though Bush said some things in the Latvian capital of Riga and in Moscow that needed to be said, he was speaking as a leader who has demonstrated an unfortunate insensitivity to the lessons his predecessors learned from the inferno of World War II.Huh?
. . . It is Bush, however, who cast aside the lessons of World War II when he first came to office, rejecting the close cooperation with allies that his father had practiced so deftly while presiding over the Cold War's bloodless denouement and the unification of Germany. It would be a good thing for the United States and its allies if Bush, listening to Putin say yesterday in Red Square that the victory of [over? - JF] Nazism cannot be divided "into ours and someone else's," absorbed the lesson his father's generation learned at great cost about the value of collective security, multilateral cooperation, and strong alliances.
Leave aside for the moment that his father's devotion to multilateralism and cooperation with "allies" was responsible for the disastrous first Gulf War.
The lesson of World War II was that weak, leaderless multilateralism offers no security whatsoever. World War II was a result of weakness and the failure of the League of Nations to act. Victory in World War II was the result of resolute action by a "coalition of the willing" – the US, USSR, UK and other Commonwealth nations – and that's about it. The Cold War was much more about alliances and cooperation, but that too would have failed without determined US leadership.
In fact, I think the case is stronger that Bush has over-applied the lessons of World War II. His willingness to act against those who are potentially great enemies, even when that appears fairly unlikely, indicate that he certainly knows the history of 1930s appeasement.
