SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A29
I
t is an American trait to believe
that history begins tomorrow.
Yesterday is dead and gone, as
songwriter Kris Kristofferson
put it. Tomorrow is a blank page on
which any new story can be written.
From time to time, we quote
Faulkner’s wisdom: “The past is nev-
er dead. It’s not even past.” But more
as a sort of riddle than as a simple
statement of fact.
Yet here we are again in 1948, or
maybe it’s 1939 or even 1919. The
20 th-century process of shattering
empires — the Russian Empire, the
Ottoman Empire, the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, the Belgian Em-
pire, the British Empire, the French
Empire, the German Reich — was
drawn out and hideously violent.
And it’s not over. It’s not even past.
This was Madeleine Albright’s
guiding insight. She had a keen
feeling for the presence of the past,
an understanding that the explosive
20 th century put pieces of the world
in motion that have not come to rest.
As a c hild, she fled the Nazis and saw
bombs raining over Europe. On
March 23, when America’s first fe-
male secretary of state died at 84,
bombs were raining again over Eu-
rope — for much the same reason.
People are still fighting over those
pieces of empire.
One tiny fragment of the shatter-
ing empires was a diplomat named
Josef Korbel. He was born in the
kingdom of Bohemia, part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived
in the magnificent city of Prague.
After the empire broke up in World
War I, Prague became the capital of
Czechoslovakia. Nazi Germany in-
haled the country in 1939; the Soviet
Union made it a satellite in 1948.
Still in his 30 s, Korbel had been
Bohemian, Czech and an exile from
the Reich. Now a Soviet vassal? No.
Using his connections with British
and American diplomats, he escaped
Prague one last time and was flung
all the way to Denver with his wife
and children — among them
M adeleine, his daughter, the future
head of the U. S. State Department.
The refugee Korbel became a
fiercely patriotic American in every
respect — except that he knew the
presence of the past, knew it visceral-
ly because he had lived it. His past
had taught him that a world without
order is unstable. An unstable world
calls out for order. And if freedom-
loving people will not establish and
defend order, tyrants will be more
than happy to take over the job.
That’s what the would-be czar
Vladimir Putin is up to with his
invasion of Ukraine. He is trying to
piece together a new Russian empire
from shattered fragments of the
past, and somewhere on his wish list
there is sure to be the word “Prague.”
Madeleine Korbel Albright was so
thoroughly her father’s daughter
that she said her formative experi-
ence as a foreign policy expert was an
event that happened when she could
barely walk. “My mind-set is
M unich,” she once said, while “most
of my generation’s is Vietnam.” By
“Munich” she meant the 1938 capitu-
lation of British Prime Minister
N eville Chamberlain to Hitler’s de-
mand for parts of the former Bohe-
mia. Hitler kept right on going,
sending tanks to Prague and more
tanks to Poland and launching an-
other, even worse world war.
To have a Vietnam mind-set —
today we might substitute
“ Afghanistan” — is to say the United
States should not be the world’s
policeman because policemen make
mistakes. To h ave a Munich mind-set
— today we might substitute
“Ukraine” — is to say the other
applicants for the job of maintaining
order are likely to be worse.
By strange coincidence, Korbel’s
influence extended beyond that of
his own formidable and charming
daughter. He became a professor of
international relations at t he Univer-
sity of Denver, writing authoritative-
ly on the shattering of empires,
notably the conflict over Kashmir
following the 194 7 partitioning of the
former British India to create
P akistan.
The pianist daughter of University
of Denver administrator John Rice
enrolled at its music school. But
Condoleezza Rice found a new career
path when she took a class from
Korbel. After earning a doctorate in
1981 at the School of International
Studies that Korbel founded (named
for him posthumously in 2008), Rice
rose among Republican foreign pol-
icy thinkers much as Albright rose
among Democrats. Thus, the second
woman to serve as secretary of state
was steeped in the same sense that
the process of ordering the post-
imperial world is far from finished.
The process can go disastrously
wrong. But it cannot be dodged,
because the past is not dead. It’s
better for the United States, and for
the world, if the imperfect forces of
liberty stand fast against the far
worse alternative of fascism.
DAVID VON DREHLE
Madeleine
Albright’s
guiding
insight
A
momentous milestone will soon
be reached. Probably. The second
use of atomic weapons occurred
Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the
first. On April 7, 28,000 days will have
passed without a third. Maybe.
This enormous achievement of post-
war statecraft is difficult to celebrate
because it is an absence of something.
