The only education I ever got was in history. And what history taught me is wrapped up in the story the premier English speaking philosopher of history of the 20th-century told about detecting the Albert Memorial. I wrote it up here, but the upshot is a point that’s both obvious and routinely ignored: if you disagree with someone, chances are you might not appreciate the way they’re looking at something. And that’s dangerous (don’t you think?) when countries are at war or considering it. All countries have terrible problems with this, but the United States even more than most. Perhaps this is always true of the global hegemon.
In any event, that’s why John Miersheimer’s advocacy of his perspective is so valuable, even if ultimately he’s wrong. He’s trying to get supporters of Ukraine to understand something they don’t agree with. Since none of us are gods, since we’re all extremely fallible, good faith disagreement is incredibly important. Yet its amazing how fast it goes out the window.
Which is why I liked this piece by Robert Wright, even down to its objection to the jingoist blinkers of American econoblogging wonderkindt Noah Smith.
This week Chinese leader Xi Jinping got a lot of attention by saying “Western countries—led by the US—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”
The Wall Street Journal called this “an unusually blunt rebuke of US policy” and the Washington Post called it “an unusually explicit public riposte of the United States by the Chinese leader.” And various commentators called it evidence of deep and irrational hostility. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said that Xi “hates this country.” And social media pundit Noah Smith tweeted, “What’s scary to me is that we heard similar rhetoric from Germany before WW1 and Japan before WW2.”
Funny he should mention World War I! Some social scientists consider that a paradigmatic example of nations leading the world to catastrophe through a misreading of each other’s intentions. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter he wrote a decade before war broke out, saw the dynamic at work:
1 sincerely believes that the English are planning to attack him and smash his fleet, and perhaps join with France in a war to the death against him. As a matter of fact, the English harbor no such intentions, but are themselves in a condition of panic 2 terror lest the Kaiser secretly intend to form an alliance against them with France or Russia, or both, to destroy their fleet and blot out the British Empire from the map! It is as funny a case as I have ever seen of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of war.
- Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany
- and