I agree, but sometimes I wonder. It seems to me the US bumbles about like a blind surgeon wishing to do good deeds but quite often making things worse as a consequence.

We go into Somalia in an effort to feed the hungry but did not understand or care that the government used hunger to control the people. In our ignorance and arrogance we went into a situation where we did not fully grasp the situation and paid the price.

We go into Saudi Arabia in an effort to protect if from Iraq but send women to protect two of the holiest cities in Islam in a culture where they do not allow women to drive much less go to school or fight side by side with men. This would be roughly equivalent to sending an army of gay, atheist prostitutes with multiple abortions to protect the Vatican and can be directly linked to the September 11 attack. In our ignorance and arrogance we went into a situation where we did not fully grasp the situation and paid the price.

We go into Iraq looking for “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” do not find any, and end up in a police action that will have lasted more than a decade by the time we are done while unbalancing the region in such a way that if we leave and it falls apart there is a pretty good chance there will be civil war and a religious pogrom that could involve dozens of nations not to mention making an area that was already hostile towards us even more angry. In our ignorance and arrogance we went into a situation where we did not fully grasp the situation and paid the price.

I have to wonder why we have presidential advisors when they are so oblivious to local customs, culture, and political structure that they have allowed blunders of such epic proportions.

I have to wonder what would happen if we returned to a more passive foreign policy where we allowed Europe, in the supposedly infinite wisdom, to run the world like they did until we got sick of picking up the pieces after they screwed up. After WWII we were heroes but here we are less than a century later being cast in the role of the villain. Maybe if the Islamic fringe kept plotting to blow up Paris, Berlin, or some other major European city rather than New York they might get a little more aggressive in helping us find real solutions to the situation rather than enabling it.

It would be interesting to peer through a window into an alternate reality and see where we would be if we had gone back to an isolationist doctrine rather than taking on the mantle of planetary policeman.

Agreed. Completely.

It’s receive, not ‘recieve’, ’scuse me.

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There’s plenty of evidence. The Bismarck, commissioned 24 August 1940.

Is anyone going to excuse Kristallnacht? Great to see all the Hitler sympathizers!

You are correct but that is not the way I took Buchanan’s point.

It appears to me that Buchanan is offering that WWII was a direct result of WWI and Versailles. In this he is correct.

However his reasoning beyond that is flawed because he offers that if England has stayed out of the war then WWI would have been another Franco-Prussianesque war with limited scope. I think this is wishful thinking.

Dave and Tim argue that the Entente would have been satisfied with a victory rather than pressing a post war victory. Perhaps they are right? Maybe WWI and thus WWII could have been avoided if England had simply stayed out of the war. Then again, maybe it could have been avoided if they allowed Austro-Hungry to spank Serbia for killing Ferdinand? There are plenty of scenarios that theoretically avoid WWI and thus WWII as they occurred.

My problem is that none of these scenarios resolves the rabid militarism and massive buildup of arms that started in the late 1800’s. If the RN and GIN had not fought in 1914 then both sides would have continued to increase the size and technology of their fleets and that’s true for ground troops as well. Without the lessons of World Wars I and II it seems unlikely to me that these massive juggernauts remain unused simply staring at each other across the boarders, fingers nervously on their triggers of their weapons, for decades.

It could be argued that this is what happened between the US and USSR but I would counter that the cold war would not have remained cold if it were not for the death and devastation inflicted on the planet by both World Wars as well as the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that was inherent in the use of Atomic weapons. If we had not lost millions of men and seen the devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would we have been anywhere as reticent to enter into a Nuclear War without truly understanding the apocalyptic consequences?

It is one thing to say the word “Armageddon” it is another thing to experience it. WWII was the closest anyone sane would ever want to come to it. I think that lesson alone was worth learning prior to entering the nuclear age even if at the cost of 10’s of millions of lives. These wars taught us that war on such a scale is impractical and forced the US and USSR to mature politically rather than resorting to armed conflict in the same way European powers had done for more than two millennia.