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Too Much History

George W. Bush faces the challenges of FDR, JFK, and Truman all at once.

Jun 2, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 37 • By NOEMIE EMERY
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ALL THROUGH the Clinton administration and into the 2000 election, some said we had run out of history. It had been tapped out, like an overused resource. It had run dry, like a well. Then came September 11, and history came flooding back with a vengeance, swamping us all in a torrent of crisis and incident. We have so much history now that we have nowhere to put it. We have a history glut. Elected in peace, George W. Bush has become a war president, fighting hot wars and covert wars on terror, while trying to rebuild the Atlantic alliance and bring peace and order to the Middle East. He is making history more than he ever imagined, but he is also reliving it, in an unusual fusion of incidents. We are reliving not one but four past crises. And the years our present situation resembles are these:

1938

IN 1938, the League of Nations, having failed to check Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, Italian aggression in Ethiopia in 1935, and German aggression in the Rhineland in 1936, lapsed at last into utter inconsequence when it failed to prevent the partition of Czechoslovakia, a sellout that Britain and France hailed as "peace in our time." Peace in our time lasted just one year, before pumped up German forces rolled into Poland, setting off a world war that raged on five continents, killed 40 million people, and lasted six years. In the end, aggression was rolled back and order restored by a military alliance led by the United States and Great Britain, with Russia acting at times as an out-and-out foe, and at times as a critical ally.

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