A book about our country's engagement with the world could be built around two events on the last day of January.
On Jan. 31, 1917, Germany announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships entering or exiting British waters. Germany and Britain were at war. The United States was officially neutral, but surreptitiously supplied Britain with war materiel.
Germany had an understandable grievance, but this was hardly a moment for international empathy. The Arkansas Democrat said that Germany's declaration was "the most acute problem" President Woodrow Wilson had yet confronted.
The British ship Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine two years before, with the loss of more than 100 Americans among the 1,193 casualties. Few of them knew the ship was carrying war supplies.
The German embassy in the U.S. had published warnings against sea travel. A few days before the cruise liner was sunk off the Irish coast in May 1915, the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic reported with exasperation that the Lusitania had sailed "despite the advertised warning of the German embassy that passengers travelling on ships of the allies run the risk of being blown up." It's easy to find editorials penned at the time criticizing Americans for boarding the ship.
But by Jan. 31, 1917, many more ships had been sunk. Germany's policy set the stage for the declaration of war to come in April. The Arkansas Gazette said, "The Eyes of the World Are on Washington," and the U.S. was pulled into a global conflict.
Try as it did in the 1920s and '30s to extricate itself from global affairs, the bell had been rung. The U.S. was a world power, and the world's mess was America's problem.
Which is how we got into Vietnam, where, on the last day of January 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters rose in a series of surprise attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces--the Tet Offensive.
If Germany's declaration of 1917 can be seen as an early step in the U.S.' rise to global power, the Tet Offensive of 1968 marked a step toward decline. The North Vietnamese, and especially the Vietcong, were resoundingly defeated, but the event came as a psychological shock.
The famous newsman Walter Cronkite announced that the war was unwinnable, and President Lyndon Johnson had another reason not to seek a second full term in office. Put more starkly, what began on Jan. 31, 1968, spurred a president to give up while a comfortable journalist of high fame kneecapped America's fighting 19-year-olds.
What about Jan. 31, 2022? There are rumors of conflict with Russia. In his war speech of 1917, President Wilson spoke of Russia as a place where democracy looked promising, as George W. Bush later said of Iraq.
And there's Iran and North Korea and international terrorism. Despite what the amoral hustlers running the National Basketball Association suggest, the greatest menace is the government of China.
I've been studying Chinese comic books and posters published during the Vietnam War. In a sense, to look at one is to look at all. Lacking the ability to read Chinese characters, I scrutinize the pictures. They convey strength, resolve, unity, perseverance and a commitment to the slow but focused wearing down of a mighty power.
Teenage girls setting traps in the jungle are presented as heroes. Drawings of smoking American planes spiraling to Earth are a regular feature. The sense of unbreakable resolution springing from each image provides insight not only into why the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam but also why China is likely to win the coming confrontation with the U.S., where spoiled partisans like to spill their days dumping unhelpful hate on one another.
Whatever we think about the theory of evolution, the world is full of struggle. Liberty and equality under the law are not historically normal and can't survive in the absence of strong people willing to defend them. China knows this. Russia knows this. The Taliban know it. The human mules carrying bomb material in knapsacks across the open southern border know it.
The German declaration of Jan. 31, 1917, convinced the American public to play hardball. The Tet Offensive of Jan. 31, 1968, convinced many that it was time to stop doing so--and, apart from the brief, multinational Gulf War, the U.S. hasn't won a major military operation since.
Human nature being what it is, global affairs are a morass. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were quagmires. And now, if we lack a critical mass of citizens willing and able to face and respond to the hard facts of an unkind world, the gathering tide of muck will drown us all.
Preston Jones lives in Siloam Springs. He oversees the site "War and Life: Discussions with Veterans." (warandlifediscussions.weebly.com). Contact him at [email protected].