The US must avoid isolationism, a path to nowhere

Robert Kaplan is a Washington-based journalist whom you don't read first thing in the morning if you want to enjoy the rest of the day. He is a conservative — absolutely not the MAGA kind — who has advised government officials and gets read by lots of important people.

He is now a doomsayer. "We have to be able to consider," he writes in a new book entitled Waste Land: A World In Permanent Crisis, "that literally anything can happen to us." Kaplan's message is that our only hope as human beings in a chaotic and dangerous world moving at breathtaking speed is to act with moderation and restraint.

These aren't, unfortunately, qualities that command much enthusiasm from voters in the Western democracies, to judge by the sort of leaders some have chosen for themselves lately.  My eye was caught by one passage in Kaplan's latest, in which he compares our world to Weimar Germany, as it was in the 1920s between the two World Wars, on the brink of Hitler's ascent to power.

I last heard this same grim assessment made by the wisest man I have ever known, a British historian named Michael Howard, who died in 2019, at the age of 96. Michael said to me a few years earlier: "We have entered our Weimar period." He meant that disillusionment with traditional elites spurs many people to become attracted to allegedly strong leaders with simplistic solutions even if they are obviously gangsters. 

Another historian whom I admire, Laurence Rees, has just published The Nazi Mind, subtitled 12 Warnings From History. He highlights, for instance, the manner in which the 1930s European tyrants generated cults of "us and them." They successfully deluded their followers that they were on the side of the downtrodden, against elites who condescended to them.

 Rees writes: "Hitler didn't just legitimize the anger felt by many of those who listened to him" — in the wake of the 1919 Versailles Treaty and economic collapse. "He also offered hope."

After World War II, the former commandant of a Nazi concentration camp recalled his happy years — and I have interviewed many old SS veterans who looked back on their time serving Hitler as the best of their lives: "I was full of gratitude to the SS for the intellectual guidance it gave me. . . Many of us had been so bewildered. . .We did not understand what was happening around us, everything was so mixed up. The SS offered us simple ideas that we could understand."

I shall now offer a proposition that supporters of Donald Trump will brand as patronizing liberal junk: The better informed people are, the more resistant they are likely to be to "simple ideas that we could understand" as answers to tough questions. Meanwhile, the less people know — and those locked into social media or Fox News know very little that is objectively true — the more prone they are to arrogance, in their certainty of rightness.

Kaplan writes, in direct opposition to MAGA doctrine: "This fragile, finite earth of ours rests, above all, on moderation, which this new age of technology is undermining."  Kaplan's critics, assaulting his thesis, aver that mankind has never been richer, freer from disease and with longer life expectancy, all of which he acknowledges. Yet climate change and nuclear weapons pose threats to the planet that didn't exist in the 1920s, alongside the challenges to democracy.

The scariest aspect of the Trump presidency is that he promotes unpredictability and disruption as his principal techniques of governance and especially foreign policy. This approach works in reality television, yet predictability and order are indispensable to a confident and stable society, such as most of us want to inhabit. 

We face, on both sides of the Atlantic, the challenge of trying to make people believe that we are best governed by prudent, honest, often boring leaders who will make responsible decisions and respect law and fairness.

The danger — the Weimar precedent — is that, instead, frightened, confused electorates embrace "strongmen," who in their narcissism and recklessness are likely to lead us to disaster, as almost all dictators do. Only this week in Britain, a country much less politically riven than is the US, a majority of Generation Z - teen to late '20s - respondents to an opinion poll said they think we would be better governed by a dictatorship.   

Bad outcomes will be accelerated by climate change — and the dismissal of the overwhelming evidence that we are wrecking the planet for our grandchildren. They can also take the form of military calamities, which may be generated either by the promiscuous use of force, or by failure to use enough force to resist such aggressors as Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who seeks to exploit the perceived decadence and weakness of the West to build a new Soviet empire. 

Yet nothing is inevitable. We must sustain hope and continue the search for better ways of doing things. The beginning of wisdom is to open our eyes, to abandon the worship of false idols and snake oil salesmen, whether in the White House or in our own backyards. 

The greatest danger facing us now, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that we might give up on trying to make democracy work, because it seems so difficult. Kaplan saw, a distance before a lot of other people did, that mass migration, water shortages, general scarcity of natural resources, epidemics and mass migration threaten to destabilize the world, and especially the West.

The one thing that all these problems have in common is that we can't hope to manage them — let us have no fancy talk about defeating them, which is impossible — unless we work in partnership with other nations. This applies even to the US, with its supreme wealth and power.

Retreating into ultra-nationalism offers a path to nowhere. A great lesson of the World War II and post-World War II eras, thoroughly understood by Kaplan as it was by Michael Howard, is that exercising the leadership of Western civilization, far from impoverishing America, enriched it as well as benefited the rest of us.

By contrast, 1918-1941 US isolationism contributed to the failure of the Weimar Republic, Great Depression and rise of the dictators. It brought Britain to the verge of defeat in 1940-1941, from which we were delivered only by the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, the US became the only belligerent to make a cash profit out of World War II.

If now, in our century, Americans give up on internationalism, partnerships and alliances, the outcome will be a tragedy not only for mankind but also for themselves.

Sketch: TBS

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include "Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy."

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.