Fireside Friday, March 22, 2024

Fireside this week! The ACOUP schedule might end up being a little unstable for the next few weeks as the coincidence of illness, the dense part of the teaching semester and unexpected travel are playing havoc on my schedule. I can only promise that we will finish the series on the failure of Hellenistic armies, but that it may be a bit before we do.

Percy would like to know why you are so close to his window, which he uses to keep guard against the birds outside.

For this week’s musing, I want to muse briefly on the seemingly perennial ideology of isolationism, in the context of the United States. Isolationism as an ideology is, of course, mostly a luxury for large and powerful countries; by contrast, as the famous Estonian internal foreign ministry memo noted, “the most important lesson is simple: time is short and time will not wait for small nations.” But the United States is a big country and big countries are afforded greater latitude for folly in strategy. The notion has long floated around (and seems to have bubbled back to the surface lately) that due to a great gift of geography – the Atlantic and the Pacific – the United States is uniquely positioned to take a position out of the fray of geopolitics and to focus solely on itself. It’s a tempting notion, only slightly hindered by the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been true.

In fact, the United States has never actually ever managed to avoid being pulled in to any ‘general’ European war (that is, a war involving most, if not all, of the great powers of Europe).

This trend arguably begins before the creation of the United States, given that the Thirteen Colonies were a key battleground in the Seven Year’s War, which is often known in the United States as the ‘French and Indian War.’ But more properly, we might say this story really begins with the Wars of the French Revolution (1792-1815). Arguably we ought to split that into the Wars of the French Revolution (1972-1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1802-1815) but it makes no difference to our analysis because either the United States got dragged into both wars once or into the one longer conflict twice.

The American failure to avoid being drawn into the early wars of the French Revolution wasn’t for lack of trying. George Washington had made it a major policy of his administration to avoid being dragged in and indeed famously warned in his farewell address against ‘entangling alliances’ for exactly this reason. And you can see the wisdom in the advice – even by 1796 it was already obvious that being pulled into the cauldron of the French Revolutionary Wars might break the young and small United States. The wisdom of that policy was so clear that the next two administrations (Adams and Jefferson) both tried to follow it, despite being opposed on most other matters of policy.

The thing is, their efforts failed.

The problem was trade – the American economy at this point relied quite a lot on seaborne trade which the war was disrupting. In order to avoid a war and formalize trade relations with Great Britain, Washington had supported the Jay Treaty (1794) in which, among other things, in order to avoid having the Royal Navy block American ships, the United States agreed to abide by Britain’s anti-France maritime policy – mostly because, without a significant navy, the United States really had no other choice anyway. Revolutionary France, however, viewed the agreement as a betrayal, tantamount to the United States entering the war on the British side and so in 1796, French privateers began attacking not just American ships but indeed any ships they found in American waters.

This became the problem of the (John) Adams administration (1797-1801) who tried to negotiate his way out of the mess, but efforts were derailed by the considerable corruption of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (a spectacular figure we must discuss sometime) leading to the XYZ Affair and the failure of negotiations. So instead Adams was forced to dispatch the United States’ small, but extremely plucky navy to the Carribean to fend off French privateers and warships, leading to an undeclared war – but still a war – we call the Quasi-War (1798-1800). The U.S. Navy’s plucky frigates managed to show that the United States might actually have some teeth, which aided in negotiations and Adams managed to extricate himself from the mess in 1800, but not before the United States had lost some 2,000 merchant ships and the French had lost 4 proper warships (the largest bring the frigate L’Insurgente) and more than a hundred privateering ships.

The Jefferson administration followed. His plan was to keep the United States out of what were now the Napoleonic Wars by simply refusing to trade with anyone involved until everyone agreed to respect American neutrality, first the Non-Importation Act of 1806 and then the Embargo Act of 1807 and then the Non-Intercourse Act of 1807. The result was failure: the trading bans hammered American business far worse than they pressured Britain or France or anyone else. Both belligerants continued to put pressure on the United States, while American merchants not looking to go bankrupt ignored the act. Meanwhile the Royal Navy, under pressure to keep crew levels up under the strain of sustaining a massive blockade of basically all of Europe had begun pressing crew off of American ships, violating U.S. sovereignty and enraging the American public, all of which led to the War of 1812 under the Madison administration, which can be understood as the North-American theater of the larger Napoleonic Wars.

Oh-for-two.

We then get a long period without a general European War through the rest of the 1800s. The closest it comes is probably the Crimean War, which involved the Ottomans, Britain, France and Russia, but none of the states of central Europe (that is, the Germans or Italians), which we don’t generally regard as a general European war as a result. Instead, the next general European War is, of course, World War I.

I needn’t rehearse that entire narrative here. Suffice to say that, after years of trying to stay out of the war – indeed, Woodrow Wilson got reelected with a campaign slogan of, “He Kept Us Out of War” the United States ended up dragged into the conflict, motivated again by disruptions to trade, in this case by German unrestricted submarine warfare.

