A High School Reunion, and Rethinking the International Order

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The date is set: on the weekend of September 12-14, the Carmel High Padres Class of 1985 will hold their 40^th reunion. I look forward to seeing my old classmates. I liked high school, even if I wasn’t a particularly popular boy, and I have a deep sense of loyalty to my fellow alumni. We were witnesses at the beginning, as it were; it is good and right that we continue to witness together. (I wrote about my attachments to my fellow Carmel Padres here.)

Forty years have elapsed since I graduated high school. Go back forty years before that and it’s 1945. Those two forty-year periods don’t seem equivalent to me, because nostalgia and individual memory distort one’s sense of time. When I was in high school, some of the more senior teachers on the faculty were World War Two veterans. That war was very much within living memory of the still bright and energetic, but to a teenager, it seemed eons ago. Nineteen eighty-five is comparatively much closer, because it lives just behind my eyelids. I know intellectually that any given forty years (a time frame with considerable religious resonance) contains the same number of minutes and months as any other. It just doesn’t feel that way.

One of the joys of seeing old friends from childhood is that you see them both as they are now and as they were, and that experience helps you to remember. It also helps you to accept your own aging. “When did we get so old,” we ask each other jokingly; “Speak for yourself,” comes the de rigueur reply. Unspoken, usually, is the I still see you as you were. The I am glad you are still here. Look at how far we’ve come.

We accept that what served us well when we were younger no longer does. We note the progress: Our children are not spanked as we were spanked. Our public spaces do not reek of cigarettes. Our sexual minorities do not face arrest for consensual private conduct. Our phone calls to distant loved ones do not cost a small fortune. There is much to celebrate.

We have come a long way since 1985, and of course, even further since 1945. And yet – until more or less this moment, the global institutions in which we place our greatest trust are all creations of the 1940s. The United Nations and NATO were created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The financial systems that structure our lives date back earlier still; the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were each created at the Bretton Woods Conference, which took place in New Hampshire in 1944. The folks who gathered in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter, or gathered at the Mt Washington Resort in New Hampshire to hammer out the Bretton Woods system? Even the longest-lived of those attendees have now left us — but what they left us still governs us.

Generations of American and European leaders have treated these conferences the way the Roman Catholic Church treats its early councils at Nicaea or Chalcedon: as occasions on which the Holy Spirit itself descended to provide guidance and inspiration. One does not question the Nicene Creed without risking one’s orthodoxy; one does not question the fundamental framework of Bretton Woods or NATO or the UN without losing one’s credibility as a serious person. The institutions which once served a vital necessity have become equal parts sacred and sclerotic. That is, we surely can agree, unsustainable and unwise.

Donald Trump is the oldest man ever elected president – yet even he was born after Bretton Woods and the San Francisco conference that founded the UN. Trump is, as both his supporters and detractors agree, contemptuous of norms. For better or worse, he is our first president in eighty years to challenge the institutions of the international order. Some see Trump as a vandal, laying waste to sacred structures. Some see Trump as an architect, ordering the destruction of a decaying and dangerous building so that something new can be built in its place. Perhaps he’s a little of both. Either way, the most ardent defenders of NATO, or the IMF, or the UN, must do more than reflexively defend systems that were created a very long time ago and under very different circumstances.

Bretton Woods was not Nicaea, and San Francisco was not Chalcedon. And even if they were, the church still had the later Lateran Councils – and Vatican II. The Church does its imperfect best to balance the importance of continuity with the obligation to change. It finds a way to honor tradition while remaining open to transformation. The postwar international order has proven far less flexible than the Catholic Church, insisting on the preservation of systems and processes that seem increasingly ill-suited to emerging challenges.

We are as far today from the end of World War Two as that moment was from the end of the American Civil War. In 1865, a Napoleon ruled France and there was yet no unified Germany. Between 1865 and 1945, Europe saw shifting alliances, mass industrialization, and two catastrophic World Wars. The desire to prevent a third and even worse conflict was admirable and understandable. The institutions they created to prevent World War Three functioned very well for a very long time. And yet. Though Donald Trump may be reckless and foolish, it is not reckless and foolish to suggest that some of those institutions are no longer as indispensable as they once were.

Nostalgia is a wonderful source of inspiration for films, novels, and yes, high school reunions. It is not a sensible foundation on which to mount a defense of systems and structures that have grown calcified, inflexible, and unfit for use. In the face of Donald Trump’s contempt, the defenders of the old order may feel compelled to double-down on the defense of what was created eight decades ago.

That strikes me as the equivalent of insisting that Carmel High students sit and watch movies on the Bell and Howell projectors of my own youth.