The White Man's Burden, Part II: “Honor The Threat”
The real world, it is often said, is not tidy. It would do much better if reality were more like fiction, when enemies took their turns in threatening us and waited patiently in line. One threat would be defeated, and a decent interval would pass before the next would arise.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t tend to happen. Threats rise and fall on their own, and the overlap between them tends to lead to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” evolving into “defeating today’s foe by creating tomorrow’s.”
During the 30’s and 40’s, three strains of totalitarianism arose around the world to threaten the democracies. Imperialism in Japan, Fascism in central Europe, and Communism in the Soviet Union all vied for supremacy. Eventually two allied and sought to prevail against all comers, then the third joined. Shortly thereafter, the
Fascists turned on and attacked the Communists. The Western democracies saw the Fascist/Imperialist axis as the greater threat, and chose to ally with and bolster the Communists for sheer survival. That led to the eventual defeat of the Fascists and the Imperialists, but led to over 40 years of the Cold War and sentencing a large portion of the world to suffer under the Communist yoke.
During the Cold War, we once again found ourselves with allies of convenience, as we backed some truly unsavory governments and factions against the Soviets’ puppets and client states. Among those whose flaws we chose to overlook were the Islamists, as we on several occasions backed them in opposition to the Communists. It was, like our alliance with Stalin, a matter of choosing to oppose the very real threat today and accepting the risks of creating another threat for tomorrow.
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Part I can be found here.
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