Counterfactuals and the Tranquility of Order
Readers must imagine my dismay when I learned earlier this week that the United States Federal Trade Commission is about to put an end to the comedy of kickbacks and peculating sockpuppetry that has maintained me in the manner to which I have become accustomed these many years. Just look at the FTC's own summary of its new rules regarding product endorsements; specifically, those parts of the new rules that relate to reviews by bloggers:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that "material connections" (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers -- connections that consumers would not expect -- – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other "word-of-mouth" marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement.
I note that these Guidelines do not specifically address the case of book reviewers, though I see no reason why they should not apply in that context. Actually, it's not unreasonable to expect someone who is receiving an endless supply of free books or software from specific vendors to disclose the fact. The new rules have excited outrage in the blogosphere because the endorsement disclosure rules seem to be more stringent for blogs than they are for print publications.
Probably the rules would not apply to someone who receives a free, unsolicited book or other product for review now and again. The problem is that the rules are not specific enough. The phrase "case-by-case basis" sounds like it means "the rule of reason will apply," but too often it means "you will be at the mercy of a mad prosecutor who can bankrupt you even if you beat him in court."
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And look, I am in fact in receipt of a video for review, Virtual JFK, a documentary historical study by the director Koji Matsutani, who is a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute of International Affairs. The Institute is located in Providence, Rhode Island, and is associated with Brown University. The video describes itself as a "virtual history," a consideration of what would have happened had John Kennedy not been assassinated, but had lived to make the final decision about American involvement in Vietnam.
I was asked by a representative of Sven Kahn Films whether I would like to see the film for review, and I said yes. Having done so, I am afraid I cannot give the video a ringing endorsement, for reasons I will state below. However, here is the Amazon link if you want to buy the video. If you use it for that purpose, I get a small commission:
The video's argument is that we can infer what JFK would have done with regard to Vietnam had he lived to 1964 by examining the actions he took in five other instances during his presidency when the large-scale use of American military force was considered as an option. The six instances are:
The Bay of Pigs Fiasco (April 1961)
The Laos Crisis (1961)
The Berlin Crisis (August-November 1961)
The Showdown over Vietnam (November 1961)
The Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)
The Withdrawal (October 1963)
"Showdown over Vietnam" refers to JFK's initial decision to supply support to South Vietnam, including 16,000 military advisers, but rejecting arguments that a large combat force should be sent immediately. "The Withdrawal" refers to the fact JFK in October 1963 was strongly considering withdrawing those advisers, though no public announcement had been made. In the Laotian Crisis, the Berlin Crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US made a display of readiness to use force in certain circumstances, but took care not to act provocactively or to leave the other side without room for diplomatic maneuver. In the Bay of Pigs affair, where there were no options but doing nothing or going directly to war, JFK proved willing to accept a considerable embarrassment by doing nothing. From this pattern of behavior, the video suggests, we may say with some confidence that JFK would have preferred seeing South Vietnam absorbed by North Vietnam to sending American troops to stop the process.
That is not an unreasonable inference. In any case, anyone who watches the film will understand why JFK excited so much affection. The director used a great deal of footage from JFK's press conferences, which were brilliant to begin with and have been edited to good effect. The upgraded image quality for the old material is extraordinary. Still, the greatest wonder of the conferences may be not that the president is witty and well-informed, but that he gets away with telling the press he is not telling them everything and that he expects them to act responsibly in reporting what he does tell them. This was government by grown-ups.
A companion book was written to accompany the video. I have not seen the book, and would not dare to comment on it now that the gleaming eye of the FTC is upon me. The book may fill in the gaps in the video's historiographical argument. From what I have seen, however, there are two problems:
The first is that the video urges on us the proposition that JFK had a personal tendency to avoid committing Americans to combat. To make that argument, though, one must contrast him with other presidents similarly situated. The only candidate is Eisenhower, whose policy of "no war on my watch" was not distinguishable from that of Kennedy's in the instances that Virtual JFK studies. The reason is obvious: during the Cold War, to start a war anywhere was to risk starting a war everywhere. So, Eisenhower made gestures with regard to Quemoy-Matsu and the Hungarian Uprising but employed no force, which is how JFK acted regarding Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In South Vietnam in 1961, there was small danger of setting off a direct confrontation with the USSR and China, and that was the one instance in which Kennedy was willing to at least experiment with force. The instance that perhaps tells in favor of principled reluctance on Kennedy's part to use the military was the Bay of Pigs matter, but that may best be explained by the Administration's policy of cultivating Third World opinion.
A more serious failing of the video is that it misconstrues the historiographical use of counterfactuals. There is little to be learned from changing one event in history arbitrarily and then speculating about the consequences. Counterfactuals are really illuminating, however, when we know that a group of decision-makers were considering more than one option of great moment and were themselves trying to figure what the result would be of choosing one option rather than another. Historians must ask whether the decision-makers understood their situation correctly. In such a case, we must understand what did not happen in order to understand what the decision-makers actually decided.
The decision about whether to increase or end the American presence in South Vietnam after 1963 eminently lends itself to this kind of analysis, whether President Kennedy lived or not. And the video ignores it.
The video does mention the Domino Theory, which was the hypothesis among policymakers in the the early 1960s to the effect that the annexation of South Vietnam by North Vietnam would lead to a series of defections by the states of the region to the Communist Block, possibly affecting not only Indonesia but even India. The hypothesis is not examined, however. The video just mentions it as an example of the strange things that educated people can believe in, like Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Box. A serious counterfactual examination of the Vietnam War, however, would have to include an assessment of Michael Lind's argument that the Domino Theory was by no means a delusion, and that it fact it made a lot of difference that Saigon fell in 1975 rather than 1965. That may or may not be true, and even if it is true, it might not justify the cost of the Vietnam War on all levels to Vietnam, Cambodia and the United States. Still, even in our own timeline, a flurry of states went Communist soon after the fall of Vietnam, to such effect that informed opinion was moving to the view that the United States was about to lose the Cold War.
The point is at least worth considering. An exercise like this should walk us through the imaginary years of the later 1960s to 1975, so we could see what effect of JFK's restraint would have been.
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Speaking of life in an alternative universe, one might suggest that the recent elevation of President Barack Obama to the college of Nobel Peace Prize laureates is in fact evidence that the political assumptions that seem to underlie Virtual JFK are rapidly becoming anachronistic. The president's policies are not different in kind from those of his predecessor. The distinction that occasioned the Prize is President Obama's willingness to frame them in terms of the global transnational constitution, or at least the version of it that applies to Europe and the Anglosphere. The Nobel Committee is simply underlining the fact that peace is not the absence of violence, but the tranquility of order. The latter is entirely consistent with a thunderhead of cruise missiles, provided their mission is Kantian.
I have seen it said that this Prize was consolation to the president for the refusal of the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. I am tempted to say rather that an award to Chicago for 2016 and the Peace Prize would have been too much, at least within two weeks. These things do not lie within the gift of any individual or group. I do wonder, though, whether the bestowal of such awards may be common knowledge on Nonprofit World before they become public knowledge. That would explain why the president was willing to expose himself to rejection by the IOC, and why the White House was so strangely unruffled in the few days between the rejection and the award of the Peace Prize.
