On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

United States attorney general, is responding to a student’s question about the Mexican War: “Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many in Texas did disagree, to such an extent that Kennedy had to promise his older brother that he would clear all future observations on that state with the then vice president of the United States.46 Some months later, as a first-year graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, I watched a videotaped lecture by the Yale diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, a man of clear views on the past’s relationship to the present. Unable to resist commenting on Kennedy’s claims, Bemis began mildly but concluded memorably: “You wouldn’t want to give it all back, would you?” Well, no, if we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us wouldn’t, even in this more politically correct age. For satisfying the claims of justice in this instance would not only disrupt the present and future, but also the past: wouldn’t the Mexicans then have to give it all back to the Spanish, and then the Spanish to the indigenous populations they decimated, and then those peoples to the flora and fauna they displaced after crossing the land bridge from Siberia thousands of years earlier? The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. A...

Brilliant