Ross Douthat's column this morning, "The Devil We Know," will be inviting game for the ideologues, both left and right. And I suspect it is they whom Douthat is addressing, although he writes that it is generic "Americans" who "don't like to admit" that
We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.
But history makes fools of us all.
And that, as best I can tell, is just about history's only unimpeachable lesson.
Indeed, one could venture that the history of international relations tends to operate not so much according to predictable, repeating patterns, but according to Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." And then of course there's its corollary, loosely stated as, If everything seems to be going smoothly, you've overlooked some very important factor.
Nonetheless the ideologues persist. They develop magnificent theories by which the world operates; strike that, they develop maginificent theories by which the world should operate, and surely would if only they were given a chance to execute their ingenious schemes. It scarcely needs mentioning that we witnessed the tragic unfolding of such ingenuity during the last administration, a neoconservative train wreck of faith.
Likewise, liberal internationalism's reputation has suffered irreparable blows. I'd argue that L. Johnson's folly -- an inadequate word in view of its stupendous costs in human life -- was more a political response to the right's disgraceful exploitation of the late 1940s and '50s than a well-contoured theory, yet it can't be denied that Johnson was surrounded by the brightest minds who could and did predict the outcome, which, naturally, bore absolutely no relationship to eventual reality.
Even history's realists took certain steps down utterly uncertain roads. How, for instance, could all of Nixon and Kissinger's balance-of-power scheming with China have ever anticipated that nation's turn to capitalism? Metternich's "Congress," too, lasted barely a generation; and the mother of all future diplomatic accords, the "Peace" of Westphalia, hardly ushered in a new age of 17th-century tolerance and cooperation so keenly sought by so many, battered by decades of intolerance's carnage.
What historians of international relations call "presentist" attempts to comprehend the past -- that is, looking backward with the rather unapologetic use of contemporary knowledge -- is even less helpful in understanding the past or present's deepest currents. Take, for instance, Robert Dallek's recent (and admittedly popular) work, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953. Here we experience the coming together of history's "greatest," wartime and postwar leaders -- Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Mao -- who, muses Dallek, in both their benign and malignant forms should have been capable of preventing the dangerously paralyzed and polarized Cold War era. Following the 1930s and 1940s' unprecedented horrors, these men were "blessed by circumstances favorable to changing international relations for the better. But they didn't, or at least fell well short of what they might have accomplished."
Why? "[T]he flawed leadership of the past," concludes Dallek, "was less the consequence of circumstances than of choice" -- alternative choices which Dallek can see with ease in 2010; however for nearly 400 preceding pages, he delineates each circumstance that led precisely to those choices.
One might say that determinism battled free will, and free will got crushed.
So what's the point of this shortest-ever survey course in international relations? Douthat answers: "The only comfort, as we watch Egyptians struggle for their country’s future, is that some choices aren’t America’s to make." Something the ideologues, and more than even a few realists, have never accepted.