Comments on Choices Under Fire

36 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 view, only a global system of governance, complementing and in some ways supersedingnational power, would suffice. Yet he was also keenly aware of how difficult this new order would be to create and sustain. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, he made it clear in his acceptance speech that military force would unavoidably continue to play a key role in world politics for the foreseeable future, and that die best way to avoid war with the Soviet empire was to present it with a strong and united front in the West. At die same time, though, he also insisted diat die old Realpolitik of die past simply made no sense for the long haul. His words are striking, coming from a man we associate so automatically with the greatest military enterprise in history: For the moment the maintenance of peace in the present hazardous world situation does depend in very large measure on military power, together with Allied cohesion. But the maintenance of large armies for an indefinite period is not a practical or a promising basis for policy. We must stand together strongly for these present years, that is, in this present situation; but we must, I repeat, we must find another solution. Here, too, we return once again to the recurring theme of nuanced ambiguity diat dominates Choices Under Fire. In assessing the long-term legacy of World War II, just as in narrating the deeds that shaped the war itself, the only way to do justice to diis conflict is through the lens of irreducible moral complexity. Marshall's vision was one of international bodies operating under global laws, of collective security, economic cooperation, and the uncompromising defense of human rights—all in the hair-raising context of an emerging Cold War rivalry that threatened humankind's very survival. World War II, in Marshall's estimation, had inaugurated a new era of unprecedented urgency in the long history of tension between pragmatism and idealism . The boundary between these two had shifted: strategies for security that had counted as realistic in the past now promised nothing but self-destruction. Yet new strategies, and new rules, were still in the process of being worked out. Such was die strange paradox diat defined this new phase of history: the very grimness of the nuclear arms race made the idealism of an internationalist stance seem pragmatic by comparison with the unthinkable alternative of another world war. MichaelBess is Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. In addition to Choices Under Fire, he is the authorof The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which in 2004 won the American Societyfor EnvironmentalHistory's George Perkins Marsh Pri^e. Comments on Choices Under Fire Sanford Lakoff ^^ uring the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Bl the United States in 2007, New York Times ^^ columnist David Brooks remarked that whereas Britons are constantly reminded of their storied past by the glitter of monarchy, Americans, lacking a living link to their national pageant, are more disdainful of all that has gone before. (We ex-colonials, he might have added, must now pay for our lèse majesté by making do with Burger Kings and Dairy Queens.) Brooks is surely right about this. We may wax nostalgic about the country's pioneering origins, admire the practical wisdom of the founding fathers, and even reenact Civil War skirmishes, but as an art critic once observed, the tradition that is most venerated in American culture is the "tradition of the new." The dollar bill proudly proclaims that ours is noms ordo seclorum, a "new order of the ages." Henry Ford, a prototypically irreverent innovator, famously declared that "history is bunk." Among the possible reasons for this disdainful attitude toward both history and historical studies may be that ours is a relatively young country and that we are a nation of immigrants, many of whom came to this "New World" anxious to shuck off the constraints of the Old. But whatever the reasons, a refusal to be bound by the burdens of the past is surely a pronounced feature...