The New Republic

"An earlier alliance with the Soviet dictator might have prevented what became the most terrible war in history". Can it be that Kazin actually believes this? The western allies were trying to form an alliance with Stalin precisely when he signed his non-aggression pact with Hitler. They never had a prayer. Hitler offered Stalin half of Poland and the Baltic States along with a breathing spell to re-build the Soviet army he had just emasculated. In his view, the allies offered him what they offered Poland.........nothing. In the end, Stalin got less of a breathing spell than he had bargained for from Hitler, to the great anguish of his countrymen, not him. The old ultra-right argument that we fought the wrong enemy is long dead; ultra-liberal orthodoxy lives on, and on, and on.

- lsernoff

June 23, 2010 at 11:07pm

One nearly universal example of intervention gone awry is the Iraq War. Yet, if the entire theater of Iraq went the way of Mosul during the first year would this be so? Would a situation like that which existed in Mosul during that year be such an obvious example of something to avoid that one could make a rhetorical question about it? The difference in results between Mosul and in the rest of the Iraqi Theater of Operations did not stem from an easier climate in Mosul, indeed before Stage IV operations began, it was predicted that Mosul would be the greatest powder keg in the entire theater of operations. Rather, it was the result of the different command environment established by the division commander there. As of yet, I am not aware of a single example of an area of operations where operations were conducted in the manner they were in Mosul where things deteriorated to such an extent. Barring such an example, the lesson should be, if there's going to be an intervention, how Stage IV is conducted matters. The name of the division commander in Mosul -- David Petraeus.

- sighthnd

June 25, 2010 at 9:05am

Kazin's argument about an earlier alliance with Stalin is pretty standard fare for historians of World War II. He mentions it in the context of the Munich Agreement of 1938, not Poland in 1939. In 1938, Stalin had not yet started to explore a rapprochement with Hitler, and was in fact militarily engaged (albeit indirectly) against Hitler and Mussolini in the Spanish Civil War. Edvard Benes, the Czech president, actively solicited a Soviet alliance in 1938 as a bulwark of defense against Germany's aggresive intentions, and Stalin at least publicly conveyed a willingness to participate. The main obstacle was Poland, which would have to give Soviet troops the right to transit the country to get to Czechoslovakia and which feared (not without reason) that the Soviets would never leave those regions once they went through them. A second obstacle was the distaste and distrust in the British and French governments for allying with the Soviet Union. Without the ability or willingness to protect the Czechs' rear flank in the absence of a Soviet alliance, the British and French felt that their best option was to negotiate a settlement with Hitler.

- wildboy

June 25, 2010 at 11:50am

I am an applied physical scientist by education and experience and I am experienced in tackling complex problems by deconstruction and analogy and I will apply an analysis of the problem of American and/or global intervention into the lives and organizations of people who are foreign to us. So this is how I would analyze the question. First the situation: In June 1865 the United States was confronted with a complex and difficult problem, that could be best summarized as follows. What is the construct of a multi-racial representative democracy? How do we, the people of the United States of America create this construct out of the political economy of the United States as she exists now (1865), in the new situation where about ¼ of the population of a major region of the country are newly emancipated slaves? As a matter of historical fact the answer to the above questions took almost exactly 100 years, (from the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865, to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) before they were meaningfully resolved to any real extent. But this is not the point of this analogy, the following is. Could the United Kingdom, France, China, Prussia, Russia, or any of the organized and developed nation states of 1865, have fashioned and implemented a solution to an America’s problem(s) as stated above? Could any of them, if they had fashioned a solution, have applied it for 100 continuous years? Have the tools of social and political science appreciably advanced in the past 145 years, such that now private and/or state actors (i.e., non-governmental organizations and/or governments), may use these newly developed tools and techniques to “solve” problems such as those the United States faced in 1865, and to do so in a time frame and with a quantity of resources which make them more feasible for solution than in 1865? I believe that the answer to these questions is an emphatic no. In the first place in 1865 the “real” question (could/can a multi-racial representative democracy founded upon popular sovereignty exist) America faced was simply beyond the conception as a question. If the question could not be asked (because it could not yet be conceived) an answer (which is what the US needed) could not have been found. None of the nation states named above either espoused or accepted a conception of the possible existence of a multi-racial representative democracy. And just two examples will suffice to explain the difficulty. In 1865 the United Kingdom would not grant to Catholic Ireland the representative democracy that would have jeopardized the Protestant Ascendency that de-facto ruled the colony. In 1865 serious opposition to the creation of a united Germany (uniting the Protestant north German Prussians with largely Catholic Bavaria, and the “western” states such as Hanover) was present in Prussia because, as Prussia understood it, as the size of the greater German state increased, it would mean the incorporation of territories that contained non-German minorities or in some cases non-German majorities. And this fact was still salient in greater-Germany seventy plus years into the future (from 1865), when the “degradation” of minority “Germans” by majority Czech and Poles in Sudetenland and Silesia led directly to the Second World War. The United Kingdom, Prussia, and the rest could not have intervened in the US in 1865 to solve our problem(s) because in the strictest sense by their lights they did not believe we had a problem that needed to be resolved. Their “solution(s)” would in have in fact not have been solutions (for a unified United States of America) at all. And almost 150 years after 1865 while it is still impossible to conceive of an ethnic Polish or Czech major political figure in a German Lander or the German Parliament; in the United States you have Vietnamese-American Congressmen and an Indian-American Governor and Gubernatorial candidate for two of the states of the union. And looking at the issue of resources, stability and resolution the answer becomes even clearer. None of the nation-states named above had the resources, commitment, or stability needed to work on a 100 year problem in the Untied States. Ultimately only the US had the commitment, stability and resources needed to solve our problems. The Negro-American minority had the unremitting, multi-generational commitment to achieve full political enfranchisement within the American system that kept them fighting for it until it was obtained. The American constitutional nation state alone, had the stability to remain intact (yet flexible enough to embrace and incorporate change) to continue with unbroken continuity so as to be available and in place to receive into itself the enfranchised Negro-American voter. And only the American political economy had the resources to sustain itself throughout the century so as to preserve the political union Negro-American was incorporated into. And as for new social and political science tools and techniques, well, the history of the last 145 years speaks for itself. I don’t see any great breakthroughs in political or social science which are the key to understanding any problems. None existed to see, analyze, or prevent either the Second World War the Cold War or the War in Vietnam. None existed to see, analyze, or prevent “Bloody Sunday” in Ireland, Sadam Hussein’s reign of terror in Iraq, or the genocide in Rwanda. And as for the so-called good works of that unemployment agency for western liberal social science majors, the NGOs; I won’t smear them with the accusation of being an elitist refuge of pedophiles, homosexuals, and whites (both male and female) who have an unhealthily infatuation with the male genitals of all non-white peoples. I will simply say that they are largely ineffective, as racist and as infected with cultural snobbery as their colonialist grandparents were. And in the final analysis, it is this presumption of superiority that is the rotten, corrupt, and flawed foundation in viewing a foreign people; and their cultures, which animates the absurd stupidity of the question itself. No matter what one may think one sees in Haiti, Ireland, Sudetenland Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Québec Province, or Ruleville, Mississippi. It is simply dead wrong to presume that an Oxford or Harvard graduate in sociology or political science is any more knowledgeable or useful in fashioning of solution the political economy of those regions, than was Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer (late of Ruleville, Mississippi, and without elementary schooling of course).

- 12alainu

July 12, 2010 at 9:22am