Kenneth Weisbrode: Historical Amnesia in West Opens Door to Risk
...One of the questions that historians may ask someday about the collapse of the short-lived post-Cold War order, such as it existed, is why the lessons of previous postwar experiences were not heeded more closely. In European history, at least, the lessons are driven into the heads of every schoolchild: The Thirty Years' War and the subsequent Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the principle of state sovereignty and forbade what we now call interventions in the internal affairs of other states for moral, religious, or ideological reasons. The Napoleonic wars and the subsequent Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 laid down the principle that a balance of power—underwritten by Britain and Russia—required a subordination of the interests of smaller countries to those of larger ones.
The First World War and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, although violating a couple of the above lessons in the name of self-determination, established the rule that open diplomacy and international institutions, and not naked power alone, were to be the basis of world order. The Second World War and the subsequent treaties of San Francisco (1945), Washington (1949), Rome (1957), and Helsinki (1975) made possible the promotion and protection of universal human rights within carefully defined regional spheres of influence. The latter formulation proved temporal; the former, permanent.
After 1991, the world seemed to enter a state of collective amnesia. The name for it was globalization, and it postulated that peace and prosperity could be enjoyed everywhere so long as governments and societies played by"global" rules largely established by the Western victors of the Cold War. To those who chose to flaunt the rules, the punishment could be harsh. Yet, the consensus over the rules themselves was quite thin and inconsistent, not only in matters of war and peace but also in business and finance. Just compare for a minute the rhetoric coming out of the West during the Asian financial meltdown a decade ago with what is happening today worldwide.
The world thus witnessed one apparent violation after another, not only of the post-Cold War rules but also of the lessons of previous postwar eras."Human rights trumps sovereignty," Madeleine Albright famously declared during NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999, forgetting the central 20th-century lesson that human rights cannot be furthered anywhere in the absence, or in repudiation, of state authority.
Likewise, economic prosperity, which the great proponent of European unity, Jean Monnet, insisted must be guided by the not-so-invisible hand of political consensus across borders, became its own mantra, itsmeans and its own end, apart from any reasonable understanding of the cultural, institutional, and geopolitical conditions that further it.
Looking back, then, we see several important opportunities squandered. The biggest—which may yet come to bite us—is the failure of the then five declared nuclear weapons states (plus Israel) to devise a deliberate program of reducing nuclear inventories worldwide to a few hundred and, eventually, to zero. Former U.S. secretaries of state Baker, Kissinger, and Shultz, along with several others, have insisted that it's not too late to turn back the tide. But with a nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, and, on the near horizon, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and probably Algeria and Saudi Arabia, the prospects are bleak. We now face the brave new world that John F. Kennedy and others warned about before the advent of the nonproliferation regime: a world of 20-plus nuclear powers, all balanced precariously against all the others by the terror of total destruction within minutes....