If we’re doomed to repeat history because people don’t remember it, those of us with some sense of the ebb and flow of human behavior can at least have a front row seat to what happens.
I thought of this while reading about developments in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A Saudi human rights activist has just been sentenced to a 10 year jail term for criticizing the government (such as it is) there. Put bluntly, this is not the behavior of a regime at ease with its own power. However, it does point to a worrying future even for those of us not subject to the arbitrary whims of feudalism in action. The reason is that Saudi Arabia matters to us here in the US, and if we don’t take care we can find ourselves once more pulled into events abroad in which we have no influence, or worse, where our actions are purely reactionary, as we try to make sense of events, governments and individuals of whom we are ignorant.
A reductionist view of America’s interventions abroad and their causes might go something like this: Once we had become a strong power, around 1900, we set about serving our industry by becoming a power believing in free trade and the propagation of “American values”. This idealistic strain motivated our participation in the Spanish-American war, at least partially. However, while we were flexing our newfound military powers very different factors were motivating actors in other nations. Primarily, thus came down to the incestuous and fragmented relationship between the powers of the old world. While France had veered between Republicanism and the ancient ways and Great Britain had evolved a democratic form of government while retaining their royalist trappings, Germany and Russia both had hereditary leaders who were fundamentally unsuited to governance. The intersection of these two on history’s stage shows why genetic inheritance is a terrible way to choose who gets to be in charge. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was fundamentally flawed as a human being, let alone to be the head of Europe’s newest and strongest power, veering as he did between unjustified confidence and deep despair. He also had an extremely unhealthy personal identification of the state with himself. For one thing he felt on a personal level that Germany ought to have a navy fit to challenge that of Great Britain, with whose royal house, he was related. His determination to pursue this goal, despite any genuine geostrategic reason for it, ignited an arms race in Europe which drew away resources that could have been used for far better ends. Why did he do this? One could go back a few decades to his relationship with the one individual who actually had created the modern German state, Otto von Bismarck. While a nobleman, Bismarck was above all else a pragmatic, hardheaded realist. Arguments of divine guidance from on high held absolutely no water with him. Whatever one may think of his politics now, over a century removed, he both created the modern German state, and diffused the dislocative process of urbanization which threatened the social order by the introduction of what we now know as public health care and welfare. Hardly the actions of a purblind reactionary. However, there was only one Bismarck, and when the Kaiser forced him from power, there was no counterweight to Wilhelm’s own guidance. As noted, this was based on his own view of himself as the personification of martial teutonic virtue. Perhaps in compensation for the fact that he had, in fact, no direct military experience, he was extremely aggressive in advocating military solutions to “problems”, such as Germany’s need for a “place in the sun” alongside other colonial powers, which were primarily diplomatic in nature. As noted, his stubborn and somewhat childish, desire for a big German navy rattled not just sabers, but also the certainties of his counterparts on the continent. In an age when nationalism was becoming increasingly important as a means for the newly-created urban masses to form some form of identification, his constant calls for military strength and aggressiveness as the primary virtues of the new state were akin to adding kindling to a tinderbox.
Separated by a thousand miles, Russia was suffering its own reaction to the “leadership” of a man who had none of the qualities needed for such a description. Nicholas II had a father, Alexander, who had begun the process, albeit slowly, of bringing Russia into modern times. In the context of Russia, this meant somewhere along the timeline of a hundred years or so behind an actual modern nation such as the UK or US. Serfs, for instance, were to have some rights. While there was thus a push from above to reform, there were factions which wished for a total and clean break from the past. One of those elements caused Alexander’s death by a bomb, and was the mechanism for Nicholas’ ascension to the throne.
Two anecdotes, perhaps apocryphal, can serve to describe Nicholas’ unsuitability for the job. He was once said to have remarked to an intimate that there was nothing he would actually have liked more than to leave the court and its responsibilities for the sake of being a simple farmer. And he was reported to have claimed that every true Russian loved him because God was just. While this might be a nice thing to think, it’s hardly a manifest on which to base action.
