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.
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).
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
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).
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.
Or in today’s terminology: a “vibe shift.”
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
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.
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.
————————————————————-
Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found the ideas explored in this piece interesting, you might also enjoy In addition to the pieces written linked to above, check out “Republican Debates on China,” “You Do Not Have the People,” “Wanted: A Stupid-Proof Strategy for America,” “Culture Wars are Long Wars,” and “As the Generations Churn.”
—————————————————————-
Commenting here so that all the sidenotes can be fully seen.
.
Commenting to get notifications
“functionaries hardened their necks”
ITYM “hardened their hearts and stiffened their necks”. 😉
“But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward. Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them: Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck: they did worse than their fathers.
Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them; but they will not hearken to thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they will not answer thee.
But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth. Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.”
–Jeremiah 7:24-29 (KJV)
Oh can’t wait for II and III. Former democrat, and I haven’t been more excited since the first few months of Obama. (Which quickly faded as it turned into same old, same old.)
Do Europeans even want American hegemony? I have some sympathy to them not wanting to sustain even minimal militaries, because any buildup is presupposed on them playing a subordinate role in U.S. ambitions.
Beyond that, can they even afford to revitalize NATO the way the U.S. wants? Their populations are greying and their economies aren’t doing hot. Them letting NATO slip away doesn’t seem much different from the comments I sometimes see about U.S. debt — that if the day comes when Washington has to choose between entitlements and defense spending, they’ll chose entitlements hands down.
That is an odd way of putting it. The Europeans certainly don’t want to be dictated to by the U.S., but they generally default to the U.S. in military matters because they don’t have capable militaries.
In both Libya and Yugoslavia, the U.S. did not want to get involved. But in both cases the U.S. seems to have gotten involved just to avoid complete embarrassment of NATO. The Europeans attacked Libya on their own, and start running out of bombs within weeks. The Germans promise Lithuania tank battalions that have not tanks.
The biggest advantage most allies give the United States is forward basing. It greatly decreases deployment costs. But if the U.S. starts loosing interest in defending the post-WW2 consensus that advantage goes up in smoke.
But you still have the US commitment to keeping open the flow of world oil: even if it is currently taking a strange turn. The U.S., with the Suez Crises, greatly undermined Europe’s ability to do that for themselves. But it’s not as if Britain/France have really worked to reimpose their naval strength since 1956.
The Europeans rode the U.S. Hegemony to relative prosperity and relevance. They benefit from the dynamics of the modern imperial-economic system even if they aren’t usually the enforcers. Do they want that to go away? Do they want to pay for an alternative? What will they look like without it?
I’ve been saying for years that Europe’s decision to rely so much on the United States for its security was rash. The US is a long ways away, and when we talk a big talk about protecting a continent that isn’t really critical to our interests, people like Vladimir Putin will think about whether we’re bluffing. In the case of Ukraine (whose sovereignty the US, UK, and Russia all promised to protect in exchange for its dismantling its nuclear weapons in the 1990s) Putin was right. (The United States’ betrayal of Taiwan by terminating the mutual defense treaty in 1979 – even after Taiwan had signed the NNPT to appease the US – is also qn important cautionary tale. The Americans are far away; if they have little to gain and much to lose by protecting you, then don’t expect them to protect you.)
I was happy about JD Vance’s speech at Munich, and I wrote a commentary on it at my own substack: https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/jd-vance-tells-it-like-it-is-at-munich
Europeans are being forced to realize that America (1) isn’t going to put up with their freeloading forever, and (2) considers things like free speech and not canceling elections to be important when deciding which foreign countries are its allies. And the sooner they come to terms with that, the better.
Europe isn’t worth the candle. Better the Russians take over than the Muslims. In my fever dreams I see an America, reclaiming all unexplainable wealth, starting with the politicians, and putting it into a fund dedicated to benefiting, first this hemisphere, later others. America First, from the Tierra del Fuego to the Northern Passage. Sifting illegal immigrants into those who deserve to stay, those who deserve to be sent home, and those who deserve a long jail term. Rinse and repeat. If Trump deserves a third term, amend the Constitution. Let economic and trade war replace kinetic war.
I was always under the impression that there was an explicit social contract between the US and Europe and that it stated « we’ll handle your Defense matters » in exchange of which you will spend the entirety of your (smaller) military budget on US equipment, you will be culturally subjugated and you will feed our tech industry by adding the extra doubling of numbers necessary for the network effects to conquer the rest of the world, you will have no geopolitical independent course of action”. In exchange Europeans got a generous social security system. I always thought that the US got the better end of the deal. Does the US realize that in the end this will also force Europe to end its reliance on US tech ?
Precisely because Trump 2.0 is prosecuting the cultural-class war with such institutional fervour, he is proving highly disruptive of the “rules based international order”. An order that had too many rules not grounded in the consent of citizens and not enough order protecting the interests of citizens. It is an order that had becoming increasingly used to prosecute a multi-faceted professional-managerial class war against local working classes: via local-community-disrupting migration; via devaluing of received heritage; via trade and interest rate/monetary policies that elevated efficiency over resilience and drove up income inequality; via coordinated attempts to control discourse; via use of international organisations to do end-runs around local votes.
In particular, the use of de-banking as an instrument of industrial policy by the Biden Administration enraged many of the tech-bros and drove them onto the Trump train. Trump is highly disruptive, but the alleged guardians of the Western maritime order pissed away trust in their judgement. If they won’t enforce their own borders, why should folk sacrifice to protect someone else’s?