My quarrel with Buchanan is that he appears to judge historical figures according to hindsight and not upon a standard limited to what the figure knew or should have known at that time. Here is an example of the absurdities into which this practice can lead a historian:
A third was the British decision to capitulate to U.S. demands in 1921 and throw over a faithful Japanese ally of 20 years. Tokyo took its revenge, 20 years later, by inflicting the greatest defeat in British history, the surrender of Singapore and an army of 80,000 to a Japanese army half that size.
It is absurd to pin blame on a politician or a statesman for a policy that goes wrong two decades later. This is an old trick of the left. For example the left blames Dwight Eisenhower for installing the Shah in Iran nearly 3 decades before the Shah was ousted and our people were taken as hostages. In between, a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, declined to act to save the Shah. To impute responsibility to Eisenhower for the hostage crisis 30 years later or, equally, to British statesman for the fall of Singapore 20 years later, is preposterous.
Seems to me, without having my judgment handicapped by actually reading Buchanan's book, this amounts to little more than parlor game, a "what- if" game. It is one thing to examine history to distill from it the essences of timeless truths. Is appeasement a good and safe policy? Are secret alliances a smart policy? Should commitments be made which in reality are so impractical that they cannot be honored? Should commitments be made the implications of which cannot be known? These are all legitimate questions coming out of the run-up to World War I and they present some truths that clearly have application to our war on terror today. It is quite another thing to play parlor games with history.
Buchanan's article, and presumably his book, contains other problems:
He led the West down a moral incline to its own barbarism by imposing a starvation blockade on Germany in 1914 and launching air terror against open cities in 1940.
Has Buchanan not heard of unrestricted submarine warfare? Is he unaware of German surface Raiders attempts to starve Britain at the beginning of the war? Does he not know that the ultimate near starvation of the German homefront by 1918 was a principal reason for the disintegration of Germany, causing Hindenburg and Ludendorff to tell the Kaiser there was no option but surrender?
With respect to the, "air terror against open cities in 1940," one can only respond: is Buchanan ignorant of Rotterdam? Of Coventry? Of the decision by the Luftwaffe in mid-September 1940 to divert its attacks from English airdromes to English cities thus commencing "the blitz?"
These kinds of ludicrous assertions which actually are wholly counter to historical reality betray a shallowness or more likely a need to create controversy in order to sell books.
Similarly, Buchanan claims:
He was behind the greatest British military blunders in two wars: the Dardanelles disaster of 1915 and the Norwegian fiasco of 1940 that brought down Chamberlain and vaulted Churchill to power.
It is no good playing with the English language like that. Either Churchill was responsible for Gallipoli and should therefore be blamed or he was not. In either case, a historian making this kind of an assertion is obligated to marshal facts to prove it. It is only cute to say that Churchill "was behind" the Dardanelles disaster-was he or was he not responsible and why? What does it mean that he was "behind" it?
If Buchanan wanted us to explore the real lessons of World War I and other lessons from Churchill's career, he might have talked about how technology outran the generals of World War I, or how secret alliances confounded diplomats before 1914. He might even argue that by 1939 there was very little option but to appease Hitler and the practice should have never gotten that far.
These are all respectable points of view that can be argued. When one writes revisionist history as Buchanan has apparently done here one owes it to the reader to be very careful with the facts.
When one undertakes to undermine the reputation of the man whom I think is the greatest man of the 20th century, one ought to consider how Churchill drew his moral judgments from World War II:
In war: resolution
In peace: magnanimity
In defeat: defiance
In victory: Goodwill
