Tea at Trianon: Dictatorships and Right Standards

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Dictatorships and Right Standards

From Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age:

The Cold War victory itself has turned to ashes. The U.S. expanded NATO yet failed to contain post-Soviet Russia. For nearly a decade, a newly free Russia posed little threat to its neighbors, but whatever opportunity existed to incorporate this former opponent into the U.S.-led order was squandered. American policymakers took pride in having contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union through far-sighted strategy, but they had no success in devising equally far-sighted strategies to win the peace and secure Russian democracy.

The architects of America’s unsuccessful foreign policy of the last three decades have been almost uniformly liberals. That has been true in Republican administrations as well as Democratic ones. Liberal internationalists tend to believe that harmony is the default condition of mankind. On that assumption, the fall of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes should always produce democratic and liberal outcomes, though they may take time to emerge. That’s one reason Washington invests billions in nongovernmental organizations, international institutions, and “peacekeeping” missions around the world. After a despotism is toppled, social work is all that’s needed to set a country right, even if some of that social work must be performed by soldiers.

A certain kind of self-described conservative or realist believes much the same thing, only with a narrow emphasis on the formula’s first part, the destruction of evildoers. These quasi-realists insist that they are not democratic idealists or liberals (or indeed neoconservatives). Yet they have only half a foreign policy and must rely on liberals to supply the other half. George W. Bush could decry “nation-building” when he ran for president in 2000, but once he went to war he and his administration could conceive of no alternative to prolonged occupation and nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan. John Bolton is not so much a realist as an embarrassed neoconservative, one bashful about admitting that nation-building is the natural corollary of regime change as practiced by an overwhelmingly liberal foreign-policy establishment in both parties. Right-leaning defense intellectuals might focus on enemies to be defeated, but they defer to their liberal colleagues when it comes to envisioning peace.

A bipartisan liberal foreign policy is failing once again under President Biden. It presents no answers to the Israel–Gaza crisis. Gaza is as inhospitable to liberalism as Afghanistan ever was, if not more so, while Israel cannot wholly adopt liberalism without endangering its own existence. The Biden administration, unable to make sense of this reality, proceeds to arm Israel while condemning the country for not fighting the war by liberal means or for liberal ends. Republicans in Congress characteristically see the immediate need to eradicate Hamas but imagine the peace will take care of itself. American policy is similarly aimless in Ukraine: neither the Biden administration nor congressional Republicans outline a plausible path to victory no matter how much aid the Ukrainians receive. The bipartisan strategy is all but explicitly one of deferring defeat. (Read more.)