The Carthaginian Peace

 I went on last time about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace at such length that it may have felt exhausting; but there is still one further key sense in which the book resonates with our time that I was not able to explore then in much depth: namely, the way in which the Allies' treatment of their defeated adversary resembled a recent particularly disgraceful episode in the annals of U.S. military history. (More on that shortly.)

Keynes's chief purpose in the book, let us recall, was to decry the Treaty of Versailles, which he saw as a dishonorable and ultimately self-destructive effort to take advantage of a defeated foe. The ruinous settlement that the treaty imposed, Keynes argued, was really a sort of "Carthaginian peace," meaning that it was peace attained through the cruel and utterly gratuitous extirpation of the already defeated and prostrate enemy. 

To try to ruin and deny the possibility for future existence to any flattened adversary would be evil and wrongheaded enough. But the Allies had a special obligation to treat Germany justly, as Keynes is at pains to point out several times in his book, because the enemy had expressly agreed to lay down arms only on condition that the negotiated peace would follow the outline of Wilson's "fourteen points." 

One of the questions Keynes takes up in the course of his polemic, therefore, is how a group of statesmen who were pledged in theory—and with apparent sincerity—to a set of ideals and guidelines for dealing justly with the defeated enemy, came instead to impose peace on such ruthless and lopsided terms. 

In the case of Wilson, Keynes attributes the president's betrayal of his own stated commitments to a kind of pigheaded literalism and capacity for self-deception—one that he declares to be "theological" in nature. In the case of the Prime Minister representing Great Britain at the peace talks, David Lloyd George, Keynes sees the root of the evil in the cynical posturing brought on by the exigencies of electoral politics.

Writing in one of his more Swiftian veins, Keynes recounts the entire disgraceful narrative from admirable beginning to craven finish. At the outset, Lloyd George pledged to uphold the fourteen points and deal charitably with the enemy. His undoing, however, was his decision to then plan a General Election immediately prior to the peace negotiations. 

This led to a scenario in which the Prime Minister could all too easily be outbid from the right. Keynes describes the rapid escalation of incendiary rhetoric from challengers to his seat who promised to more thoroughly flay the Germans, with one politician at last stepping up to declare himself for "hanging the Kaiser," and nothing less. 

Lloyd George at first neither mimicked this demagogy nor rejected it outright. Instead, he chose simply to ignore it and not respond. But ultimately, the supposedly apolitical press cajoled him into taking a more active stance. As journalists so often do, they presented their own opinion as simply an objective description of what everyone else—the hypothetical public at large—was supposed to be thinking and saying. 

Keynes quotes an article from the period: "the public mind was still bewildered by the Prime Minister's various statements [....] It is the candidate who deals with the issues of to-day [...] who adopts Mr. Barnes's phrase about 'hanging the Kaiser' and plumps for the payment of the cost of the war by Germany, who rouses his audience and strikes the note to which they are most responsive." 

And it was only at this point—after both the opposition had made political hay, racing to see who could strike the most strident "tough-on-Germany" posture, and the journalists had lent their sanction to this channel of thought—that the Prime Minister changed course. Lloyd George came out with a new, much harsher set of demands for the peace process, ensuring the doom of the fourteen points.

Lloyd George's ultimate stance, Keynes writes, "furnishes a melancholy comparison with his programme of three weeks earlier." And the whole "sad, dramatic history," he opines, serves above all to underline "the essential weakness of one who draws his chief inspiration not from his own true impulses, but from the grosser effluxions of the atmosphere which momentarily surrounds him."

To come now—as I promised I would—to our own time, I know of no better sentence with which to sum up the more disgraceful episodes of the first year of the Biden administration. We can do the president the justice of believing that, like Lloyd George, his "own true impulses" are in line with the original humanitarian commitments with which he took office. But his later decision to impose a "Carthaginian peace" on Afghanistan was surely not in keeping with them. 

The U.S. treatment of Afghanistan—in the wake of our exit—and I will return to the subject in due course—is, however, not the only way in which Keynes's tale of Lloyd George's behavior resonates with our contemporary political experience. I also think of Biden's backsliding on immigration and asylum. 

The platform on which Biden made his bid for office, after all, was thoroughly idealistic. It could not have said more unmistakably or many-times-over that he had every intention of restoring asylum and bringing "dignity and humanity" to the U.S. immigration system. But that was before—just as with David Lloyd George—the political winds began to blow from another direction. 

As soon as Biden faced an influx of people seeking asylum during his first months in office—caused in part by the hopes that desperate people rightly vested in his promises, as well as by the anti-asylum policies that the previous administration had put in place, which perversely incentivized more dangerous crossings outside official ports of entry and forced unaccompanied children to separate from their relatives—he began to sound a very different note on the issue. 

In his case, as in the British Prime Minister's, the right-wing opposition and the supposedly "liberal" press worked in lockstep to ensure the defeat of his plans for reopening asylum access. Ultimately it was the Washington Post editorial board, even more than Fox News, that helped to establish it as simply a "given"—something universally known and therefore never needing to be questioned—that Biden's policies were responsible for causing a "crisis," because he had been too "lenient." 

