December 5, 2003

The War On Terror is a Battle in a Much Longer War

So says writer Clark S. Judge, in an essay outlining the "100 Years War" that America has been fighting since the early 20th Century.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall until the September 11 attacks, Americans believed they were living in a largely post-conflict world - the "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama titled his famous 1992 book. Humanity was embracing an enduring state of liberal democratic happiness, a world entirely broken from the bloody past. Since the September 11 attacks, a shadow of doom has run across this new-age portrait, but the belief that we are in an entirely new age remains.

Yet, viewed with a little more attention to history and less to the euphoria and hysteria of the moment, this "new world" appears hardly new at all. Instead the major conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries appear to be chapters of a single story, of a single epochal struggle: a new hundred years' war that is almost finished and will shape human institutions for centuries to come.

... Again and again in an unbroken line stretching from Wilson’s 14 Points to Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush’s recently issued National Security Strategy, the United States has proclaimed as its goals free peoples, free nations, free expression, free commerce, enduring peace among less fearsomely armed nations, and human dignity.