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TODAY Tuesday 11 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Armistice Day and the Next Great War

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent for the first time since July 1914. 12 million Europeans had died in the Great War. Before the end of 1919, another 20 million worldwide would die from an epidemic of influenza. There was widespread starvation in Russia and in many of the remnants of broken Austria-Hungary. War; plague; famine -- three out of Four Horsemen were at full gallop.

No one foresaw the level of devastation. It was literally inconceivable. The even more appalling slaughters of the Second World War were less surprising to a Europe that had experienced the catastrophes of the First. We can barely appreciate the shock and revulsion that gripped a continent bursting with energy and optimism and technophilia just four years earlier. No one realized that the engines of progress -- population growth, science, industry, education, nationalism -- could be deployed so effectively in the service of Death.

History doesn't repeat itself, Mark Twain said, but it rhymes pretty well. Any parallels today?

Our main advantage over the men and women of 1914 is that the most powerful nations in the world are not arrayed against each other in alliances that are depressingly even-matched. Plus the governments of our day concede much less power to their general staffs than the civilians of 1914 did. Once Russia and Germany mobilized in late July of that year, a cycle of war-preparedness move and counter-move gained a momentum that could not be slowed by diplomatic notes. It's often said that the European powers stumbled into the Great War; actually, it all went according to plan. The analogs of those 1914 plans exist today -- we pay the military to plan wars, after all -- but our institutions seem better capable of controlling them. And you probably would have to say that today's generals are less spoiling-for-a-fight than the brass of 1914 (although the recently published transcripts of the "Kennedy Tapes" of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis reveal a distressingly hot-headed Joint Chiefs of Staff).

To reach the level of destruction analogous to the wastage of the First World War, a war today would have to involve at least two of today's military Great Powers: the US; Europe; Russia; and China.(Japan can join this club anytime it wants to, and will if there's a big fight with China.) Someone wanting to prevent a re-enactment of the summer of 1914 would examine the possibilities for a direct conflict between two or more of the Great Powers or a conflict that arises from the commitments made by the Great Powers to lesser powers that drag the Great Powers, willy-nilly, into war with each other.

Let's see...Russia and China? Two days ago Presidents Yeltsin and Jiang signed a formal agreement on their oft-disputed border. That matter taken care of, it's hard to see what they would want to fight about. The other way around in fact: China needs cheap fossil fuels and raw materials, and Russia has both. Despite their (mutual) racisms, China and Russia have converging national interests. Could that mutuality of interests lead to an alliance? Maybe. Imagine a Russia feeling hemmed in by NATO expansion (and why shouldn't it?), imagine a China feeling hemmed in by unyielding US antagonism towards its claims to Taiwan, Tibet, and the Spratley Islands, imagine an accommodationist Europe... Stung by demonstrations in Tianemen Square occasioned by the collapse of the yuan, China stages maneuvers in the Straits of Taiwan, the US dispatches the Pacific Fleet, Japan re-interprets its "Peace Constitution," Russia reinforces the Kyrile Islands off Hokkaido, China sends a Silkworm missile which misses the Taiwanese airbase but demolishes downtown Taipei, Taiwan stages daring air attack reprisal on Shanghai, China retaliates with massive attacks, the US mobilizes etc., etc.

Or...China and the Islamic Alliance? Islamic militants overthrow Mubarak in Egypt, abrogate peace treaty with Israel, spur surprising and successful coup by Islamic elements in Algerian army, which ignites rioting in streets of Riyadh followed by thousands of armed Iraqi "volunteers" bolstering the anti-monarchy forces who call for US help even as Scud missiles thump into Tel Aviv, provoking pitiless Israeli airborne attack against Republican Guard formations on Kuwaiti border as USS Nimitz is hit by an Exocet probably launched from southern Iran, followed by stern Chinese warnings about "the bloody costs" of neo-colonialist gunboat expeditions, etc., etc.

I'd bet against either scenario, at least within the next ten years. The supplies of oil and gas are sufficiently plentiful and widespread these days that fossil-fuel importers (Europe, Japan, the US) can shop their way around a chokepoint, even one in the Middle East. And the determination of China to get rich is probably a force more reliable than the temptation to cow its neighbors. Still, it's not hard to imagine threats to Israel or Taiwan quickly igniting larger conflicts, which could suddenly develop a wild momentum of their own.

What we have today that seems most troublingly reminiscent of 1914 is an interesting popular tendency to not duck a fight if it looks as if we can win it quickly. Wars are certainly terrible, we say, almost abstractly, but the last one was short and decisive (Russo-Japanese War, Gulf War), and we get to see how all this impressive machinery really works. Besides, wars are interesting. People are chary to support a long-term commitment to police Bosnia, but you wouldn't find too much opposition to any in-and-out assault on Iran or Iraq. Now it may be that mini-wars with Iraq or Iran would ultimately "be about" guaranteeing cheap, uninterrupted oil supplies, but a war-stirred public rarely likes hard-boiled materialist analyses, whether offered by proponents (Secretary of State Baker's avowal that the Gulf War about "jobs, jobs, jobs") or opponents (No Blood for Oil!). A charismatic American president and a titillation-prone mass media could probably tap into the ancient itchy warrior curiosity lying below the social listlessness of our time and place. The streets of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg were vibrant and joyous during the vast mobilizations in the summer of 1914; survivors often described it as the happiest days of their lives.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Tom Turner has a fresh "In Other News..." this week, and it's about television. Tom may be fed up and maybe he's not going to take it anymore, but the Left Coaster actually has some good things to say about videotape as a tool of protest and civil liberties.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/10: Mea Maxima Culpa
11/07: Inflexible Flyers
11/06: Meaningless Votes, Really
11/05: In Praise of SeaWeb
11/04: Reality Check
11/03: Green Loafing
10/31: Guilty Nationalist Pleasures
10/30: Europe Alone
10/29: Duck! (Again)
10/28: Civil Society and Conservation

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