Rutland
Herald and Montpelier (Barre) Times Argus
Sunday
August 31st, 2014
President
Barack Obama could bring together elements of both the left and the right in
this country, if he did something he may be contemplating – namely - at least
tacitly making common cause with the brutal dictator Syrian President Bashar
Assad against the even more brutal militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria. (ISIS)
At
first blush that sounds pretty bad. But before jumping off the deep end in
righteous indignation, I have been musing about lessons of history that may
apply to understanding shifting alliances.
As
the popular 19th century Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, put it to the British
House of Commons,
“We
have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are
eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” In those
days those interests were whatever was good for Britain and the British
Empire.
However
amoral and cold blooded this may seem, let me remind you of a time when the
United States and Britain set morality and ideology aside and became allies with
one of modern history’s greatest mass murders - the Soviet Union’s dictator
Joseph Stalin - because that was the only way to win World War
Two.
At the time Britain had a particular reason to
despise Stalin. On August 31st, 1939 -just one week before WWII would
begin - Stalin signed a non-aggression
pact with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In a secret part of the deal the two
agreed to divvy up Poland, the Baltic States and much of Eastern Europe. But the
pact’s importance for the British and French was that Hitler was now free to
wage war against Western Europe, without having to worry about his eastern
front. As the Low Countries and France quickly fell and London was soon to be
laid waste by the German Luftwaffe in the 1940 Battle of Britain, Stalin was
considered an evil co-conspirator with Hitler. But that was about to
change.
On
June 22nd 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In Operation
Barbarossa, described as the largest invasion in the history of warfare, about
four million troops along an 1800 mile front swept into the Soviet Union
For
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British people this was a great relief
as it apparently meant that Hitler had given up on plans to invade Britain.
Throughout the 1930’s Churchill been outspokenly anti- Soviet. But when he got
wind of Barbarossa, he said to his personal secretary John Colville,
“If
Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in
the House of Commons.”
The
United States was no friend of Moscow either. But when America entered the war
six months later, it did so as a de-facto ally and major arms supplier of the
Soviet Union. By February 1945 at the Yalta Summit, Churchill and President
Franklin Roosevelt were competing for Stalin’s favor. Churchill wanted to be
sure the Soviets stayed in the war in Europe until Hitler was defeated. And
Roosevelt got Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan, although that
would become unnecessary once the atomic bomb was successfully tested.
Still,
there is no doubt that as far as the war in Europe was concerned, the alliance
with Russia paid off. As Churchill told his people, “It is the Russian Armies
who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German Army.”
The
second major instance when strategic interests trumped morality was the American
effort to reverse more than two decades of hostile relations with the People’s
Republic of China. In sheer numbers of victims, Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong
probably out-did Stalin as a mass murderer by several million. But at the height
of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry
Kissinger calculated that a broad range of American interests would be served,
especially security interests, if America could normalize relations with this
increasingly powerful Asian giant.
In
his book, The White House Years, former Secretary of State Kissinger wrote. “For
twenty years, U.S. policy makers had considered China as a brooding, chaotic,
fanatical and alien realm difficult to comprehend and impossible to sway…..These
twenty years of gridlock had blinded our experts, and no doubt their opposite
numbers in the People’s Republic, to a vital change; an emerging, still only
dimly perceived community of interest between the United States and
China.”
In
February 1970, Kissinger discussed with Nixon, themes of a secret message to be
conveyed to the Chinese. It would say that the U.S. wanted to send an emissary
to Peking… “that we wanted to make a fresh start- that we would not participate
in a Soviet-American condominium (against China), that we would proceed not on
the basis of ideology, but on an assessment of mutual
interests.”
After
eventually getting a positive response from China, Kissinger wrote, “Only
extraordinary concerns about Soviet purpose could explain the Chinese wish to
sit down with a nation heretofore vilified as the archenemy….what the Chinese
really wanted to discuss was the global balance of power.”
In
February 1972, hardline, anti-communist President Richard Nixon made his
historic trip to China. The “mutual interests” that brought the two countries
together were their concerns about the Soviet Union. Those worries were
alleviated by the visit and the negotiations that ultimately led to full
normalization of relations.
Whatever
further action President Obama may propose in dealing with ISIS militants, it is
certainly not in Syria President Assad’s interests for ISIS to be successful. So
he has that shared interest with numerous countries including America. No public
agreements need be made. Tacit understandings might be reached- for instance
that Assad’s sophisticated air defenses wouldn’t shoot at U.S. planes if they
were attacking ISIS bases inside Syria.
Such
attacks might help Assad militarily. But that should not preclude U.S. action in
Syria. Today ISIS is by far the greater threat to the interests of America and
the region.
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