IF YOU DRAW THE SWORD... (via Oswald Czolgosz)

Sword of honour: Paul Robinson on the ancient code of insult and revenge that is still prevalent in the American South (Paul Robinson, July 2003, The Spectator)

In a much discussed recent book, Walter Russell Mead identifies four strands of American foreign policy: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian. Jacksonians follow the ideas of President Andrew Jackson, the archetype of ante-bellum, aggressive southern honour, who fought more than a dozen duels. They see the pursuit of national honour as the prime purpose of policy. Right now, Jacksonianism reigns triumphant in the halls of American power. The South’s political influence has possibly never been greater. It was Al Gore’s failure to win a single state in the old Confederacy that lost him the presidency, and George Bush Sr’s nemesis came in the form of Ross Perot, a Texan who in 1953 almost singlehandedly devised the current Honour Code of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Jacksonian rhetoric has spearheaded America’s recent wars. The word ‘honour’ is rarely used, but substitutes such as ‘credibility’ abound in official speeches. Nato had to bomb Yugoslavia because the ‘credibility of the alliance was at stake’. Coalition forces had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was ‘undermining the credibility of the UN’. Saddam was not a threat to the USA, but he was a living insult to its honour. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful state on earth, he had for ten years continued to survive and defy America’s wishes. For an administration driven by sentiments of honour, such an insult could not be permitted. Just as the South could not allow Lincoln to become their President, so George W. Bush could not allow Saddam to continue humiliating his country. Only war could satisfy honour.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the pursuit of honour often leads people to attack others, to drive them down, in order to inflate themselves. The Greeks called such behaviour hubris, and believed that hubris inevitably resulted in disaster. It certainly did for the Confederacy.

Mr. Robinson has understood far less here than he might have, or else is using an entirely valid concept--American Jacksonianism--to score cheap political points. Compare the desultory nature of our actions in Yugoslavia, our inaction for a decade in Iraq, and our failure to move to actual confrontation with the Soviets in the Cold War to our immediate (or proximate) entry into wars following the shelling of Fort Sumter (Civil War), the sinking of the Maine (Spanish-American), the sinking of the Lusitania (WWI), Pearl Harbor (WWII), Tonkin Gulf incident (Vietnam) and 9-11 (Afghan War and Second Iraq War)--none of the latter incidents was a necessary cause of war, but were physical insults that were seized upon by those who desired war as a pretext to say that our honor had been challenged and must be defended. In the face of such actions by our foes, Jacksonians, who tend to be rather isolationist as a rule, can be whipped into an interventionist frenzy and we always are. On the other hand, although Jacksonian blood was up throughout the Cold War, there was unfortunately never such an incident--though JFK squandered a potential one during the Cuban Missile Crisis--and never a president willing to provoke one--though Truman easily could have as Nazi Germany fell and the USSR took over great swathes of Eastern Europe. The capacity of Americans to withstand innumerable slights to their pride in that doleful era without ever starting a shooting war, pretty clearly suggests that the additional element of a physical assault--no matter how minor--is required.

Mr. Robinson's final sentence implies that America today resembles the Confederacy--apparently he's been reading too many Harold Meyerson columns--but he's missed a key point about the Civil War. It was not the South that started the War to defend its honor, but the North that was brought into the war to defend its. Suppose for a moment that the South had seceded and merely said that it wished nothing further to do with the North--would President Lincoln have had the political support in that event to pursue a war of reunification? It seems an open question at best. Similarly, suppose that we concede the validity of the view that George W. Bush and the neocon cabal with which he has surrounded himself had all along harbored the desire to go to war with Islamicism generally and Saddam Hussein specifically. The question is, wouyld they have had the political support to do so in the absence of 9-11? The answer to that is obviously not. But the South and the Islamicists did both--just as the Germans, Japanese, etc. before them--foolishly attack America and learned (or are learning) the truth of Admiral Yamamoto's probably apochryphal statement: "I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping tiger, and filled him with a terrible resolve." The lesson to be learned from America's historic tendency to Jacksonianism is that it is better to bear any humiliation America offers than to throw down the gauntlet and have America crush you in the ensuing duel. The problem is not our sense of honor, which we always successfully defend, but the sense of our enemies, which always leads to their suicide.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Special Providence by Walter Russell Mead (Brothers Judd)
The Jacksonian Tradition (Walter Russell Mead, Winter 1999/00The National Interest)
-ESSAY: Braced for Jacksonian Ruthlessness (Walter Russell Mead, September 17, 2001, Washington Post) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2003 10:31 AM