The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Tuchman on America, WWI and Beyond

Tuchman on America, WWI and Beyond

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, February 22 2009, 22:20:42 (CET)
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When America was finally drawn into World War I it marked the end of one era in foreign relations, Isolationism, and the beginning of what we’re suffering from now...sort of in everyone’s face.

“ In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed. America came to the end of innocence, and the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence. That screen too must fall.

Where once we saw ourselves self-contained and free to stand apart, we now see ourselves as if endowed with some mission to organize the world in our image. Militarily we could knock out Hanoi (written in 1967, mine), and doubtless Peking too, tomorrow, but we cannot raise a clean new democracy on nuclear ashes. Whatever our material or political power, it is not enough for omnipotence. We cannot mold the non-Western world to our desire nor require its acceptance of our concepts of political freedom and representative government. It is too late in history to export to the nations of Asia and Africa with unschooled and undernourished populations in the hundreds of millions the democracy that evolved in the West over a thousand years of slow, small-scale experience from the Saxon village moot to the Bill of Rights. They have not had time to learn it and history is not going to give them time. Meanwhile we live on the same globe. The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.”

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