To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations (Hoover Institution Press Publication

by Angelo M. Codevilla

Author Angelo Codevilla asks, What is to be America’s peace? How is it to be won and preserved in our time? He notes that our government’s increasingly unlimited powers flow in part from our statesmen’s inability to stay out of wars or to win them and that our statesmen and academics have ceased to think about such things. The purpose of this book is to rekindle such thoughts. The author reestablishes early American statecraft’s understanding of peace—what it takes to make it and what it takes to keep it. He reminds Americans why our founding generation placed the pursuit of peace ahead of all other objectives; he shows how they tried to keep the peace by drawing sharp lines between America’s business and that of others, as well as between peace and war. He shows how our 20th-century statesmen confused peace and war as well as America’s affairs with that of mankind’s. The result, he shows, has been endless war abroad and spiraling strife among Americans. Codevilla provides intellectual guidelines for recovering the pursuit of peace as the guiding principle by which the American people and statesmen may navigate domestic as well as international affairs.

Genres: Politics

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2010

About the author

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. Educated at Rutgers (1965) Notre Dame (1968), and the Claremont graduate university (1973), Codevilla served in the US Navy, the US Foreign Service, and on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He taught philosophy at Georgetown, classified intelligence matters at the US Naval Post graduate School. During a decade at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, he wrote books on war, intelligence, and the character of nations. At Boston University, he taught international relations from the perspectives of history and character.

Reviews

[JoséMaría BlancoWhite · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book every US citizen should read. Not so that he or she learns more about politics, foreign affairs, international treaties and stuff like that. No, because those things are just the fog that blurs the main idea, which is peace: how to make it and how to keep it. The enormous bureaucratic machines set up by federal agencies in the US have only achieved the following: they've made the average American citizen think he is too stupid to know about issues related with war and peace. The American citizen needs to be reassured (they claim) that all those high issues can only be handled by the expertise of the federal organs ad hoc. Heck, what else are there so many federal offices and bureaucrats paid for? These are smart fellows from crème-de-la-crème ivory league colleges. They must know, one expects. Well, no. It’s all a screen, Bob. And probably you had already guessed it. Only nobody wrote about it, and you didn’t want to be the first to say it out loud, did you?: It's a scam. They don’t care about America’s peace. They care only of making big, moralistic statements, that show -put a show of, rather- their high moral standards and extreme sensitivity to issues affecting Humanity (with capital H, please).

Mr. Angelo M. Codevilla, the best American writer alive, along with Thomas Sowell, cuts all the BS short. Highly readable. With history lessons included, that feel as no lesson at all, but just as a delightful time spent reading and learning, with lots of common sense.He proves to the reader all the baloney that the ruling class (mind this two words, folk) has fed the American people since early 20th century.

The point of the matter is that America should mind their own business and not meddle in foreign issues that don't affect her directly; that America should talk soft, but when action is unavoidable, then should intervene, win and get the heck out of there. Alas, everyting is being done wrong. It’s the age of progressiveness. Too much talk, too many treaties, too much baloney, and no power or willingness to backup those words.

In this book you'll learn a lot of little history, that history that doesn’t filter through the big media or that gets lost among the big picture of events. Anybody remembers today that it was a communist who killed Kennedy? So much hullabaloo about the killing that everybody lost track that it wasn’t the Tea Party or the conservatives that killed Kennedy. No, it was an American commie! Well, this book helps you find the North again. Some bits of information are worth the whole book:

significant parts of the ruling class, led by such officials as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, identified the enemy as conservative Americans who, like Barry Goldwater, wanted to fight the war to victory or not fight at all. These domestic enemies, McNamara wrote, were a danger to peace greater than the Communist powers. Laying the blame for the Vietnam War on domestic conservatives proved to be more consequential than anything that happened on the battlefield.

The ruling-class consensus that many, prolonged, inconclusive involvements all over the world are a permanent, sustainable feature of America’s life is wrong, because these lead America to forget what it is about.

This one affects Europe, their backward nationalisms and love of state. Guess how it all started?

After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo the [new] states became the purveyors of education and sources of authority. They fostered the myth that people within their borders formed distinct races with different geniuses and destinies. All partook of Charles Darwin’s ideology that life is an evolutionary struggle in which the fittest survive. And… The war of 1914-1918 … how joyfully Frenchmen, Russians, Germans, British, Italians and so forth marched off to the slaughter.

