"The Strong Do What They Can and the Weak Suffer What They Must."
A Deep Dive into the End of Post-WWII Moral Internationalism and a Revival of the 2,500-Year-Old Melian Dialogue
There are some timeless truths that never change no matter how hard we try to bury them. They may be forgotten or ignored — for a while — but it is only ever a matter of time until events bring them back into focus, much to the surprise of everyone who thought that the current political, economic, or social order had somehow managed to tame the self-serving brutality of history.
In the 19th century, Germans coined a term for politics based purely on pragmatic calculations rather than on moral or ideological considerations — realpolitik. Perhaps the most famous example of realpolitik in action comes from Chancellor Otto von Bismark’s ruthless 19th-century campaign of using “blood and iron” (military force) and economic pressure (customs unions) to unite all German-speaking lands under Prussian leadership — by any means necessary — in order to achieve his goal of establishing the German Empire.
At the core of realpolitik is the timeless rule that a nation's strength and its ability to impose its will are the ultimate determinants of legitimacy in international affairs (a.k.a. “might makes right”). Since the dawn of time, national interests have always trumped all other considerations. To quote ancient Greek historian Thucydides, writing in the 5th century BC in the context of the infamous war between Athens and Sparta, “The question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength. Outside of that, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The post-WWII era emerged as a giant experiment to try to replace realpolitik with a kinder, fairer, more moral world order — it was an effort to impose classical liberal moral principles onto the interactions between nations by entangling Western Civilization in a maze of treaties, alliances, and international institutions designed to restrain the endless wars, exploitation, plunder, and bullying that stronger nations have always imposed on the weak.
But despite the lofty rhetoric and high-minded moral intentions, this new coalition of liberal-minded nations failed to bring about an end to history.
It was always a pipe dream to think that national interests could be subordinated to post-WWII morality — predictably, that era is now unravelling as all those post-WWII institutions, treaties, and alliances crumble beneath mountains of corruption and (above all) because in reality every member-state, big and small alike, never stopped working to selfishly manipulate and exploit all those institutions, treaties, and alliances for their own national interests. Beneath the lipstick, a pig is still a pig.
In many ways, much like the failed communist experiment that defined life on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the 20th century, the whole progressive post-WWII experiment in moral international collaboration was just as utopian and ideologically-driven as any other social engineering experiment that relies on everyone “doing their part” and setting aside their own self-serving interests for the “collective good”.
Here’s the problem:
Who gets to define the collective good for a community of nations?
Who gets to decide whose national interests should be sacrificed for the benefit of others?
Where will you find the angels who won’t take advantage of their power and influence if they are put in charge of these international institutions?
How do you prevent morality itself from being weaponized by the weak to pray on the strong as everyone gets entangled in all these international alliances and treaties?
And once you build this moral international order, which nation do you trust with the policeman’s big stick that’s required to enforce the rules?
As a side note: we know from chimpanzee studies that a coalition of betas that manages to overthrow an alpha can often produce a reign of terror that is far more lethal, more prone to group violence, and more unpredictable and destabilizing to entire communities than the direct, predictable, and contained aggression of an alpha.
The institutions of this new order, like NATO, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Panel on Climate Change, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the experimental project known as “the European Union”, and so on were all artificial constructs designed to watch over this giant post-WWII experiment that was supposed to foster morally-principled international collaboration to bring an end to the brutal realpolitik of history — these were the proto-institutions and treaties for a kind of World Government designed to impose morality and enforce limits onto the interactions between nations.
In effect, these international entanglements were meant to create a kind of scaled up version of the American Republic, which had created a Constitution founded on classical liberal moral principles to regulate the interactions between self-serving individuals — only instead of watching over individuals, these post-WWII international institutions, treaties, and alliances were meant to watch over the affairs of entire nations. A government for governments.
The earliest roots of this vision for this new era of moral international liberalism, founded on the principles of national self-determination, collective security, open borders, free trade, and humanitarian interventionism, extend all the way back to 18th-century intellectuals like German philosopher Immanuel Kant (and his book Perpetual Peace), but the modern incarnation of those ideas really only crystalized into a foreign policy framework thanks to the advocacy of President Woodrow Wilson and his progressive peers in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Even the defunct League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations, which existed between the two World Wars) emerged from his advocacy, although ironically America never joined the League of Nations because both Wilson’s opponents in Congress and his presidential successors feared that membership in the League might undermine America’s unilateral freedom to defend its own national interests — even they recognized that entangling America in any alliance with a coalition of other nations could quickly prove fatal to America itself.
A little context is needed to set the stage for the next part of this discussion: in 1787, the American Constitution created the world’s first blueprint for an inspirational government founded on classical liberal principles in which every single individual citizen has equal rights, equality before the law, individual autonomy, and natural rights (notice the similarity to how most people think about nation-states today, regardless of whether they are weak or strong). In theory, if not in always in practice, every single citizen living under the American Constitution has the moral right to chart their own course within the protective envelope of this decentralized republic.
But what sets the American “republic of individuals” apart from the “coalition of nations” of the post-WWII era is that the American Republic works because there’s a powerful watchman watching over it with a monopoly on violence to enforce the rules. Individual sovereignty inside the Republic depends entirely on the policeman’s gun and the hammer of justice to protect individual liberty from the would-be tyrants and wannabe warlords lurking within society, just as it requires the watchful eye of the US military to defend the Republic as a whole against hostile or predatory foreign forces lurking on the outside. Without a nightwatch, no-one sleeps in peace for long.
But when we try to scale those lofty ideals up from individuals onto a coalition of nations, as Western nations tried to do during the post-WWII era, the scheme quickly falls apart because there’s no 800-lb gorilla more powerful than all the rest looming over all the self-serving member nations to make sure they all play by the same rules.
At least, there wasn’t until 1945.
With all of Europe reduced to ashes after the Second World War and with no other Western nation strong enough to challenge America on this side of the Iron Curtain, for a brief moment in history one of the member nations of the “international community” loomed so large over all the others that an 800-lb gorilla did seem to exist as the watchman to keep everyone else west of the Berlin Wall in line.
And so, Western leaders and intellectuals set about trying to build a maze of treaties, alliances, and international organizations to try to tame the self-serving and exploitative instincts of nations — a system that was wholly dependent on the goodwill of the American superpower to serve as the watchman to cement it all in place.
But just as WWI failed to live up to the liberal fantasy that it would be the War to End all Wars, this American-led post-WWII experiment in moral internationalism was equally doomed in its utopian ambition to bring about an end to history. A rather ironic anecdote from history is that in 1917 Woodrow Wilson even explicitly asked Congress to allow him to lead America into the “war to end all wars” to “make the world safe for democracy”.
Because, as the old saying goes, who watches the watchman?
America wasn’t just the watchman for this new global order, it was also an active participant in that international system with its own self-serving national interests and hidden agendas. No-one can serve two masters — when push came to shove, America served itself. This idea hardly requires an explanation — we all know what Wall Street, neo-cons, and the military industrial complex have been up to over the past century, and how they have abused and exploited the financial architecture, treaties, institutions, and alliances of the post-WWII era in pursuit of America’s national interests.
But the blame cuts both ways in equal measure. The weaker nations living under this American-led umbrella were equally ruthless in their efforts to exploit the American-led post-WWII order for their own benefit. And, like in the aforementioned primate studies, by entangling America in the coalition, the betas gained the power to begin leveraging those alliances, institutions, and treaties as a way to undermine the alpha on the throne.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently declared that “the post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us”, he is not wrong.
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