Besides, suddenly the most sophisticated
of weapons might be used by a moral
primitive because of Russia’s 10-thumbed
mishandling of its conventional forces in
Ukraine. The calamity of crossing the
nuclear threshold might occur because,
for example, a Russian convoy ran out of
gas. Because of the Russian military’s
incompetence regarding logistics and
other military fundamentals.
Writing for the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen,
former State Department counselor, says
the “abundant” evidence that “Ukraine is
winning” includes: “Most modern mili-
taries rely on a strong cadre of noncom-
missioned officers. Sergeants make sure
that vehicles are maintained and exercise
leadership in squad tactics. The Russian
NCO corps is today, a s it has always been,
both weak and corrupt.”
And: “Vehicles bunched up on roads,
no infantry covering the flanks, no closely
coordinated artillery fire, no overhead
support from helicopters, and panicky
reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of
vehicles destroyed to those captured or
abandoned bespeaks an army that is
unwilling to fight.” Furthermore, assume
characteristic Russian military crudity —
the use of artillery to compensate for
myriad failures: “If the Russians level a
town and slaughter its civilians, they are
unlikely to have killed off its defenders,
who will do extraordinary and effective
things from the rubble to avenge them-
selves on the invaders.” Witness “the
annihilation of a Russian battalion tacti-
cal group in Voznesensk.”
Putin has thrown 75 percent of Russia’s
combat-ready ground forces onto
Ukraine in an attempt to reestablish
Russia’s great-power status. He did not
reckon on (notes former deputy under-
secretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey)
Ukraine’s “ 900,000-man pool of veterans
from eight years of war” fighting Russian-
backed insurgents in Ukraine’s Donbas
region.
The Ukrainians’ effective resistance is
forcing President Biden to make a deli-
cate calibration that he is fortunate to be
in a position to make: How much embar-
rassment can Putin suffer without taking
a catastrophic step — use of a tactical
nuclear weapon? Biden’s calculation oc-
curs in this context of Secretary of State
Antony Blinken’s saying U. S. objectives
are the restoration of Ukraine’s sover-
eignty and territorial integrity. This
might maximally imply the reversal of
Putin’s 2 014 annexation of Crimea.
The rhetoric of imagined but rarely
attained precision is common in modern
governance. Policymakers speak of “fine
tuning” an economy that is powered by
hundreds of millions of people making
hundreds of billions of daily decisions
and subject to “exogenous” events unan-
ticipated by policymakers. Military plan-
ners contemplate “surgical strikes” as
“signaling devices” as conflicts ascend
the “escalation ladder.” I n 1965, war theo-
rist Herman Kahn postulated 44 rungs on
that ladder. The 22nd: “Declaration of
Limited Nuclear War.” The 44th: “Spasm
or Insensate War.” Rung 21 was “Local
Nuclear War — Exemplary.” As Biden
calibrates, we might be rising from Rung
20: “ ‘Peaceful’ World-Wide Embargo or
Blockade.”
After 1945, it was understood that
nuclear weapons might, by deterring mil-
itary interventions to counter aggres-
sions, enable wars of considerable con-
ventional violence. Biden, however, has
orchestrated a symphony of sanctions
and weapons deliveries that has — so far
— nullified Putin’s a ttempt to use nuclear
threats to deter effective conventional
responses to his aggression.
Presidents are pressured by friends as
well as foes. In 1 976, as Republicans
convened in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan
was almost tied in the delegate count,
having potently attacked President Ger-
ald Ford’s policy of U. S.-Soviet detente,
including Ford’s refusal to meet with
Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In Kansas City, Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, detente’s architect, asked Tom
Korologos, a Ford aide who enjoyed tor-
menting Kissinger, who would be Ford’s
running mate. Korologos answered: “Sol-
zhenitsyn.” Volodymyr Zelensky is to
Biden what Solzhenitsyn was to Ford,
someone whose prestige encourages
firmness.
Ukraine’s president illustrates
Churchill’s axiom that courage is the
most important virtue because it enables
the others. Zelensky has stiffened the
West’s spine, made something like victo-
ry seem possible, and made it impossible
to blur the conflict’s moral clarity. So, a
collateral casualty of the conflict is a
19 th century German philosopher.