Driven by the perceived failures of the post-WWI peace, Americans went into the 1930s quite adamant that they would avoid the next major European War. But even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States just a few days later, the tensions pulling the United States into the conflict were significant and once again based on the United States’ strong economic connection to Europe. The United States Navy had, in fact, been conducting ‘neutrality patrols‘ to protect American shipping beginning in 1939 and that effort escalated as German U-Boat attacks mounted. The alternative would have been burning down the Anglo-American trade relationship and in the process self-destructing a decent portion of the American economy, an obvious non-starter.

In short, then, the Atlantic and the Pacific have never yet protected the United States from involvement in a general European War. NATO and the broader post-WWII security architecture was constructed on the realization that this sort of crude isolationism had been repeatedly tried and had repeatedly failed and that instead the best way to keep the United States out of a global conflict would to avert a global conflict, by careful and deliberate foreign policy.

And it worked! The period from the end of WWII to the present has been the most peaceful period in human history, the ‘long peace.’ It has also – as a result of that peace – been a period of rapidly rising prosperity globally.

But more narrowly, that decision was predicated on a realization that attempting to retreat behind the Atlantic and the Pacific was a fool’s gambit: far too much of the American economy reached out beyond those oceans either in imports or exports and the United States was far too tightly culturally entwined with many other countries as well. Attempting to sever those connections – to shift to ‘autarky’ (where a country’s economy is largely self-contained) – would impose economic costs that American voters were profoundly unwilling to accept (without necessarily freeing the United States of security costs, since it could no longer rely on allies to share that burden). American policy in Europe has never been one of pure charity, but rather in the post-WWII era was borne out of a realization that the United States had to proactively intervene in order to prevent yet another major European conflict, because such a conflict would almost certainly draw in the United States, whether we wanted it or not.

On to Recommendations!

I want to start by recommending a fantastic series of substack posts by Joel Christensen (sententiae antiquae on Twitter) pulling out short, moving passages from the Iliad. Each passage is presented with translation and discussion and I think they’re all thought-provoking, good reminders of why the epic has so captivated readers over the centuries. Especially thought-provoking, I thought, were, “You’re Gonna Die Too, Friend” (from Book 21), “Laying My Burdens Down” (from Book 22) and “A New Widow and Her Orphan,” a treatment of Andromache’s bitter lament in book 22 that the audience knows is even darker than she yet realizes.

And while we’re on the darkness of war and loss, this study by Larry Lewis of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at Center for Naval Analyses on the practical results of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ‘Civilian Harm Reduction’ efforts does with much more rigor what I attempted more briefly a few firesides ago: assessing the IDF’s tactics to determine if they are, in fact, as careful at avoiding excess civilian casualties as they claim. He comes to a similar conclusion: Israel is, in fact, distressingly tolerant of high civilian casualties in Gaza and while the operation to destroy Hamas was justified by Hamas’ attacks, the methods Israel is using are resulting in more civilian death than is necessary.

On a less deadly note, I wrote recently in Foreign Policy about how “The History Crisis Is a National Security Problem,” noting how U.S. security relies on a steady supply of historians to various parts of the Departments of Defense and State as well as an educated citizenry prepared to understand the questions being put to them in elections (as noted above!). It is my hope that an article like this might also serve as a model for other historians to use when reaching out to the policy communities connected to their fields – to explain that history education in the United States is in distress and to connect that to the issues policy-makers (with funding dollars) care about.

For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend Patrick Alan Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020). It is, I will grant, generally a little pricey in soft-cover for such a slim volume, but quite useful as a detailed source- and campaign-study of the Pyrrhic Wares that walks the reader through what we can know in an understandable manner, similar in this respect to the older but also excellent two volumes by John Lazenby covering the First and Second Punic Wars. Particularly valuable is that Kent puts the differences in the sources and the scholarly judgements about reliable up front in the text, making note when the sources differ and why he has opted to trust one and not another. In particular, he stresses how the narratives of our sources are shaped by how they position the Pyrrhic War as an event – as the late great war of what is effectively Rome’s ‘heroic’ era, before the start of the more ‘historical’ period with the First Punic War in 264.

Kent’s project here is not purely descriptive, however. Instead while covering the ins-and-outs of Pyrrhus’ campaigns in Italy and Sicily, he aims to demonstrate (and I think does so quite effectively) that the notion that Pyrrhus was for grand conquests as an ‘Alexander of the West’ of sorts is a later elaboration by our sources to puff up Rome’s achievement in fending him off. Instead, Kent argues that Pyrrhus’ aim was more limited: to pull the cities of magna graecia into his control and use their resources, likely for further campaigns back East aiming at control of Macedonia proper. Kent points out that for all of the rhetoric in our sources about Pyrrhus’ grand aims, his actual actions seem bent towards this more limited design than grand dreams of conquest in the west.

The book is well written and very accessible for the lay-reader and brisk to read at an economical 142 pages. It includes two maps in the front-matter, one of southern Italy and one of Sicily, which do a good job of placing the various battles and sieges in geographic relation to each other (though I might have wished for a few more maps, for instance a map outlining different areas of settlement, e.g. Samnium vs. magna graecia vs. Latium and Campania, etc).