"Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and even Stalin drew on a shared vision of a world ruled by law to win the Second World War. Even Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were animated by a vision of a stable world. We are in danger of slipping into a world of sectarian struggles, in which the traditional world leaders think only of their own advantage. Meanwhile, videos on youtube and short comments on twitter have replaced speeches and news stories as the forum for international conflict. The Republican-induced paralysis of our own democracy is a dreadful blow to democracy worldwide. And last but hardly least, the Republican position on immigration seeks in effect to institutionalize a situation in which millions of our workers have no legal status. Not since slavery has the United States experienced anything comparable. I cannot help but wonder whether the great achievements of western civilization are too far away to inspire enough of us anymore. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.""
Looking only at MacMillan's recent book's illustrations, re various European journals' illustrations, it is hard to place them on a higher emotional level than those of youtube or twitter. However, qualitatively, and artistically, they were much better done, and show an incomparably better, if journalistically jaundiced and manipulative, grasp of international politics, as it was felt and understood, than ours.
Reading Kennan's two volumes on the diplomatic run up to WWI, and then Macmillan's book, gives quite a different impression than the one gets from 20th Century American history, and what I would call something like Wilsonian Rooseveltism, call it utopian liberal socialist leftism; or its later nemesis, McCarthyism, and later the neocon Republican droolings.
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