Later on, in another iteration of the perpetual border controversy, newspapers of all ideological stripes would assert it as a fact—long before the oft-ventriloquized "public" had even had time to form an opinion about it one way or another—that an increase in migrant arrivals at the border was self-evidently a "political problem for Democrats." Like the leader-writers of Keynes's day, they reported the public as believing that which they believed themselves, and thereby made of it a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Biden, much like Lloyd George, at first tried to change the subject. Instead of tackling the issue head-on and pointing out all the ways in which immigration is a good thing for the United States—indeed, an economic necessity—and asylum a moral and legal right, he attempted a Schor-influenced pivot to infrastructure and other "bread and butter" topics. Ultimately, however, this proved impossible to sustain, and so, like the British Prime Minister a century before him, he gave in and simply changed his position.

The result was that a Biden speech in March 2021 on the subject of immigration sounded as if written (and probably was written) by a wholly different person or team than whoever it was that penned his campaign pledges of a few months prior. Comparing a Biden plan published in March 2021, which described the United States as "a nation of borders," with the platform just months earlier, which spoke of it as a "nation of immigrants," made for a "melancholy comparison" indeed—to borrow Keynes's phrase. 

But there is another and equally shameful episode that comes to mind in which Biden allowed himself to be influenced not by "his own true impulses," but rather by "the grosser effluxions of the atmosphere which momentarily surround[ed] him." And this second episode was even more reminiscent of the one Keynes was recapitulating, because it involved the treatment of a former foe. 

Unlike Great Britain in its contest with Germany, of course, the United States lost its war in Afghanistan. But because of its ironclad grip on Afghanistan's financial system—through its ability to freeze the vast majority of the country's central bank reserves—the U.S.—with Biden at its helm—was able to impose a Carthaginian peace every bit as ruinous—if not more so—than the one the Allies imposed on Germany at Versailles. 

And this one was, if anything, even more dishonorable, because it involved a far weaker country in an even more precarious economic position, and one which the U.S. had just recently chosen to evacuate knowing full well that a collapse of the central government and a takeover by the Taliban was the only realistic outcome of their departure. 

When the inevitable happened, instead of taking whatever steps it could to ensure some minimal economic functioning in the country and save lives from starvation, the U.S. guaranteed widespread hunger and devastation by in effect shutting down the Afghan economy. They did this by freezing its central bank reserves—and then expropriating half of these funds to be held in the event of a possible court order requiring their disbursement to the families of 9/11 victims. 

Shades here of British demands for the Germans to cover the full costs of the war and provide pensions to every widow of the conflict. Then, as now, such demands for reparation were made by a far richer country of a nation wholly unable to pay—and the costs if such a proposal were carried out would be borne not by whatever guilty parties there may have been in power, but by faultless ordinary citizens of the defeated countries—and especially by their children. 

And in one case as in the other, one could see all too easily why the demands of electoral politics would persuade the otherwise well-meaning administrations in charge of the necessity of the dishonorable course. A David Lloyd George could not appear to stand in the way of British widows collecting war pensions from the defeated Germans, any more than Biden could be seen to oppose offering Afghan money to support 9/11 victims' families. But the end result in either case was no less disgraceful for all that it was predictable. 

Those who argued for freezing the assets and holding them in reserve argued that the alternative was simply to risk seeing these funds siphoned off by the Taliban. In so arguing, they ignored the loud and repeated cries of economists and humanitarian experts who offered concrete proposals for how the U.S. could gradually unfreeze these assets and restore them to Afghanistan while imposing strict accountability measures to track where the money was actually going. 

But of course, some didn't really care if freezing the assets of the Afghan central bank meant upending the country's fragile economy and plunging millions into death and starvation: because they believed such a fate was richly deserved. As one of the lawyers representing the 9/11 families put it in an interview, while arguing for expropriation of the Afghan reserves and a distribution of the spoils to the 9/11 families: "The reality is, the Afghan people did not stand up to the Taliban when they had the opportunity [....] As a country, as a people, they bear some responsibility for allowing the Taliban back in."

In other words, justice demands that Afghans starve for allowing themselves to be taken over by a brutal insurgent force. Moreover, not only contemporary adult Afghans deserve this fate, according to this lawyer, but so too do their children, and their children's children.

In response to such lines of thinking, one can do no better than to quote Keynes again. In one extended footnote, deep in the text, he reviews at length some of the reports of various humanitarian commissions who surveyed conditions in the defeated powers of Europe. He describes accounts of children malnourished and underfed, some so accustomed to prolonged starvation that their instinct is to hoard bread even when it is freely given. 

Keynes observes, after reviewing such horrors: "Yet there are many persons apparently in whose opinion justice requires that such beings [that is, the starving children] should pay tribute until they are forty or fifty years of age in relief of the British taxpayer."

So it is in our country too, even under a humane Democratic president who was opposed to prolonging the war. Biden promised to bring us peace through an end to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. He delivered. But it proved to be a Carthaginian peace. The United States, with all its wealth and power—so capable of munificence, so well-provisioned—if it chose—to practice magnanimity—opted instead to thieve scraps of bread from those whom we had just recently and knowingly left in the direst peril. 

In so doing, we call forth the shade of Keynes to rebuke us, and rightly so. Let us turn to his book one more time and learn its lessons anew. There is no sanction, he writes, "either in religion or natural morals," for a principle of collective punishment.