Everything short of war runs into a vested interest

A few weeks ago I posted about a debate some decades ago between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley. I commented that I had always heard of Buckley as being a refined communicator but never having read anything by him. Subsequent to viewing that video, on a visit to a used bookstore, I came across Right Reason by William F. Buckley, a collection of essays, columns and reviews covering the late seventies and early eighties. I have been sampling in a very desultory way.

Independent of his writing, what I am finding fascinating is the opportunity of dipping into contemporaneous accounts of events that were on my radar screen but not of huge immediacy. In this time period, I would have been in boarding school in England, then in the US, and then at University. My main source of news would have been Time magazine and The International Herald Tribune while overseas and The New York Times and Washington Post when in the US. For all that I was somewhat of a newshound, what was above the line on page 1 did take second order to the test I was taking that day, the cute girl on the second row in World History, who all would be attending the student union movie that evening, etc. So much of what Buckley writes about in this book, the war in Nicaragua, the shooting down of KAL 007, the boycotts of South Africa - all of these were on my radar screen then but quickly passed into deep storage as I attended graduate school, launched a career, got married, had children. And all of a sudden those events are history. My kids study them in a paragraph or two in US History. But here he is writing in the present tense in columns from that time. It is a neat diorama of history and memory and present-tenseness.

But in reading, it is not only a perverse form of nostalgia. There are also interesting insights tucked away. On page 100 there is the following comment in a series of columns from September 1983 regarding the shooting down of Korean Airlines 007 by the Soviets and the struggle of the US in finding an appropriate way to respond.

On the other hand, we don't - do we? - know what to do. War is excluded these days, and everything short of war runs into a vested interest: the wheat farmer, the Pepsi-Cola people, the gas pipeline manufacturers, the truck people, the bankers.

It is often commented that liberal democracies rarely go to war, much less with each other and to a considerable extent that is true. Buckley's comment pithily captures the reason why. In a pluralistic, free, federalist republic with widely dispersed power and interests, the more the domestic economy is intermeshed with the global economy, the more likely it is that there are material dispersed interests for any of whom, any action short of war (in which everyone is equalized by all losing) would involve differential ox-goring.

That explains the difficulty of exerting any negative action on any foreign country with whom we are having dificulties. But the less developed the opponent might be, the less likely there are to be any domestic interests to serve as a retardent to action. So democracies do impose boycotts or go to war with other powers but relatively rarely and usually with someone with whom there is a large differential in power. Not because it is more desirable to take action against weaker countries but because it is more feasible, not from a military perspective but from a political perspective.

This also sheds light on the observable rarity of two democracies going to war with one another. It is especially rare and per Buckley, most likely because there are enmeshed commercial interests in both countries seeking to avoid significant conflict.

Globalization is fashionably much decried in many progressive corners but clearly the more globalization the better because the more globalization the more peace there will likely be.