Before sinking into insanity, Friedrich
Nietzsche propounded a theory that still
reverberates in the intelligentsia: There
are no “facts,” “only interpretations.” That
today’s war has been caused by one man’s
wickedness is a fact. War is a harrowing
means of embarrassing the faux sophisti-
cates’ moral relativism, but by doing so,
this ill wind has blown some good.
GEORGE F. WILL
Biden makes
a delicate
calibration
about Putin
T
he pretense is gone — the pre-
tense that Supreme Court con-
firmation hearings are about
determining nominees’ fitness
for office, gleaning a sense of their legal
acumen and approach to judging, and
gathering the information necessary to
exercise a solemn senatorial power.
No longer. Advise and consent has
yielded to smear and degrade. The goal
is not to illuminate but to tarnish: If a
nominee can’t be stopped, at least the
other side can inflict some damage on
her and the opposition party.
The confirmation hearings just con-
cluded for Supreme Court nominee
Ketanji Brown Jackson represented
the culmination of a sad trajectory.
Nominations and hearings have always
had a political component; after all, the
Framers assigned the confirmation
power to a political branch.
But never has a confirmation hear-
ing been less about law and more about
partisan point-scoring and presiden-
tial campaign-launching.
The 1987 confirmation hearings for
Robert H. Bork kicked off the modern
judicial wars, and Republicans still
seethe over Bork as Democrats’ origi-
nal sin. “We started down this road of
character assassination in the 1980 s
with Judge Bork’s hearings and sena-
tors have been engaged in disgusting
theatrics ever since,” said Sen. Ben
Sasse (R-Neb.).
I was there, and what actually hap-
pened was, to borrow Bork’s famous
description of why he wanted to be a
justice, an “intellectual feast” — espe-
cially in comparison with this past
week’s food fight. He was defeated by a
vote of 58 to 42, including six Republi-
can senators opposed. (Two Democrats
voted to confirm him.)
That wasn’t because Democrats
dragged him “into the gutter,” as
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) complained.
Bork defeated Bork all by himself,
thanks to his earlier, incendiary writ-
ings and then his testimony before the
committee. His expressed views were
so extreme and so far outside the legal
mainstream that his confirmation
failed by the largest margin in history.
“His view of the law is at sharp
variance with more than a century of
Supreme Court decisions which have
applied equal protection to women,
aliens, illegitimates, indigents and oth-
ers,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.),
announcing his vote.
Contrast this with the case, such as it
is, against Jackson. There were inter-
ludes of substance involving her judi-
cial philosophy and methodology for
deciding cases, her understanding of
the substantive due process cases that
led to rulings supporting abortion
rights and same-sex marriage, even a
case or two on which she had ruled.
But with minds made up, substan-
tive probing mostly gave way to
p osturing.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful
would you say you are in terms of
religion?” asked Sen. Lindsey
O. Graham (R-S.C.)
“Can you provide a definition for the
word ‘woman’?” asked Sen. Marsha
Blackburn (R-Tenn.) And, “do you be-
lieve child predators are misunder-
stood?” Quoting from Jackson’s college
thesis, Blackburn asked, “What person-
al hidden agendas do you harbor or do
you think other judges harbor?”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), seeking to
turn Jackson’s defense of accused ter-
rorists against her: “First off, l et me just
ask, do you think most detainees at
Guantánamo Bay were mostly terror-
ists or mostly, I don’t know, innocent
goat farmers?” And: “Okay, do you
think America would be safer or less
safe if we released all the detainees at
Guantánamo Bay?”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) on that
subject: “Why in the world would
you call Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
and George W. Bush war criminals in a
legal filing?”
Answer: Jackson didn’t. A habeas
corpus petition that she filed alleged
the government had engaged in “tor-
ture and other inhumane treatment”
that “constitute war crimes.” Legal
rules effectively required that Rums-
feld and Bush be named; after the
administration changed, Barack
Obama was substituted as a defendant.
Not that this deterred Republicans
trying to make it look as though Jack-
son had smeared the former president.
“Judge, official capacity, personal ca-
pacity, all of that is just a bunch of
procedural gobbledygook,” observed
Cotton, Harvard Law School 2002. “It
sounds like a debate about how many
terrorists can dance on the head of a
pin to me.”
None of this — none — was designed
to elicit useful information from Jack-
son. Its goal was to rough her up and
underscore GOP talking points.
Hence the microscopic — and out-of-
context — focus on what Jackson called
“this small subset of my sentences,” in
child pornography cases, as if a Justice
Jackson would somehow use her power
to unleash child predators on the
c ountry.
