Radio Free New Hampshire: Dancing In The Dark

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

We have lived with stalemate for so long, we have forgotten how and why it happened. But to best appreciate Donald Trump’s actions in Iran, we should learn that history again.

It starts with the end of the Second World War. That conflict broke Europe’s great powers. Though only Germany suffered defeat, France and England suffered the aura of defeat. Their populations were exhausted, their economies were shattered, their governments were weak. The continent’s smaller powers were just as bad off. Only the Soviet Union and the United States had any strength to spare.

When Berlin finally fell, our forces faced each other with precious little amity. Some favored the prospect of a new war to drive the Red Army back to Russia’s borders. But that didn’t happen. The Soviets had a defensive mindset, the Americans were far from home, and the allied nations had no stomach for more heavy fighting. Especially when victory could not be certain. Even though America had the bomb, our stockpile was low, and Russia held the advantage in men and armor.

Then the Russians developed their own bomb, and the Cold War began in earnest. Nobody wanted it. Nobody chose it. It arrived on the tide of necessity and its consequences were brutal. Many died and many more were forced into lives of both spiritual poverty and material misery.

It has been a long time and we have all forgotten. But east and west both took care to not destroy the world they shared. Generals and diplomats labored on both sides to maintain a tenuous peace. There were also constant reminders that the other side was not purely evil; that they didn’t just want us dead. Van Cliburn won a piano contest. Bobby Fischer won a chess match. Those things mattered. They were rays of light in the darkness. And in that darkness we gained the habit of stepping with great care.

The strategic value of acting with discretion soon transcended its military aspect. It became entwined with decolonization and our increased respect for foreign cultures. Our limited wars in Korea and Viet Nam strengthened it yet more, leading America’s first (and still loudest) post-war generation to be skeptical of any use of American power abroad. It was all tainted with capitalism, it was all tainted with self-regard, it was all tainted with the blood of innocents.

This social, political, and emotional bias in favor of inaction, regardless of both its original purpose (to keep the peace between us and Russia) and its original effectiveness (that peace held for half a century) finally came to cripple us. It became the intellectual furniture we had inherited from the past. We got used to it, we got lazy, then we turned contemptuous of anyone who questioned it.

We ended up wringing our hands as North Korea gained nuclear weapons. We tried to handle this problem with economic threats. That didn’t work and we are now saddled with a madman in control of mass destruction. We relied on the Israelis to take care of Libya’s nuclear weapons; we criticized them for that, while we benefited from their boldness. In the wake of 9/11, when we learned how deeply certain foreigners hated us, we tried toppling Iraq’s government; and the resulting mess made inaction look good all over again. We taught our kids, apparently, to regard Israel with hatred, for fighting actual wars to save their own people. We had trouble imagining causes worth either killing or dying for, unless they were romantic causes, in which case we excused everything.

But a poorly executed war like Iraq proves little more than the test case itself and the prospect of simply wringing our hands again while yet another madman obtained nuclear weapons remained as objectively insane as ever. Iran’s government preaches death. It exports terror world-wide. It dooms the future of the entire Middle East (those who rightly care about the plight of Palestinian Arabs need look no further than Tehran for the sorrow of their cause). Iran has been actively fighting the West for decades and we have all watched this happen.

Donald Trump has handled this matter with his usual amateur skill set. It’s easy to fault many of his moves. But he still deserves credit for what has become his main virtue: the ability to see what’s in front of himself, combined with the willingness to do something about it. Whether Iran was one month, one year, or one decade away from obtaining a nuclear weapon is immaterial. The world was doing nothing, and not because of grand strategy. It had simply forgotten how to imagine anything better.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.