Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy

[Tymoty]

[...] the destiny of the state was in the hands of fallible men, and even in their hour of triumph great societies were perched on the precipice of catastrophe.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Introduction

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

By looking disaster squarely in the face, by demonstrating just how quickly things could spiral out of control, the Athenians hoped their citizenry would be charged with the sense of mutual obligation and moral courage needed to avoid such a fate.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Introduction

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

A great virtue of history is that it offers vicarious experience—it provides wisdom and insight without the pain that is often the price of accumulating them.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Introduction

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

Taking decisive action in the face of uncertainty and danger was critical for citizens of a democratic state assailed by forces from within and beyond their land.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter One

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

[...] a persistent and repeated error through the ages has been the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active effort, planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifices, just as war does.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter One, qouting Donald Kagan: On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

In some ways, the situation that America inhabited after World War II could hardly be called tragic at all. If the war had laid much of the world low, in doing so it had vaulted America to Olympian heights. In 1945, the U.S. gross national product (GNP) was three times that of its closest competitor, and American military expenditures were nearly three times those of all the other major powers combined. America alone possessed nuclear weapons, a navy that dominated the maritime commons, and an air force that could devastate targets anywhere on earth. Its ideological influence, as the world’s leading democracy, radiated outward. [...] America was now poised to assume “the responsibility which God Almighty intended,” president Harry Truman would declare, “for the welfare of the world in generations to come.”

Yet if American leaders emerged from World War II with the optimism afforded by hegemonic power, they also carried the sad insight provided by recent experience. The individuals who populated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations [...] had been eyewitnesses to the Great Depression and World War II. They had seen how quickly the seeming peace and prosperity of the 1920s had given way to the privation and accelerating international tensions of the 1930s, and then to the cataclysmic bloodletting of global war. They had been horrified by the speed with which predatory authoritarians had gained ascendancy over divided and demoralized democracies, and chastened by the ensuing American vulnerability and global destruction. In short, they had received an unforgettable education in the fragility of international order and the devastating ramifications of its collapse.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter Four

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

World War II and its aftermath produced an intellectual revolution in U.S. foreign policy, no less profound than the intellectual revolutions that had paved the way for Westphalia and the Concert of Europe. American leaders rejected the doctrines—protectionism, unilateralism, non-entanglement, and utopianism—of the 1920s and 1930s, and they gradually but decisively embraced the difficult task of fostering global security and prosperity. [...] This ethos would inform an order-building project of epic scope—one, like its most successful predecessors, that drew its most powerful and enduring inspiration from tragedies experienced and tragedies foreseen.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter Four

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

For U.S. officials of the 1940s and after, it was virtually an article of faith that international security rested primarily on widely shared international economic security and prosperity.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter Four

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

[...] the resulting economic system was not classically liberal. It permitted the use of capital controls by countries that had yet to fully recover from the war, and in deference to the lessons of the Depression, it deliberately provided policymakers with the autonomy to pursue social security initiatives and Keynesian full employment programs at home. Yet the system was nonetheless comparatively fluid and open [...]

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter Four

#tg211496239

[Tymoty]

Leaders of foreign countries were well aware of this fact, and they often complained about the “exorbitant privilege” that America extracted from its economic dominance. More striking in retrospect, however, are the costs and burdens that Washington bore by dint of its leadership role.

Hal Brands & Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, Chapter Four

#tg211496239