Historical Parallels

In response to my posting of a 1967 article about elections in Vietnam that sounded eerily familiar (U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote -- Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror), reader Steve writes:

The post on Vietnam elections was interesting. Now if the Iraq election would have gone worse and failed would you have posted that article to show that failed elections are good because successful ones didn't work in Vietnam? It would seem that failed elections would break the "parallel" between Iraq and Vietnam so that would have to of been a good thing no? Or would you have simply reinforced your previous comments on the doubts surrounding the election and look at the election as vindication?

I am always amused when historians use "parallels" to compare historical events. I've always felt that forming "parallels" was the weakest form of critique or analyses a historian could use. Writing on "parallels" is similar to someone asking why apples fall from trees and answering them with "Apples fall from trees, just like oranges that's just the way it is". So the person goes on with their life knowing that apples fall from trees because oranges do too but one day they run across a pear tree. Now they have a problem, pears don't look like apples or oranges. Oranges and apples are fairly rounded but the pear doesn't look anything like them. It would impossible to use any "parallel" between the fruits. The fault being that when the person first asked the question, the answer should have been gravity but instead, they were told it happens because that’s what happens to other things like it. No one is any smarter from comparing historical events; you get smarted by understanding them and not making cosmetic "parallels".

I agree. But let me add some more thoughts.

Steve's analogy is interesting to me because just this week in my "West and the World" course we are covering the Scientific Revolution and reading a bit of Newton. Newton, of course, argued that if you see apples and oranges fall from trees, you can infer that pears do too, according to some universal principle. I don't want to push the idea of "universal laws" into history, but your analogy doesn't really prove your point. I wouldn't say that because something similar-sounding has happened before (even if it has happened many times) that, therefore today's event will follow the same pattern according to some universal principle. We do that to some degree, in history, and, just as with science, our conclusions and theories must continually be tested against the evidence.

That is as far as I want to push the scientific analogy, but there are other ways we can read that newspaper article from 1967. I agree with Steve that the article doesn't really answer any questions for us, but it SHOULD make us raise questions. I agree that Iraq is not Vietnam, and the Iraq War is not the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean there are not some similarities worth investigating. To what degree are there parallels between Iraq and Vietnam? Or a better question: Can we learn anything from our experience in Vietnam that would help us better understand and influence what is happening today?

In the case of the article I posted, I think the "lesson" to be drawn -- or, really, the question to be raised, is: is our government wrong again about "turning the corner" (today's version of the Vietnam War's "light at the end of the tunnel"). Can this article from 1967 help us to raise questions about how our government understands and communicates the situation? Can it help us raise questions about how a foreign government in a land occupied by American troops establishes legitimacy? For example, the South Vietnamese government "elected" in 1967 never established legitimacy within the country. Clearly, the historical situations are very different between then and now, but I believe the article can raise questions about a similar problem with legitimacy.

A very different potential historical parallel was brought up by the eminent historian David Kennedy in this month's Atlantic Monthly (if it is not available through their website, you can go to the Cheng library's e-journal page):

What "W" Owes to "WW"
President Bush may not even know it, but he can trace his view of the world to Woodrow Wilson, who defined a diplomatic destiny for America that we can't escape

A similar point was made a while back in the New Republic (available through cheng's e-journal page) and a book called The Folly of Empire:

WHAT WOODROW WILSON CAN TEACH TODAY'S IMPERIALISTS.
History Lesson
by John B. Judis
Post date 06.02.03 | Issue date 06.09.03

Kennedy doesn't draw out the "lessons" in the same way Judis does, but I wish he did because he (Kennedy) makes some interesting and important points:

[...]Wilson would recognize George W. Bush as his natural successor, and he would recognize today's Americans as the direct spiritual descendants of the people he so reluctantly led into that conflict. For Wilson did not think that what came to be known, and often derided, as "Wilsonianism" was just a policy selected from a palette of possible choices. Rather, he saw it as the sole approach to international relations that his countrymen would embrace as consistent with their past and their principles. Wilson did not so much invent American foreign policy as discover it.

[...]

Woodrow Wilson instinctively reacted to the onset of the Great War by issuing a proclamation of neutrality. But as the conflict grew in scale and duration, wreaking devastation previously unimaginable, he became increasingly convinced that isolation was no longer a viable posture for the United States. Yet Wilson also felt (along with many other Americans) that Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy, with its embrace of raw power and cold national interest, was irrelevant, even alien. If neither traditional isolationism nor conventional realpolitik would do, then it fell to Wilson to craft an authentically American foreign policy that would so resonate in the hearts of his countrymen as to provide a sustainable basis for American international engagement.

Two assumptions underlay Wilson's thinking: that the circumstances of the modern era were utterly novel, and that providence had entrusted America with a mandate to carry out a singular mission in the world.[...]

What Kennedy points out is that Wilson didn't have "Wilsonianism" as a set of ideals to frame his worldview, he had to invent it, though out of the raw materials of American national mythology, at a time when the other ideals of isolationism and Rooseveltian imperialism/militarism seemed to offer no good answers. So, for Wilson, historical parallels were irrelevant, or only partially helpful.

Kennedy also reminds us that Wilson was very reluctant to go to war. This is where I wish he had engaged more directly with how Bush is or is not heir to Wilson. One could argue that Bush, like Wilson, found himself after 9/11 in a world where the reigning foreign policy worldviews provided no clear guide, thus he had to invent a new paradigm. (And one could argue that in seeing terrorism as a global war he did this successfully.) But where does that leave Wilson? Is Bush "properly" applying Wilsonian logic? Is he using the words but not the spirit? Is he adapting Wilsonianism to a changed world?

In his book and article Judis argues that both Wilson and T. Roosevelt learned from their experiences and their policies and worldviews eventually converged on a kind of internationalist pragmatic idealism (I am summarizing from memory, so don't take my word for it). I would like to hear more from Kennedy about whether he thinks Bush's Wilsonianism fits today's world or not.