Today, the question is: what lessons from history are we ignoring? 

Victoria Schofield: Protectionist policies can lead to hardship rather than prosperity.

The lesson in history is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff enacted by the US administration of Herbert Hoover in 1930 and which intensified nationalism in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Initially framed to protect American farmers, its enactment – against the advice of over 1,000 economists – had the reverse effect. Although not directly responsible either for the Great Depression or the outbreak of war, its passage contributed to a substantial decline in global trade which provided those who were willing to attempt to alter the politico-economic status quo ante, notably Germany and Japan, with a reason for doing so.

We may like to think that we have learnt from the consequences of Smoot-Hawley with the introduction of the World Trade Organisation and a general commitment to open trade. But with nationalism on the rise and the slogan of America First emanating out of the United States, the mood can again change; President Trump’s new protectionist initiatives have already sounded an alarm bell, as witnessed by the over 1,000 economists who have now written to him. For us in Britain, as politicians argue about the exact nature of our trade and investment policy as a  ‘third country’ outside the EU, we should remember that tariffs and quotas aimed to appease some political interests serve to make the world poorer.

Paul Lay: Military investment goes hand-in-hand with technological innovation

Peace dividends are superficially attractive. Which government would not wish to lavish greater sums of money rewarding its supporters and bribing its opponents?

When the Cold War came to an end – along with, as some suggested, history itself  – and before the eye-opening atrocities of 9/11, when Monica Lewinsky was the biggest thing in the news cycle, humanity appeared to be on course for verdant, postbellum uplands. But, as the historian David Edgerton suggested in his 2005 study Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970 and reiterates in his latest magisterial work, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, technological innovation and a well-funded fiscal-military state go hand in hand.

Part of the return, in addition to enhanced security, is prosperity. It is no surprise that the two most technologically innovative and advanced countries on Earth – the US and Israel – should also be ones who spend serious money on the military, the source of such transformational technologies as the internet. And China is advancing on that front, too, aided by an expanding, scientifically literate workforce. The parlous state of British investment in its armed forces and the apparatus that surrounds it is a far greater challenge to our future prosperity and security than Brexit.

Britain has been a major military and intelligence player for centuries. It should not stop being one when, all around us, we see growing uncertainty, fragmentation and instability. The era of the fiscal-military state is not over yet.

Allan Mallinson: There are limits to military force.

Tacitus’s famous “And where they make a desert, they call it peace” was not a bad warning that the sword has its limits. Insurgencies can be mitigated by strong military force, but force does no more than buy time, during which statesmen may employ other means to deal with the root causes of the trouble. Everyone seems to agree with this in theory, and yet, in practice, military force is too often the first recourse, and then politicians, bereft of ideas or will, come to believe that the military alone will achieve a result.

The problem of first resort to force is further exacerbated where that force is “stand-off” – that is (usually) airpower. The problem with airpower is that while it can be extraordinarily precise, the targeting of its air-delivered bombs and missiles – the product of intelligence gathering – is reliant on people on the ground. And people on the ground, unless they are your own, are ultimately not very reliable.

The other problem is that airpower looks impressive, a substantial contribution to the battle; aircraft are inherently awe-inspiring, as are explosions on the ground, whether monitored from the air or witnessed on the ground. The danger is that it can quickly seem sufficient.

Eliot Cohen: History teaches us nothing.

History has no lessons.  Context, yes, and indeed, if read widely and well, a kind of wisdom and insight into people, places, and events, but nothing directive. As Sir Hew Strachan once said to me, politicians want answers, and they some times hope that historians can provide them. But what historians can really provide is good questions. That should suffice.

Paul Lay 

Until recently, I had assumed that democracy in the UK was safe and assured. That now feels like a misperception and, for obvious reasons, a perilous one. Ultimately, democracy depends on those on both sides of the political divide – and in the UK, historically, we tend to view politics though a binary lens – being ready to lose. Yet, for the first time in my lifetime, intelligent, decent democrats, such as Lord (Andrew) Adonis and Professor A.C. Grayling, among others, are calling this consensus into question.

This is particularly ironic given the celebrations in the UK of the centenary of suffrage for (some) women and all men. The suggestion that a Brahmin class knows best argues against the general belief in the stress-tested wisdom of a British electorate, which rarely gets things wrong and remains supremely un-ideological.

It is worth recalling, though, some of the reasons women got the vote in the first place. Certain politicians argued that women, particularly those from the upper and middle classes who got the vote in 1918, would act as a counterweight to the socialist demands expected from the newly enfranchised male working classes. And they were right, so much so that all women were given the vote by a Conservative government a decade later. 

