At the height of its glory and power, ancient Athens sponsored theatrical performances of tragedy, featuring the greatest playwrights of the day. These public festivals offered more than entertainment. They were designed to remind the audience that even in their hour of triumph, great men and great societies are constantly perched on the precipice of catastrophe, through mistakes of omission or commission. The plays were more than a warning against hubris, however. They were intended to inspire the citizenry with a sense of the mutual obligation and moral courage needed to avoid such a fate. As the best of the Greeks knew, a tragic sensibility is not the same thing as an acceptance of tragedy. By dealing squarely with the omnipresent possibility of great suffering, a tragic sensibility can better prepare one to brave an uncertain world.
The Greeks were on to something vitally important not only for their time but for all time, according to Hal Brands and Charles Edel in their new book, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order. They argue that global peace and security are still far from automatic. A tragic sensibility leads us to recognize that the possibility of great power war, and with it civilizational catastrophe, is always looming on the horizon. This insight is not a recommendation for resignation but resolution. Brands and Edel fear that the United States is losing that sensibility at a time when the foundations of great power peace are under growing threat. Their purpose is to use history to help Americans and their allies rediscover the sense of tragedy before they must experience it themselves.
The memory of tragedy has sometimes impelled the building of international orders that have succeeded, if only temporarily, in holding the forces of upheaval at bay. In the wake of great geopolitical catastrophes, leading statesmen have found the foresight to create new systems of norms and rules to regulate the relationships between states and, just as critically, to erect the stable balances of power that sustain them. Driven by painful experience, they have accepted the geopolitical hardships and sacrifices necessary to avoid the far greater costs of a return to uncontrolled upheaval. Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, and Edel, a senior fellow of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, identify the Peace of Westphalia, the Concert of Europe, and the American-led liberal international order, as examples of the tragic sensibility at work.
Postwar Stability Is Unravelling
After World War II, American statesmen instinctively understood how terrible a rupture of world order could be, and the Soviet threat constantly reminded them that international stability could not be taken for granted. They and their allies created a flawed masterpiece: a postwar international system that was never perfect but was one in which authoritarian challengers were contained and ultimately defeated, democracy and basic human rights spread more widely than ever before, and both global and American prosperity reached unprecedented heights. (Brands explored these postwar triumphs and occasional failures in his 2014 book, What Good is Grand Strategy?: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush.)
Unfortunately, in the authors' view, the international liberal order is currently fraying badly under the assaults of revisionist powers, notably China and Russia, and international predators like North Korea and radical jihadist groups. But more importantly, we are threatened by our own complacency, fatigue, or excessive narrow-mindedness. This loss of the tragic sensibility, if not successfully challenged, portends disaster.
Winston Churchill once observed that a man must nail himself to the cross of thought or action. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that officials and scholars of international politics generally come down on the side of either strategic restraint or assertiveness (with conservative and liberal variants). Today's common wisdom, after the setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, is for restraint. According to this view, a willingness to act boldly leads not to stability and deterrence but to a deadly escalatory spiral. The implication is that the greatest risk of another geopolitical disaster lies in overreacting rather than underreacting to threats. Brands and Edel, by contrast, contend that assertiveness is the wisest course. They offer an understanding of strategy that explains why this is so.
Perhaps most importantly, the balance of power is inherently unstable. International orders, even the most inclusive ones, create winners and losers because they benefit states unequally. The power balances that underpin a given system shift over time, encouraging new tests of strength. Those advocating restraint assume that challengers will simply exhaust themselves absent outside provocation, or that revisionist powers will be satiated once their regional ambitions are fulfilled. But Brands and Edel contend that most systems tend toward more, rather than less, entropy over time, meaning that more, rather than less, energy is required to stabilize them. And revisionist powers rarely reach some natural point at which their aspirations subside. Interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, and risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off.
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