Dead men talking

Elections, they say, never turn on foreign policy. They should.

I just finished reading historian Victor Davis Hanson’s The End of Everything, and voters deserve to know whether the presidential candidates grasp, as Hanson put it to me, how close “the unimaginable is to the quite possible”—by which he means war and annihilation.

From Russia and Ukraine to China and Taiwan to the simmering Koreas to Iran, its proxies, and Israel, any of these could produce the spark that sets the world ablaze. Hanson addresses these scenarios in a brilliant epilogue that is frightening because it’s plausible.

He spends the bulk of his book on four dead ­civilizations—the Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, and Aztecs—and the strikingly common set of factors that attended their demise. As for the killing part: During the Aztecs chapter, I used the audiobook on a car trip. Details of the brutality were unsparing. My wife plugged her ears.

Hanson does not spare arrogant moderns who misunderstand human nature: As we develop more efficient ­methods of death and destruction, we naïvely think their actual use beneath us. It’s a “postmodern conceit that total war is … obsolete” and that cool diplomacy will solve it.

Believing that is dangerous, Hanson explained. History shows that “once the logic of conflict ­escalation is unleashed,” all civilizations can face their end of everything.

This is why I’m praying for a foreign-policy election. I recorded an interview with Hanson that will air soon on The World and Everything in It podcast. I asked him a few questions in preparation for that, which I’ll share here.

What would Hanson add to his epilogue if his writing deadline were extended to today? This:

“In Ukraine, up-armed Ukrainian land and air forces are now making incursions into Russia as the war continues into its third year, drawing new existential threats from Putin and Russian grandees that the conflict is nearing a nuclear threshold.

In the Middle East, Israel awaits a promised second Iranian [attack]. Nuclear Pakistan and NATO member Turkey claim they will supply—or join—the Iranian cause, depending upon the ferocity of Israel’s response. Russia is making similar eerie noises.

In the West, we discount where all these escalating tensions can end up on the grounds that we are well past both the age of theater-wide conflicts and the use in war of existential weapons—as if human nature has somehow changed.”

Which it hasn’t. Applying the book’s argument on what the four dead civilizations teach about “the Melian Dilemma, the awful choice between calculated survival and brave extinction,” I suggested to Hanson that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems determined to risk the latter. But at the same time, that Zelenskyy may be applying a Hanson warning to his enemy, Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Beware of killers with pretensions of an enlightened intellect.”

“We are nearing Somme 1916 territory with perhaps a near 1 million total casualties collectively on both sides. … Yet somehow in the West, we feel that we must use our proxy to weaken Russia to the last Ukrainian, even as Ukraine runs out of not so much weaponry as simple manpower.”

Hanson says there could be a settlement. Russia gets Crimea and the Donbas, both sides demilitarize, and Ukraine gets Western arms but not NATO membership. “No side is happy … but the bloodletting ceases,” Hanson says.

And if the war rages on? Hanson foresees an “armed-to-the-teeth” Ukrainian army attacking Russia to ease pressure on itself, “earning the full retaliatory power of Russia—as we near the unthinkable.”

Thinking another unthinkable: direct U.S. involvement in any of the global flashpoints. I note that we share a major characteristic of the four dead civilizations, “factionalism and disunity.”

Were this election to turn on foreign policy, here’s a key question for the candidates: Who can offer a winning, realistic vision that unites our divided country?