Cynicism is one thing, however. Nihilism, quite another.

Victoria Schofield

The idea that the United Nations ever had any mandatory authority to resolve the conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir is a dangerous one. For 70 years, the bogey of potential UN involvement has hung over the conflict between those two nuclear neighbours, India and Pakistan.

There are those (mainly in Pakistan) who support the UN’s involvement, believing that it has the authority to hold a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, there are those (mainly in India) who reject the UN’s involvement because they think it would force a referendum or plebiscite on the state, whose outcome might prove unacceptable to India’s national interest.

But both viewpoints are incorrect. The belief that the UN resolutions (passed in 1948 and 1949) which urged the holding of a plebiscite in order to confirm or negate the state’s temporary accession to India, had any mandatory authority, is misplaced. The resolutions were only ever recommendations which outlined certain measures that both countries should undertake before a plebiscite could be held. Once one or other government reneged on its commitments, the UN had no authority to force that country either to hold a plebiscite.

By misunderstanding the UN’s role, alternative avenues for resolution have been not been sufficiently explored. People in both countries have become frustrated and  attitudes have hardened; in such a volatile situation, the potential for another military confrontation remains – most probably  instigated by an act of terrorism using the unresolved dispute over Jammu and Kashmir as the pretext.

Allan Mallinson

The most troubling misperception for me is that the EU has been the both the builder and the guarantor of peace in Europe. 

In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution over six decades to “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”, and being instrumental in “transforming most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace”. The problem with the award’s parameters – the prize is meant for those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” – suggests that the EU’s contribution to peace has been greater than Nato’s. Indeed, that by not reducing its standing armies, Nato is itself endangering peace.

I have no difficulty with acknowledging the EU’s role in peacebuilding (a United Nations term), but the absolute guarantor has always been Nato. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more of [the members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…”, promising dire consequences for the perpetrator. To misunderstand this, wilfully or otherwise, is to exalt the EU to the point of hubris, and to denigrate Nato to the point of undermining Article 5 – which is precisely President Putin’s aim.

Eliot Cohen

So many misperceptions! The largest and most consequential though is the failure to accept contingency. It is difficult to study political or military history without concluding that things did not have to be the way they were. Commanders, diplomats, activists – all have their role to play, as does sheer accident. Abraham Lincoln stops a bullet in 1862 (and there were those trying to kill him) and the Civil War probably ends with two countries (at least) in what is now the United States. Halifax becomes Prime Minister in 1940, as he wished and Neville Chamberlain, not to mention the largest bloc in the Conservative Party, would have preferred, and it is difficult to believe that Britain would have avoided a peace treaty, or at least a substantial truce, with Nazi Germany.

There is a tendency in our age to think in structural terms about trends and underlying facts, and there is something to that. Particularly in democracies, crowds matter. All of us witness large phenomena – the spread of personal digital assistants, for example – that no one really can control. Big data is the absorbing interest of the moment. But it is still the case that particular people make a difference. A Kagame or an Erdogan are consequential people – a Trump, Putin, or Xi Jinping even more so.

And sometimes things blow up. There may have been structural preconditions for the so-called Arab Spring, but surely it mattered that a fruit seller in Tunis was so maddened by desperation and rage that he set himself on fire. There is a danger that we will forget just how contingent events can be. In this centennial of World War I, after all, it bears remembering that had Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided that one brush with an assassin was enough, and returned to his hotel in Sarajevo, the slaughter of millions might not have followed.

Tomorrow our History Jury will select the lessons of history that are being ignored to greatest cost.

Today they offer their view of the event from 2017 with longer-term greater-than-anticipated consequence… 

ELIOT COHEN: NORMALISATION OF TRUMP BY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Not an event, but a series of sounds: the creaking of bending knees among conservative (or nominally conservative) American intellectuals, pundits, and politicians making the case that Trump was not all that bad, when you come down to it…

A vulgarian and a loudmouth, perhaps, but look at the tax cuts!

The dismantling of irksome regulations!

The willingness to call out deadbeat European powers on their feeble defense spending!

And one might not like the way he did it, but he did point to real problems at home, to include unchecked immigration and outmoded infrastructure.

This matters because it indicates the way in which Trumpism, in some form, will survive Trump whether he serves three more years or seven, or is taken off by impeachment, a 25th Amendment process for removal by the Cabinet, or suffers the effect of too many snack buckets from KFC and Macdonald’s. This in turn means the loss of an intellectual centre for a Republican Party that once stood for some basic ideas, and opens up the prospect of conflict and renewal, in the realms of both ideas and action.