The interaction of these two kings was, to modern eyes, simply weird. Even as he was thinking of waging war against Nicholas, Wilhelm often wrote personal, handwritten letters addressed familiarly to “Dear Nicky” in which he presumed to tell his distant cousin how to govern Russia and deal with other (non-German) pesky foreigners. Nicholas, for his part, worried about what the court, not government, of Great Britain might think of his actions. It was the fact that these idiots were in charge of the two most powerful land armies on the continent which made the First World War inevitable. Without the expansionistic desire of Wilhelm, Germany would not have had any reason to go beyond its strength in land warfare, and Britain would not have felt alarmed enough to forge strong alliances with Russia and France. Without Nicholas’ weak, and worse, reactionary, leadership, Russia might not have had such strong social tensions that made revolution practically inevitable, and led to the Soviet Union.
Again, this is a reductionist view, but without two hereditary rulers in positions for which they were patently unsuited, it is quite possible there would have been no First World War, no communist revolution in Russia, and thus no Lenin. The murder of a minor duke in a small nation would not have led to tens of millions dying if these rulers hadn’t aligned their personal prestige with that of their nations, and that of their nations with “blood relatives” fighting amongst each other in a small, relatively unimportant, place. If there had been no First World War, Germany would in all probability never had had Hitler come to power and there would have been no Second World War. If there had been no Lenin, there would probably have been no Stalin, and thus after the second World War no Cold War. If no Cold War, America would have never gotten involved in either Korea or Vietnam. As an aside, there would not have been any deposition of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Allende in Chile in 1972, both occurrences which created a reservoir of ill will with which we are still dealing, even if we did eventually win the bigger fight against communism.
History matters.
My point is this: when it is obvious that somebody is completely, patently and obviously unsuited for power, it behooves others to pay attention when that individual seems to be in danger of gaining power. The wrong people at the top, unchecked, can make decisions which have repercussions far beyond the borders of their own country. This is why democracy, as Churchill famously said, is the worst possible form of government, except for the alternatives. Hereditary leadership, as an alternative, is close to being the worst of all.
Coming back to Saudi Arabia, it would seem that there is some danger of ancient Russian history repeating itself. A reformist (somewhat cautious, but still) king nearing the end of his reign, while the heir to the throne seems, for all intents and purposes, ready to rule through divine inspiration and a return to the tried and true methods of repression. Is this a fair assessment? Hard to say, as secretive as the royal family of Saudi Arabia is, but piecing together reports seems to make it plausible. The worst part of having a single absolute ruler is that other nations, such as the US, cannot make decisions in how to handle the relationship on the basis of rational political calculus, but rather on the basis of a single individual’s psychology. Especially when that nation is one which has indirectly already caused the death of more Americans in a single attack since Pearl Harbor, this is worrisome. If Saudi Arabia really wants our military protection, which they do, I would make it conditional on a check-up of Prince Abdullah every year by the best of our analysts. We cannot continue to support a regime which shares none of our values, and which might well veer crazily to one extreme or the other in the future without some guarantee that the person in charge is at the least, sane and shares at least some of our basic human values.
In a perfect world, of course, the King would have to be a pauper for some years before gaining power, since one of the biggest problems of hereditary rulers is they have no conception of reality. Wilhelm’s childish obsession with boats to rival those of his relatives across the channel can be seen reflected in the Saudi family’s constant one-upmanship of each other with ever-larger private jets. Any normal, sane person, even a rich, normal, sane person would recognize this as compulsive behavior. In the context of practically infinite personal resources on the one hand, and ruthless courtier behavior on the other it makes a sort of twisted sense, but not in the real world. It is, in a word, worrying, that Saudi Arabia seems not only likely to repeat errors of the past, but seems completely oblivious to the fact that it might be doing so. Iron-handedness eventually leads to stagnation at best, else revolution. A revolutionary Saudi Arabia, run by a small band who themselves feel no compunction in sacrificing lives for some greater religion or ideology, and allied to what are still significant and important reserves of oil, would be even worse, but not by much. As Americans, we might choose not to pay attention what goes on there, leaving it to oil company analysts, defense and state department policy people, but if our kids get dragged into the Middle East with guns in their hands and die for no good reason in WW3, we won’t be able to plead ignorance.
Below are some links:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/09/world/meast/saudi-arabia-activists-sentenced
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011–13_Saudi_Arabian_protests
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2013/04/saudi-uprising-protests.html
http://www.thenation.com/article/166305/price-dissent-saudi-arabia#
Worldly Philosophy 