From Kabul to Saigon to the Peloponnesian War, democracies are bad at imperialism

Editor’s note: this originally ran in the Aug. 20, 2021 edition of the Anaconda Leader. It is being reprinted today after receiving first place for column writing in the 2022 Better Newspaper Contest (see story on page 1).

Whenever I observe world-historical events unfolding – and I think we can all agree we’ve had far too many of those lately – I have an unavoidably human tendency toward viewing them through the perspective of the past. Oftentimes it’s the past which I’ve studied, but just as often it’s my own past for the simple reason that it’s the past I know the best. So when I read a little over a week ago that the Taliban had completely surrounded Kabul and was quickly moving in, “the Fall of Saigon” is immediately what came to mind. Not those famous blurry TV images from 1975 (hey I’m old, but I’m not that old) of would-be refugees scaling up steps leading up to a helicopter perched on a rooftop near what had been the American embassy. No, to something much closer to home: my friends.

The high school I attended had a large contingent of immigrants, particularly from Southeast Asia, and after finding several of them to be even nerdier than I am and consequently befriending them I learned at least a few weren’t your stereotypical seekers of “the American Dream” – that is, people who were just looking for a better way of life for themselves and their families – but rather were here because if they had remained in their native countries they’d have been killed, or worse. 

Writing my very first byline news article for a publication that wasn’t a school paper, I interviewed a friend who was tortured and permanently disfigured by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s former communist rulers who came into power in the vacuum created by the United States’ pullout from Vietnam, and found him to be incredibly forgiving of what had been done to him, his family and his country. Another friend was a Laotian refugee who, even though his English was quite limited, spoke passionately in a high school history class when the subject turned to totalitarianism in the 20th century, using yours truly as an example of an intellectual who would have been murdered by the state had I lived in his native country at the time of its civil war. Then there was that one friend of ours, the quiet kid who I later found out had been one of the famous “boat people” who fled Vietnam in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Saigon. He was just a baby at the time though, so he had no recollection of it, had no real wish to discuss it, and his parents were even more close-mouthed about their experience than he was. 

Years later, when I was in grad school, I finally got all I ever wanted to hear and then some from a colleague who was one of those same “boat people,” only he was considerably older, an adolescent at that time when he and his family risked death on the South China Sea – but as South Vietnamese, from a family who was supportive of the U.S. presence in the country, the risk of remaining was far greater. He and I shared broad agreement on matters of political philosophy, and to this day I credit him for encouraging me in my ultimately failed efforts at learning French outside my regular coursework (this was back in my Rousseau phase, naturellement), but – and there’s always a but – we clashed epically over American interventionism. 

At the time, and this was in the early 2000s, so only a couple years after 9/11, I had been swayed by the argument put forth by the Neoconservatives of this grand vision of fighting tyranny anywhere and everywhere it dared to rear its ugly head. That was the essence of the Bush Doctrine. In fact, my university lobbied hard for the Bush Library – our political philosophy department was chock full of professors and students both who shared this mindset – but there were some like my friend who were not persuaded. After hearing his harrowing story of escape and survival following America’s first failed attempt at exactly this same kind of project in Asia, it’s rather unbelievable looking back on it now to think there had ever been a second. And yet, we were right in the midst of it. We as a nation. As a people. And we’re still in it, whether we realize it or not. 

I’ll never forget my friend’s words back then: “I wish I could believe it.” The “it” in this case being that we’d stay there for the long haul – and 20 years isn’t a long haul when you’re talking “nation building.” Back then I thought, why couldn’t we? The world’s only superpower, fueled by cheap credit and even cheaper labor in what would turn out to be a hollow economic boom, who could stop us from imposing our will upon the world? And as to the corollary, “why shouldn’t we?” – so soon after 9/11 that wasn’t even a question. Perhaps it should’ve been.

What really should’ve been the case was for my friends’ stories of life as refugees to have persuaded me to change my views, but nerd that I am that didn’t happen until I took a course on the history of the Peloponnesian War, which brings me back to my tendency of looking at current events through the lens of the past – about 2,400 years past in this case, to the war between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta backed by autocratic Persia. To this day there are two passages that stand out to me as proof of the futility of democratic interventionism: the speech the Athenian general Pericles gives before dying of the plague, where he finally tells the people the truth about themselves, that they’re an empire and if they don’t fight to keep it they’ll lose it along with their own freedom (which they did), and the reports from Athens’ failed attempt at liberating their fellow Greeks from centuries of Persian rule – that the people preferred the evil they knew (the Persians) to the unknown evil of self-rule. 

Perhaps our leaders should’ve taken that same course before setting us – and the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and too many others – on the same course as those Athenians. The name of their government after losing their war against tyranny? The Thirty Tyrants.