WHY OBAMA COULD TURN 2014 INTO 1914

The deadliest folly in history began 100 years ago this August.

The 20th Century dawned with more hope and promise than any before it.  Living standards were rising rapidly.  During it, poverty, disease and war could be eradicated, many intellectuals believed.

Until August, 1914.  More than 8.5 million soldiers and up to 40 million civilians died during World War I — an appalling butcher’s bill for a war no one wanted.

Military technology had raced far ahead of tactics.   Bone-headed generals launched bayonet charges against machine guns.  The slaughter was astronomically asinine. In the Battle of the Somme alone (July-November 1916), over 310,000 French, British, and German soldiers were killed (dead, not just wounded).  Over 9,700,000 soldiers died on WWI battlefields.

For the first time since the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), noncombatants were deliberately targeted. It began in August, 1914, when German soldiers shot 150 civilians at Aerschot in Belgium as part of a deliberate policy to terrify civilians in occupied territories so they wouldn’t rebel (Schrecklichkeit).  Worst was the Armenian genocide (1.5 million deaths).

Virtually an entire generation of young men was wiped out.  Depression replaced rapid economic growth.  The war’s devastation fueled Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and Communism in Russia, setting the stage for even bloodier war.

WWI crushed the old world in which kings were rulers, not mere figureheads, and vast empires stretched across the globe.  There were fewer than 50 independent nations then, four times that number today.

Our world is very different.  Surely national leaders now wouldn’t "sleepwalk into war" as Kaiser Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, et. al. did back then.  But Graham Allison, Harvard professor and Defense Department consultant, hears "echoes of 1914" in 2014.

So does the military historian Sir Max Hastings.  This year "the risk of some local turf dispute exploding into a great power collision (is) alarmingly real," he said.

The "echoes of 1914" are loudest in the Pacific, where an increasingly belligerent China threatens war against all who resist its breathtaking territorial claims.

China "aims to push rather than break limits," said an analyst for the International Institute of Strategic Studies.  But wars are more often the product of miscalculation than conscious design, history indicates.

The turmoil in the Middle East today reminds her of the turmoil in the Balkans in 1914, said British Prof. Margaret MacMillan, who wrote a book about "The War that Ended Peace."

"While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the Balkans then," she said. "A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the U.S., Turkey, Russia, and Iran all look to protect their interests and their clients. Will Russia feel it has to support Syria, the same way it once felt it had to support its client Serbia, and Germany felt it had to support Austria-Hungary?"

The most dangerous illusion both then and now is thinking war is unthinkable, Mr. Allison and Ms. MacMillan both aver.

War has been as common a source of human misery as poverty and disease.  On average, there’ve been at least three "major" wars going on every year for the last 4,000 years, calculates biologist Antonio Casolari.

A territorial dispute between a rising power and a declining one that escalated out of control has been the most frequent cause, Prof. Allison said.

From the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) on, alliances have heightened the risk of war. And when rulers stir up nationalist fervor to distract attention from economic problems, the risk of war rises.

There’ve been just three periods of relative peace: the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180 AD), the Pax Britannica (1815 to 1914), and the Pax Americana (1945 to the present).  They existed because one nation was so mighty no others dared challenge it. All were happy times for humanity.

The Pax Romana ended when a weakened Rome struggled to repel barbarian invasions.

As Germany, after unification in 1871, rose to become Europe’s leading industrial power, the Pax Britannica dimmed.

It’s the policies of President Barack Hussein Obama, not a shift in the geopolitical balance of power, that are putting an end to the Pax Americana.  He’s slashed military spending, and refuses to exercise American leadership.

The White House "initially responds to external events with assertive breast thumping and stiff demands, then shifting rapidly to cringes and retreat," said Walter Russell Mead, editor of The American Interest.  Consequently, "powers great and small around the world put less faith in America’s will and capacity to act."

"With Europe failing to deal effectively with Putin, the Middle East in flames, and terrorists and jihadis destabilizing a number of sub-Saharan African countries even as they increase their military capabilities in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, the Obama administration is facing the comprehensive failure of a grand strategy of disengagement," Mr. Mead said.

My fervent hope for 2014 is we’ll get through it without the administration blundering into war.  That’s still the way to bet, but the odds for peace are diminishing – in large and tragic part to our very own President Zero.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.