The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page B

America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.
    Diplomacy and humility abroad can encourage friendship. And such good manners and deference are vital in improving our global image and lessening tensions. Yet, unfortunately, pleasantness and magnanimity are not always enough to ensure good relations with rival states and interest groups that look more to what we represent than to what we might say or do on any one occasion.
    It is a tragedy of the human character that a Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran say they predicate relations with the United States on notions of goodwill, deference, mutual respect, past apologies, and benevolent diplomacy, even as they tend to interpret our outreach as weakness and treat deterrence with respect. Having a hundred-thousand-ton nuclear carrier in the Persian Gulf, more lethal than the combined militaries of most nations, probably does more to keep the calm in that region than sending a presidential video to the Iranian theocracy, no matter how artfully phrased.
    Perhaps the strangest barometer of the rise of the therapeutic mind-set is the growing prevalence of old-style piracy. Criminals based in Somalia, using just a few thugs equipped with small arms, routinely hijack and commandeer large oceangoing merchant vessels. Such overt piracy is a symptom of the erosion of international order—not merely in the example of the perpetually failed state of Somalia, but more so by the general global indifference to the piratical encroachment into the world’s vital sea lanes. Likewise, the classical antidote of going ashore to demolish the homes, bases, and dockyards of the miscreants—known from the days of Pompey’s successful efforts against Cilician piracy—seems to be taboo to Western navies in the age after the American “Black Hawk Down” humiliation in Mogadishu. Instead of a military response, we are likely to run a cost-benefit analysis of the piratical threat, to consider the mitigating circumstances of poverty and oppression that turn erstwhile fishermen into seaborne criminals, and to blame the victim in wondering out loud why seagoing vessels don’t carry their own security teams or why such profit-mongering shipping companies must skirt so close to hostile coasts.
    The same confusion is often true of hostage-taking, whether the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 or the Iranians’ capture of fifteen British sailors in disputed waters off Iraq in 2007. Kidnapping regimes are no longer issued ultimatums to release captured diplomatic or military personnel—or else. Instead, the detained are paraded on international television and coerced into signing affidavits admitting guilt or testifying to superb treatment from their captors—while state propaganda airs accusations of espionage, coupled with threats of trials and worse.
    Western powers place a peaceful resolution of the crisis and a safe return of the hostages above all other considerations—even when they privately accept that public signs of humiliation and weakness will lead to further aggression and more hostage-taking. The ultimate result of the Iranian hostages crises was not better understanding between the Iranian theocracy and Western powers; rather it was increased Iranian terrorism after 1980, and, in the British case, an arrest in 2009 of British embassy employees on charges of espionage and treason.
    Yet who in the affluent West would have wished for an American president in November 1979 to issue a warning along the following lines: “If the Iranian government does not