Military Neglect on Our Part

We were given fair warning on Tuesday when Robert Gates arrived in China. I doubt, however, that we will heed it. Liberal, commercial polities have a tendency to be caught flat-footed at the beginning of an armed conflict, and what is true for them is even more egregiously true for the modern democracies so aptly described as welfare states. War, defeat, and a profound loss of prestige are, I fear, the catastrophes that we are now courting – as the Chinese military ostentatiously indicated by brazenly test-flying their first stealth fighter, one larger than any in our larder, just a few hours before our Secretary of Defense sat down for discussions with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The blunders that we are now making are by no means unprecedented. The first example that comes to mind is England under William III, which was arguably the first fully modern, fully commercial polity in human history. As Winston Churchill points out in his Marlborough: His Life and Times, England’s Dutch king fought vigorously to maintain in England in the wake of  the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) a standing army as a deterrent, but he was thwarted by a Parliament weary of war, unfriendly to taxation, and intent on harvesting a peace dividend. In the absence of an England capable of deploying on the continent of Europe an expeditionary force at a moment’s notice, when the last Hapsburg monarch of Spain died without issue, Louis ignored the terms of his marriage with a Spanish Infanta and connived in installing on the Spanish throne his grandson Philip, who was in line to inherit the French throne as well. Given their immense wealth and their holdings in the New World, the unity of France and Spain would have had as its practical consequence the establishment of a universal monarchy dominant over Europe. This was the very eventuality that the War of the League of Augsburg had been fought to prevent, and in response the English, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs in central Europe launched the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), which the first two of these states were initially – thanks to the natural propensity of liberal, commercial polities – ill-equipped to fight.

Churchill – who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in part as a recognition of his remarkable accomplishment in Marlborough: His Life and Times – composed this magisterial study in the 1930s, and one cannot read it without realizing that writing this work was a central part of his intellectual preparation for becoming a wartime Prime Minister. Britain was caught in the toils of the Great Depression at the time, and he watched in horror and raised his voice in protest as Germany under Hitler rearmed and as Britain and France succumbed to wishful thinking and repeatedly chose butter over guns. The Second World War – and the casualties accompanying it – were the price that was paid for the improvident stewardship of the political leaders of Britain and France.

I mention these disgraceful examples because I suspect that we are following in their wake.

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