played a decisive if reluctant role. As in that first period, she emerged richer, more central, and more modern. A third struggle, the Cold War, immediately followed the end of this second period. This contest was intensely material and as ideological as any conflict in hundreds of years. It represented a struggle at the level of the most fundamental question of politics: How should life be lived? Two totalizing, uncompromising worldviews were placed in opposition. This 45-year struggle occurred under the threat of nuclear disaster, which gave it an aspect new in human history, the potential for complete destruction. It was possible to find sober-minded theorists pondering problems like this one: “Let us assume that for 10 billion dollars one could build a device whose function is to destroy the earth,” Herman Kahn wrote in the 1960s, with a spirit typical of his age in his slick, sickly worrisome masterpiece On Thermonuclear War’*’. Yet in this period too, over time, America found herself in an axial role, first carrying one end of the risky fight and then, at the conflict’s surprising and jubilant conclusion in 1989, discovering the country was in a position of unprecedented, unchallenged power. As with the two earlier shifts, this one had brought with it an arrangement nearly ideally tuned, yet again, to America’s advantages. I mention all this here because while it may be fashionable to speak of the period just passed as the “American Century” - and to wonder whose century comes next, the reality is that for two and a half centuries, through some of the most violent and wonderful changes in human history, America has had a remarkable run**. A senior American military official once asked me, a week or so before he sat with the Chinese President, how best to begin his remarks. “You might say,” | suggested, “that America respects what China has done in the last thirty years. To have brought 400 million people out of poverty as Beijing has done is an historic accomplishment. But he must understand that America, particularly in the last intense century, has paid in nearly countless dollars and in the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives, to establish an order that has benefited billions. The scale of this accomplishment is, by a great measure, historic.” America has been an emblematic, profound force. It has been a country tuned exactly to the needs of her age. Three times over. Inevitably, the world now asks: Can this continue? 46 Eventually the entire world: John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace in The Essential Keynes (Boston: Penguin Classics, 2015) 47 It was possible: Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960) 48 ] mention all this: Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. See chapter one, and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (TK London, 1988) 41 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018273