On a scale of one to ten for meaningful questions, this one goes to eleven.\u00a0 What will replace the current order?\u00a0 And by order, I mean the relationship of man to institutions.\u00a0 A citizen to his government, and a people to another.\u00a0 The one thing we know for sure is that the familiar system will no longer exist.\u00a0 There are plenty of wreckers and ruiners insisting on change because they detest the current system of systems, and at any rate, things have a way of changing even when they are supposed to stay the same.<\/p>\n
The current international order is less than one-hundred years old.\u00a0 It will be instructive to see if the centenaries of WWI events bring about meaningful introspection amid all the retrospectives.\u00a0 We are the same people that the ancient Greeks were, and the Babylonians before them, so it is no stretch to claim that we confront the exact demons as our forebears did a mere hundred years ago.\u00a0 And they burned the world to the ground.<\/p>\n
The current generation of Afghan and Iraq war returnees are experiencing just a taste of what the famed Lost Generation lived, and this group has had it much better off in most ways than veterans of the “forgotten war” in Korea or the “bad war” in Vietnam.\u00a0 Yet the menacing incompletion, indeed sabotage, of our wartime goals in the Middle East are producing a situation unseen in the last hundred years.\u00a0 After the Great War came the sins and mistakes of Versailles, isolation, and appeasement, which paid off in a vengeful, resurgent Germany and a breakout Japan.\u00a0 After the Good War, much was stabilized, although at a terrible price through the Cold War and several smaller engagements, including the Forgotten War, which technically has not ended.\u00a0 These were all clearly nation-state actions, until the Bad War, in which we continued our conventional-war nation-state strategy and tactics while the enemy flowed through us like water through bedrock, unseen, everywhere, unstoppable.<\/p>\n
There were good reasons as well as bad for stopping the war in Vietnam short of our goals — not the least of which was unclear goals.\u00a0 But they manner in which it was done left a stain upon the nation and most inappropriately was seen as a mark against the veterans who fought it — which was convenient for the half-educated civilian populace and the scoundrels in government, but which constituted a deeper stain than even the betrayal of our allies.\u00a0 It is one thing to betray a friend — quite another to forsake a brother who has done as you asked.<\/p>\n
As our wars had progressed from great to good to forgotten to bad, the nation found itself in a “deep funk”, seemingly unable to win and certainly unwilling to try.\u00a0 The cheery optimism and can-do good-guy-ism of the Reagan administration could barely get a few friendly irregulars funded here and there, and once in a while rescue a tropical island full of coeds.\u00a0 But things had at least been stabilized for better and for worse through the Iranian hostage crisis and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.\u00a0 Reykjavik was made possible in part by the Mujahideen.<\/p>\n
All these irregulars and transnational conflicts, the increasing necessity for, and political difficulty of dealing with MOOTW (military operations other than war, pronounced “mootwah”) should have served as harbingers of something far larger on the horizon.\u00a0 Samuel Huntington wrote of the clash of civilizations, and while it has been trendy for so long that it is perhaps now out of vogue to criticize his unfulfilled predictions, his analysis is sound and not flashy, despite the sweeping title.\u00a0 The old order of arranged wars between nation-states will give way to a new order of emergent wars between peoples.\u00a0 The “western way of war” is between sides, you may answer the question “which side are you on?” in any manner you choose — it is a choice.\u00a0 The older way of war is between identities, and the question “what are you?” is rarely asked and seldom changed.\u00a0 You can be a citizen of two nations, and you may change this almost at will.\u00a0 You can belong to only one civilization, and you cannot meaningfully change this.\u00a0 Wars between nations may be negotiated and resolved as agreed.\u00a0 Germany or Japan could very well rise to lead another terrible war, someday.\u00a0 Nothing prevents it but constant work to avoid it.\u00a0 The clashes between civilizations are themselves more permanent, end only with permanent solutions, and usually require several rounds of total war to resolve once and for all. Neither Carthage nor Cahokia will ever matter again.<\/p>\n
Huntington argues that all of the wars with which we are familiar, save a few, are civil wars within western civilization, and even the outliers, such as Korea and Vietnam, are exports of western wars onto Asian peoples.\u00a0 Fair enough — the Marxism and other totalitarian influences upon even the most formidable of Asian adversaries were picked up in the universities of Paris.\u00a0 Huntington borrows Toynbee’s collection of six extant civilizations, and while I haven;t read Toynbee, I quibble with lumping all of western civ into one bucket if Japan is to stand so firmly apart from “confucian” as to warrant its own slot.\u00a0 I would argue that the distinctions between Anglo and Latin western civ are as formidable as any, but fine.<\/p>\n
I am throwing a stub finish on here, just to close out the article.\u00a0 I will continue in this vein shortly.<\/p>\n
The century to come will not resemble the one which has just passed.\u00a0 Those who frequently find the current situation unsettling, and look for ways to return to some kind of normal, are going to be disappointed.\u00a0 What is gone will not come back.\u00a0 The future is coming and while we struggle over its shape, it is important to recognize that it will not resemble the past.\u00a0 Conservatism must analyze its own principles and separate nostalgia and inertia from a spirited defense of that which we must defend.\u00a0 My style of conservatism is about acknowledging our immense good fortune at the inheritance from those braver and better than ourselves, and the struggle to identify and defend the pillars of that culture.\u00a0 For this reason, much of my style of conservatism focuses on identifying threats to western civilization and refusing to accept that all change is inevitable.\u00a0 Change will come, but we are not without influence about what that change will be, and more pointedly, what it will not be.\u00a0 It is entirely right and good to assert the superiority of western civilization, and to defend it.\u00a0 The next hundred years will require much in the way of defense.<\/p>\n
On a scale of one to ten for meaningful questions, this one goes to eleven.\u00a0 What will replace the current order?\u00a0 And by order, I mean the relationship of man to institutions.\u00a0 A citizen to his government, and a people to another.\u00a0 The one thing we know for sure is that the familiar system will no longer exist.\u00a0 There are plenty of wreckers and ruiners insisting on change because they detest the current system of systems, and at any rate, things have a way of changing even when they are supposed to stay the same.<\/p>\n
The current international order is less than one-hundred years old.\u00a0 It will be instructive to see if the centenaries of WWI events bring about meaningful introspection amid all the retrospectives.\u00a0 We are the … Continue reading