When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, November was for us a wonderful month full of school holidays. There were five of them - All Saints Day (November 1), Election Day, Veterans Day (November 11), Thanksgiving Day, and the Friday after (at a time when most folks went back to work that day). Veterans Day is still a legal holiday (no mail, no banking), but otherwise gets little attention - unlike, say, in Canada, where the Remembrance Day two-minute silence still has real power. In a better world, perhaps, we would make more of Veterans Day. But that is not where we are.
That said, the Veterans Day we do have still has salience. Primarily, it evokes personal, familial, and local appreciations of those who have served our country in uniform, especially in our many wars. That is certainly edifying and important. At a more remote remove, however, Veterans Day has an historical component. It is, after all, the 106th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First Word War, which (along with the war itself) paved the way not for a century of peace but a prolonged period of wars and civil and global conflicts.
When the Armistice Day Centenary was celebrated in 1918, Donald Trump was the U.S. President, someone whose understanding of what World War I had been about and whose appreciation of military service and sacrifice were both severely attenuated at best. His presence at the commemorations created some dissonance at the time.
Now Donald Trump is to be President again, and his neo-isolationist outlook offers an alternative perspective to the traditional themes of this holiday.
The first widespread takeaway from the experience of World War I was that the pre-war order (Churchill's "Old World in its sunset" that was "glorious to look upon" ) had failed and could not be put back together again. The question then became what new international order could be created to replace what had self-destructed. The post-war world the winners created proved disastrous (which could and should have been predicted at the time). The gratuitous destruction of the Hapsburg Empire, the calumny of German war guilt, the imposition of reparations, plus the rise of the Soviet Union on Europe's eastern end, all created an international order set up for failure which it did within 20 years.
The victors of World War II won much more decisively, and that perhaps gave them greater freedom to restructure the international order in a way which appeared to them to be more promising. Even the Cold War, which was my first introduction to international relations, unintentionally created a kind of stability. And, while the end of the Cold War was a bountiful benefit for those living in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, it in turn created unexpected new problems and new disruptions.
We are now coming to the end of that post-Cold-War era, wondering what exactly is going to take its place. One thing that is clear is that unlike the previous two post-WWII eras, the U.S. will not play the kind of exceptional role it has hitherto played.
And that is a very somber reflection for this Veterans Day.
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