The Euro-American Split (I): Dread Possibility
First Comments on a New World
Ancient, effortless, ordered, cycle on cycle set,
Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget
It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with the deep.
Men, not gods, devised it. Men, not gods, must keep.
—RUDYARD KIPLING
THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room for high drama: The decisive round of a boxing match draws the eye despite the fact—or perhaps because—the boxers play an antique game. In such times and climes, victory means mastery of existing modes, not the invention of new ones.
But nothing human is everlasting. Always there comes a day when spectators search for better games and settlers seek out fresher pastures. That day of change arrives with much confusion and fanfare. Sons dishonor their fathers. Daughters rise against their mothers. Ancestral ideals are cast aside, and possibility staggers forth from its long captivity, ready to wreak vengeance on mankind.
Fourteen years ago, Robert Michael Gates foresaw such a day. To the ministers and officers of the North Atlantic he spoke, and gave this warning:
With respect to Europe, for the better part of six decades there has been relatively little doubt or debate in the United States about the value and necessity of the transatlantic alliance. The benefits of a Europe whole, prosperous and free after being twice devastated by wars requiring American intervention was self-evident….
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.
Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.1
To these words Europe did not incline its ears. In Brussels, functionaries hardened their necks and followed their own counsels. Now they stand astonished, wishing they had hearkened when time still allowed, aghast to find their generation rejected and forsaken.
This theme of generations is key to Gates’s prophecy. For individual souls, emotional commitments and moral values change glacially: men and women orient themselves around ideas they collect in their youth. Absent terrible shock they stick with their chosen truths for as long as they live. This is a biological reality. Individuals are sticky things.2
Individuals are also mortal. Thus the staccato tempo of most social change.3 Like freshets held fast by glacial dam, the young are ever churning. The traveler does not see the bubbling streams hidden beneath sheets of ancient ice. They see only a wintery wall, frozen and imposing. Appearances deceive: under the pressure of the swelling melt the ice-wall is waning. Soon it will thin an inch too far. Then the young, no longer so young, will have the demographic weight needed to engulf their fathers. The glacier breaks and the old world is swept away.
Which is all to say: Cultures do not change when people replace their old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones. (Many great happenings in human history are decided by such forces—see this essay and this essay for a more detailed explication.)
Donald Trump’s first administration dwelt in the “shadow of the boomers.” That shadow is banished. Trump’s second administration is led by men never tempered by the twilight struggle. They were schooled instead by housing bubbles and forever wars.4 Those events did little to kindle in their hearts the faith of their fathers.
As Robert Gates feared, so it has come to pass. A new generation now questions whether the boons of NATO are worth their cost.5
That is not all this generation questions. Many self-evident truths are now contested propositions. The Overton window has been flung open. A new world is being built—but its shape and form have yet to be determined.
What does this mean for you, the ambitious or alarmed, who seek to influence the course of American diplomacy?
Only this: Build no arguments on unsure foundations. Do not resort to presuppositions long agreed on. The time has come to reason your case from first principles.
There will be a temptation not to argue at all. Do not yield to it. The truth is that this new administration is deeply divided; the right has a clear sense of what it wishes to tear down, but no consensus on what it hopes to build in its place.There are great blank spaces in the right’s imagination, and a thousand fuzzy images in need of shading and detail. This administration is only one month into office. Most of its personnel have not yet been hired. Most of the big debates have not yet been had. Few proposals have been made, much less heard. There is ample room to sway this administration one way or another—but only if you start at the proper place.
It is no longer sufficient to argue that NATO, or a free Taiwan, or any of ten thousand other things, are good because they buttress American hegemony. That presupposes American hegemony is a thing worth preserving in the first place—a presupposition not shared by all in power. Our arguments must strike deeper. These are days of dread possibility. Victory will not be had without contesting fundamentals.
Parts II and III soon to come.
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Robert Gates, “Reflections on the status and future of the transatlantic alliance,” speech given Brussels, Belgium, Friday, June 10, 2011. Emphasis added. See also his December 15 addendum:
“The main purpose of the Brussels speech, and the main message I wanted to send to our European friends, was to convey this warning: that a generation of senior American policymakers that have been the strongest defenders of the Atlantic Alliance are departing or have departed from positions of responsibility in Washington. Henry Kissinger, Zbig Brzezinski, the late Larry Eagleburger, Jim Jones, myself, and of course Brent. We were all to one degree or another influenced by our formative experience during the Cold War…. The politicians and policymakers that will follow us, frankly, will not have the same historical, personal, and indeed emotional, tie to Europe, and may not consider the return on America’s investment in Europe’s defense worth the cost. And that would be a tragedy.”
Jorge Benitez, “Gates renews warning of dim and dismal future for NATO,” Atlantic Council (15 December 2011).
Stephen Vaisey and Omar Lizardo, “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change,” Socius 2 (1 January, 2016). For my commentary on this study see Tanner Greer, “Culture Wars are Long Wars,” The Scholar’s Stage (3 July 2021).
Or in today’s terminology: a “vibe shift.”
Consider Trump’s most important security and foreign policy picks. The only cabinet members older than 60 who have a foreign policy portfolio are Susie Wiles, Howard Lutnick, and Scott Bessent. John Ratcliffe and Pam Bondi are 59; Michael Walz is 54; Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio are 53; Pete Hegsgeth, Kash Patel, and Jamieson Greer are 44; Tulsi Gabbard is 43; and Elise Stefanik is 40 (if you suspect Elon Musk and Russ Vought will play an important role in defense budgeting in the future—I certainly do—then note that their ages are 53 and 48).
Most of the important second rank staff—men like Alex Wong (44), Michael Needham (43), Michael Anton (56), Elbridge Colby (45)—are of this same generation. Stephen Feinberg (64) is an important exception.
If true of the senior staff, all the more so for the junior. These are bastard offspring of the lockdowns, too young to remember the road to Baghdad, much less the Berlin Wall.
This is beautiful. Who knew that a lyrical meditation on generational change could be the vehicle to discuss contemporary foreign policy! The interesting question may be not why these massive shifts are occurring, but why a system built to wage the Cold War, which ended a third of century ago, continued under its own momentum for so long. A big rethink of America’s role in the world should have occurred during the first Clinton administration, but instead the supposed “global hegemon” just lurched, reactively, from crisis to crisis, decade after decade. When it finally settled on a new alternative mission, it was to plant rainbow flags in desperately poor places that didn’t want them. The victorious Taliban painting over the George Floyd mural in Kabul captures the vacuity and incompetence of the current elite. The institutions decayed into bureaucratic stasis, and the quality of the elites that managed them decayed even more. Your call to the rising generation of policy makers and officials is worthwhile, and I hope that their thinking will be more deeply historically informed, and less shaped by contemporary ideological deformations. Eager to read the second and third installments.
As one of the mentioned “bastard children of the lockdowns” (perhaps older by a few years), the possibility space excites and scares me in equal measure.
I am *not* ready to lead, or to provide real scaffolding for what comes next. And yet I question the old presuppositions anyway. I hope I learn quickly enough to be of value…and I fear not enough people know enough to be of value themselves.