Yeah, to the slaughter indeed, like obedient sheep.

Practicaly, patriotism means obedience to the ruler, regardless of peace or war, regardless of the quality of government.

Europeans don’t have a right to complain of anything the government does to them: they never were “We the People”. They should shut up and obey, else change the rules of the game. No, I don’t mean becoming communist. France’s Louis XIV said: “The state is me”. Communism means going back to that.

The bad consequences of good intentions:

New York’s Walt Whitman advocated annexing all of Mexico forcefully to bring the blessings of good government to people who had known only misrule. Thus, Americans would “regenerate the world by asserting the privileges of humanity over the accidents of birth and fortune.” … In the North, as the “All Mexico” movement had shown, there had grown a sense of moral superiority and therefore of moral duty to confess the others’ sins, starting with the slave-holding Southerners.

As the author rightly points out, This attitude continues in our time.

Significantly for the long run, the advocates of empire succeeded in branding their oponents as “isolationists”.

Those who did the labelling and that should have come down in history as Imperialists, came instead to be known as the Internationalists; the anti-imperialists or “isolationists” lost this first Orwellian battle for the rule of the language. You lose the language battle, you’re definitely the loser, down through history, no matter how unjustly. Remember the “Popular” East European Republics?They couldn’t be less popular to their peoples, but hey, they got the “Popular” word firmly grabbed in their names.

The hyper-moralism of the Amercian leaders, first the Democratic, then all of them, is what most enervates me. Think of all the big and small wars and interventions that could have been avoided, where America didn’t really have a stake to defend but nevertheless they went and bled. Had their politicians, full of hypocrite morality, not committed through their treaties and big words, promising the world peace and and happiness, how many lives would have been saved! They had no business in most of those places. Now the world wouldn’t be infected with so many terrorists wanting to kill Americans all over the place, including within the US.

Things started to get really out of hand with this fellow Wilson:

The american people rejected the [Woodrow] Wilson’s party in the election of 1920. But, because Wilson’s progressiveness had become orthodoxy among America’s best and brightest of both parties, logic and elections proved weak against it. For both parties, peace had come to mean … a pacificsm as mindless as it was frenetic and provocative … a more or less united ruling class intoxicated with its own virtue and ideology, increasingly divorced from public opinion.

Not Conservative, as conservatism is today understood, and definitely not Liberal. This is plain common sense. It’s about war and peace. And you should mind about it, because those in the government sure don’t mind it, since they definitely will not be doing the fighting.

[Wilson Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Codevilla makes a good overarching argument that, in international affairs, the U. S. needs to maintain the goal of peace with other countries that furthers the interests of this country. His criticisms of the Patriot Act and other destructions of civil liberties after 9/11/01 were on the mark. But the line that he draws that separates American interests from non-American interests seems arbitrary to me. For example, he doesn't convince me that toppling Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1991 or Syria's Bashar Assad in 2011 would not necessarily have entangled the U. S. into worsening conflicts. It is too easy for Codevilla to say in hindsight that most of the issues that we had in the Middle East were the result of the failure to do those. Nonetheless, the book does highlight episodes from all of American history that have a bearing on recent events that I didn't already know.

[Ryan Lurk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone looking for a nuanced and articulate historical perspective for simply “how the hell we got here”. Codevilla perfectly captures the descent of American geopolitics from our founding principles to the current capture of political ideology by the academic elite. It transcends partisanship, and the connection drawn between foreign conflicts and domestic political strife should be at the forefront of political philosophy.

[J. Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Codevilla offers well needed reminders of the limits of American power and how we, as statesmen and citizens, need to turn more attention to our own country before we look overseas. While I found his discussion of Islam in the Middle East to be incomplete and at points inflammatory, I do think we need to consider how the US can (and cannot) interact with the greater world and find peace through self-improvement.

[James Huston · Rating 4 out of 5]

An outstanding book that surveys American use of power in history and its search for peace. He says some things that are eyebrow raisers that I couldn't independently verify, and I found myself arguing with him about many thing. But I still recommend it as thought provoking and a good historical review.