Will we be able to avoid it? I see little reason to be sanguine, and neither does this guy.
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Bill,
You are right in saying that there is "little reason to be sanguine" about the possibility of a new world war. I briefly touched on this subject as part of a comment on Malcolm Pollack's blog, and I think that what I wrote is worth repeating here: "While historical parallels are too hastily constructed these days, such as the insistent but unschooled similitudes that some on the Right find between the decaying Late Roman Empire in the last century of its existence and contemporary America, they are sometimes quite instructive. If we consider, for instance, the political and military situation of Europe in the months preceding the outbreak of the First World War in August of 1914, we find precisely the sort of local and regional clashes, involving lesser nation states tied to one or more of the Great(er) Powers with the potential to ignite a general war with one or more of the latter’s strategic opponents."
Posted by: Vito B. Caiati | Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 01:58 AM
Vito,
To be clear, I see little reason to be sanguine about the possibility of avoiding WW-3. I hope and I pray that that sanguinary possibility remains in the realm of the merely possible.
As for the "unschooled similitudes," mention one or two if you are inclined to do so.
Posted by: BV | Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 11:30 AM
Bill,
One fundamental dissimilitude is the general policy of the Imperial Roman state to the inward pressure exerted by the barbarian tribes to enter the Empire. Possessing superior but not unchallengeable military resources, from a highly disciplined and well-trained army; to standardized, high-quality weapons; a network of well designed and constructed frontier fornications; a paved system of roads; and control of the sea—the Empire employed these in many, long and brutal, military campaigns against these outsiders in Eastern Europe from the 2nd to the 5th centuries. The Romans assumed that the Germanic, Gothic, and other peoples were inferior in rationality and culture and that allowing them to sweep into the Empire would have disastrous political and civilizational consequences. Thus, they resorted to violence to keep them out. When settlement was allowed, it was regulated by treaty and under strict military control, harsh with former enemies and more lenient with of “friends.” In both cases, the Romans sought, until the crises of the late 4th and 5th centuries overturned the possibility of this approach, to scatter the newcomers over the Empire and to incorporate, immediately or after several decades, the young men into its legions, where they could be controlled more easily. With the calamities of 376 and of 406, precipitated by a massive westward movement of various barbarian tribes, this system broke down, since Roman now lacked the military might to prevent outright invasion, with the pillage and ruination that accompanied it. Hence, the Empire was forced to accept the progressive fracturing of its Western half, now falling into the hands of barbarian polities, which undermined the tax base of the state and, hence, its military, but even at this point, armed resistance continued, often with Rome, whose army was now increasingly made up of barbarians, allying itself with one or more of these proto-states. As this brief, inadequate sketch shows, the elites of the Late Empire, for all their faults, including most notably that of rushing too willingly into civil war, were never foolish enough to willingly open the borders of the Empire. This is striking contrast not only to the American policy of the last four years, which has essentially opened the borders of the nation to the entire world, but rather to the entire thrust of immigrations law from 1965 to the present, which has intentionally led to its ethnic and racial transformation, a foundational element for the dominance of the Left, with all the cultural and political decay that this involves.
Posted by: Vito B. Caiati | Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 02:04 PM
Which is more likely, Vito? Internal collapse via hot civil war and/or infiltration and terrorism perpetrated by the illegals Biden has invited in, OR WW-3? The former would probably preclude the latter and would be better for humanity at large.
Posted by: BV | Monday, June 24, 2024 at 04:21 AM
Bill,
Of the three, I think that a terrorist attack is certainly the most likely, since the illegals pouring over the border in the last several years come from every corner of the world and certainly include, as some arrests reveal, terrorists. Somewhat less likely but still more possible than at any time in the last sixty years is the outbreak of a world war, since there are now two triggers that could ignite such a conflict, the Ukraine and the Mid-East. Of the two, the former is much the likely candidate, since the funding and arming of a proxy state and the progressive eastward expansion of NATO represent fundamental threats to Russia’s national interests. I do not regard a hot civil war as an immediate threat; in the longer term, perhaps, but not now or in the next few years.
Vito
Posted by: Vito B. Caiati | Monday, June 24, 2024 at 07:32 AM
Vito,
I agree with your analysis.
What I don't understand is how people as intelligent as George F. Will can fail to support Trump over Biden given the current situation. Can you shed some light on this, as an historian with knowledge of psychology?
See this article by Will: https://www.news-journal.com/questions-for-biden-trump-debate-that-might-be-useful/article_2216394a-3235-11ef-adfd-7354c3a9e275.html
He speaks of a Biden-Trump "consensus" and seems to be suggesting moral-political equivalence between the two when, as you I agree, he should hold his patrician, Beltway, yap-and-scribble nose and support the better of the two candidates. namely, that person of color, the Orange Man.
Posted by: BV | Monday, June 24, 2024 at 10:35 AM
Bill,
While I don’t have all of the personal particulars that might explain the politics of G. Will, I would bet that his politics, in the end, is less about “principle or “real conservatism” as it is about the defense of a particular conception of self and an associated mode of life. Everything about the man reeks of a narrowly conceived persona and fixity in the past, a neurotic insistence that both this public presentation of self, including the defining life events to which it is attached, are to be taken as normative. Fundamental for him is not politics or policy, but the protection of this world, one he happily shares with others, right or left, whose pedigrees, speech, and demeanors conform to it. Here were have the milieu of the bow tie, the cocktail glass, the dinner party repartee, the opinion piece in the right periodical, the golf date. And the old Republican Party elite of this milieu, the center of Will’s neurotic notion of self and reality, is precisely what was pushed aside and rendered irrelevant by the Orange Man, rough in manner and speech. Thus, Will’s politics, including his support for Biden in 2020, is a reflection of his outrage at the effrontery of Trump in busting in where he neither belongs nor is wanted.
Posted by: Vito B. Caiati | Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 03:48 AM
Vito,
You sum it up well in your concluding sentence. The bow-tie boys of the Beltway see Trump as an unclubbable interloper, a man without class, gauche and gaudy in the manner of the nouveaux riche, who crashed their party, or rather, their soiree.
Unlike Hillary and Dukakis, he doesn't try to affect the manners and dress of the 'deplorables' and working folk in his base. He doesn't show up in a work shirt or try to affect a Southern accent. He walks among them in his bespoke two thousand dollar suits. He would never do something as stupid as Dukakis did when the latter donned a helmet and postured as a tank commander. Apparently the pols who do that sort of thing think of the lower orders as stupid people who won't instantly see through the fakery.
Posted by: BV | Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 08:53 AM