A collapse of character rarely is rarely a singular event but in a year in which Trump showed absolutely no alteration in his fundamental character, the fact that so many Republicans in and out of government were willing to accommodate themselves to him, was noteworthy. Luckily, the story will not end there.

PAUL LAY: CHINA IN AFRICA

If democracy is difficult, slow and neglectful of the long term, dictatorship has its challenges, too, though short-termism is rarely one of them. While historians and theologians argue over the introduction of a new project at Oxford University looking at the ethics of imperialism, the People’s Republic of China gets on with the real thing, especially in Africa, a continent of immense potential, mineral wealth, corrupt governance and poor infrastructure.

January 2017 saw a major event: the opening of a $4.2 billion railway line between Djibouti and Addis Ababa, replacing a 19th-century French railway. It’s the East African section of China’s trillion dollar One Belt Road – a 21st-century Silk Road, crossing and connecting huge swathes of the developing world – which will eventually reach Rwanda (where it will replace Britain’s 19th-century ‘Lunatic Line’). The potential for trade is enormous, but increasingly there is a cultural aspect, too. This new Scramble for Africa is, by and large, welcomed by states that have found western aid too prescriptive in its demands.

China now has more diplomatic missions in Africa than the US and has a greater number of peacekeepers on the continent than any of the UN’s Big Five. A hard power is finally cultivating its soft skills, as it continues its global ascent.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: ‘RUSSIA-GATE’

The appointment in May 2017 of former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, as special counsel to the Justice Department enquiry into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 American Presidential election initially appeared to be an attempt to let the enquiry take its course away  from the media spotlight. The circumstances were similar to the appointment in 1973 of former Solicitor General, Archibald Cox, as special counsel to investigate the Watergate Hotel break-in.

But several indictments against Trump campaign advisers and members of his transition team have since indicated that Mueller’s probe is close  to penetrating the Trump administration itself. Indicative of how seriously Mueller’s investigation is now being taken was the unprecedented revelation in December by the White House (and confirmed by Vladimir Putin) that the US administration had shared intelligence with the Russians, thereby preventing a planned terrorist attack in St Petersburg.

In the event that the investigation implicates the White House leading to calls for Trump’s impeachment, a plausible explanation might then be mounted, suggesting that any contact with Russian agents was part of the new administration’s policy initiatives for greater intelligence sharing in the war against terrorism, rather than being a covert attempt to enlist the help of a foreign country to thwart the outcome of the Presidential election.

The parallels with the early stages of Watergate are unmistakable. The sequel could be as historic.

ALLAN MALLINSON: PRESIDENT MACRON

The election of President Macron – but in a perverse sense. His international profile is high, but largely by default. Mrs Merkel is distracted by Germany’s internal divisions; Mrs May by Brexit; and President Trump by himself. Some are saying therefore that Macron will become the de facto leader of the free world. There are several problems with such a leadership bid.

• First, reputation counts; and France has no record of leadership worth the name.
• Secondly, although young and telegenic in a country that rates these things, and although he has had one or two technocratic successes since being elected (especially trades union reform), he is not tackling “L´éléphant dans la chambre”: the question of national identity and Islamism. François Heisbourg, former presidential adviser on national security issues to both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, has said recently “This is one where people are asking the question, ‘When is he going to speak?’ He will not be able to keep silent forever. It’s one of the deepest divisions in the public debate that I’ve seen in a very long time, and it’s very ugly.”

It wasn’t ugly enough for Marine Le Pen to be elected, but it certainly is for Sarkozy to make a comeback. Sarkozy back at the Elysée, chastened but experienced, and doubly determined, would mean the ditching of Euro-defence pretensions, a strengthening of Nato, and root and branch reform of the EU.

Perhaps more a prayer than a prediction, but a fervent one nevertheless.

***

UnHerd also has our Politics Jury (reconvening for a second set of deliberations soon!).

Tomorrow the jury will reassemble to answer the question, “What “event” of 2017 will in the long-run prove far MORE consequential than currently supposed; and why?” (Added: Here are their answers).

ELIOT COHEN: TRUMP’S JERUSALEM DECISION

President Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital produced the expected quotient of gasps, head-shaking, and finger-waving from the establishment. Even for those of us who loathe the man and are inclined to oppose anything he does simply because he does it, it has already turned out to be a forgettable moment. In so doing it is a reminder that is only when an absurd policy collapses that we can see just how silly it was all along.

Behind the unwillingness to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital lay not the unresolved issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace and sovereignty over territories occupied and administered by Jordan until the Six Day War in 1967. Rather, it originated in the original, and very dead, partition plan of 1947 which proposed an international status for the Holy City. Since Israel’s parliament, foreign ministry and prime minister’s office are all in the western part of the city – which everyone assumes will stay Israeli no matter what – the policy was senseless.

Indeed, what was striking was just how indifferent Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi (among other Arab capitals) were to what happened to Jerusalem. Perhaps what was important, though not consequential, was the manifestation of a simple reality: other conflicts and developments in the Middle East matter a lot more than whether external powers recognise a seventy year old fact.

PAUL LAY: BREXIT

Brexit will be of less consequence than one might expect from Britain’s obsessive media coverage, made worse by the Manichaean world of social media, where recriminatory wishful thinking marks the extremes on both sides. The UK and the 27 EU nations are friends, allies and – most importantly –trading partners, and will remain so.

The negotiations will be fraught, even unpleasant on occasion – that is democratic politics – but both sides have a fundamental interest in reaching a relatively amicable and reasonable solution. Once that is achieved, one hopes that the UK will finally address its deep-rooted problems: a poor technical education system and a crass public sphere. Similarly, the EU should concentrate on the challenges of immigration and the rise of far-right ideologies among the Vysegrad countries (and, to a lesser extent, in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). Germany faces an existential challenge, too: how does it transform itself – urgently – from a manufacturing powerhouse of hardware into one fit for the Fourth Revolution? It is a long way behind Silicon Valley, Israel and the other software pioneers, and it is not helped by the instability following Merkel’s unmasking.

If anyone will be harmed by Brexit, it is most likely to be the Republic of Ireland, though even that, in the long term, may result in a united island, which will be largely welcomed in Britain, but create anxieties, not least economic ones, in Ireland. Those six counties are expensive.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: MUGABE’S ‘END’

The fall of President Robert Mugabe will prove less momentous for the twenty million Zimbabweans (including four million exiles living in South Africa and the UK ) than at first anticipated.

For decades Africa watchers have lamented the iron hold which the 93-year old Mugabe retained on Zimbabwe since independence in 1980; supported by the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), he ran the country as a one-party state.  When news  broke in November 2017 of his forced retirement, brokered by the same military who had sustained his authority,  Zimbabwean politics appeared to be at a turning-point. There were high expectations that the people could look forward to a more democratic form of government, with checks and balances on presidential authority and a more harmonious relationship with the minority white population. The symbolic return of the  Zimbabwean white farmer, Robert Smart, one of several  thousand evicted from their lands during the Mugabe regime,  was indicative of a more benign approach.

But it now appears that the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who also depends on the support of the ZNA, will replace one style of dictatorial rule by another (Presidential ‘elections’ next September notwithstanding). There is to be no truth and reconciliation and no accountability for Mugabe’s excesses. Instead while the former President enjoys a generous retirement package at state expense, the same autocracy, nepotism and human rights abuses will continue.

ALLAN MALLINSON: NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

A historian’s business is the past, not the future. That said, if journalism is the first rough draft of history, it’s perhaps legitimate to comment on how that draft is written.

“In the long-run we’re all dead” (Keynes), but let’s define the long-run as the next ten years. And in that time, despite the advances in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear weapons technology (specifically, miniaturisation of a nuclear detonator) this year, and testing of an “intercontinental” ballistic missile, I do not believe, as some fear, we shall see war on the Korean Peninsula. (I’d prefer to say “should not”, but the question to the jury isn’t phrased in the conditional).

Here’s why I don’t envisage a war. First, it’s not in China’s and Russia’s interests that the DPRK develops a credible capability, since that would change respective relationships with the DPRK to their disadvantage. Equally, it’s not in their interests that the US resorts to arms to prevent the DPRK developing that capability, for besides the law of unintended consequences, it would mean the ultra-long-term intrusion of the US into East Asia, and the border of an enlarged Republic of Korea on the Yalu River.

Above all, war isn’t in the DPRK’s – and specifically Kim Jong-un’s – interests. The DPRK’s forces are equipped and trained for conventional, not guerrilla, warfare, and would be as roundly defeated as were Saddam’s in the Gulf War. (And I do not think that, given the purpose for which the US would go to war, the US would shrink from using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary). Kim is not irrational. His nuclear programme is almost certainly based on the same logic as Nato’s during the Cold War: if conventional forces are too expensive, rely on nuclear. He has a growing middle class, and the universal vice – or virtue – of the middle class is materialism. Kim’s long-term aim is regime survival. He will probably not have much Latin, but he will know the import of “Sic semper tyrannis.” Certainly, friends in China will be able to tell him about the fall of the unassailable Robert Mugabe after Zimbabwe’s General Chiwenga visited Beijing for “consultations.”

I don’t rule out pre-emptive strikes, or some very nasty surrogate bloodletting, but regional war? No.