Hence the Cruzian performance art,
complete with prop books, about, of all
things, the curriculum at Georgetown
Day School, which Jackson’s daughters
attended and where she sits on the
board.
Cruz, holding up a copy of Ibram
X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby”: “Now this
is a book that is taught at Georgetown
Day School to students in pre-K
through second grade, so 4 through
7 years old. Do you agree with this book
that is being taught with kids that
babies are racist?”
What does this possibly have to do
with Jackson’s suitability to serve on
the high court? To ask that question is
to miss the larger point: That is no
longer what this exercise is about.
RUTH MARCUS
Confirmation hearings?
More like defamation hearings.
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 23.
Honey, would you listen to this?! It says
babies aren’t born racist but are taught to
be racist. And parents are supposed to
teach their children to be anti-racist. That’s
outrageous! Honey? Honey, are you
awake?
These books, among others, present a
critical conundrum for Jackson’s confir-
mation, according to Cruz’s graphically
illustrated interrogation. This is because
they’re available (and sometimes recom-
mended) at Georgetown Day School, a
private school in D.C., where Jackson
serves on the board of trustees.
So?
So, Cruz thinks that because certain
books are accessible to students at a n elite,
private school, this judge — coincidentally
the first African American woman up for a
seat at the big bench — can’t be trusted to
rule on cases that come before the court?
At least we might trust that Jackson,
unlike Cruz, would read the facts of the
case in their proper context. Cruz appar-
ently hasn’t read the books he finds so
repugnant because the excerpts he quoted
were demonstrably taken out of context.
If nothing else, Cruz’s performance has
reaffirmed why he’s the least popular
person on Capitol Hill and why former
House speaker John A. Boehner memora-
bly uttered an instruction to his former
antagonist while recording the audiobook
of his recent memoir, “On the House”: “Ted
Cruz, go f--- yourself.”
Graham, who long ago mastered the art
of getting attention by saying outrageous
things and — once upon a time — hilari-
ously true things, is no one’s audience.
Whatever happened to the old Lindsey
Graham on his way to flip-flopping infamy
no longer matters. Today, h e’s the tantrum-
throwing tyke who refuses to take off his
Batman cape and stomps out of the room
when things don’t go his way.
T
he usual circus we’ve come to
expect from Supreme Court confir-
mation hearings devolved last
week into something less grown-
up and more, shall we say, tykey. (Usage:
“Is the little tyke up to his tricks again?”)
Watching the performances of Republi-
can Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey
O. Graham of South Carolina, I was swept
back to my childhood memories of the
“Merry Moppets” play school and the Big
Babies, as we referred to our toddler
colleagues who couldn’t control
t hemselves.
To say that Cruz and Graham have
become caricatures of themselves would
be to minimize their accomplishments at
self-parody.
Cruz, who once distinguished himself in
the Senate by reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green
Eggs and Ham” aloud during a 21-hour-
19 -minute sort-of-filibuster, questioned
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s opinion
about several children’s books that he
thoughtfully brought to the hearing.
Remember now, the committee is sup-
posed to determine whether a nominee to
the high court is qualified to serve, usually
based on experience and judicial tempera-
ment, though there are no constitutional
requirements. Personally, I’d like to add a
spot-check of reading materials on the
night tables of nominees and Judiciary
Committee members.
We k now what would be found on Cruz’s
bedside: “Antiracist Baby” by Ibram X.
Kendi, “The End of Policing” by Alex Vitale
(currently No. 1 on Amazon, thanks to
Cruz), and “Critical Race Theory: An Intro-
duction” by Richard Delgado and Jean
Stefancic, to name a few of the tomes
keeping Cruz awake at night.
One could hardly transition to another
paragraph without pausing briefly to con-
sider the pillow talk at Casa de Cruz:
Yes, he did. On the second day of the
hearings after grilling Jackson on her faith
— “On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would
you say you are in terms of religion?” —
and a fiery exchange with committee
Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) about
Guantánamo Bay detainees — Graham
raised his voice, grabbed his Coca-Cola
bottle and stormed out of the chamber.
In another line of questioning, he re-
ferred to the brutal 2018 confirmation
hearings of Brett M. Kavanaugh and asked
Jackson how she would respond if a letter
concerning her past were produced on the
last day of her hearing.
“How would you feel if we did that to
you?” he asked.
When Durbin reminded Graham that
Jackson wasn’t involved in the Kavanaugh
proceedings, he said, “I’m asking her what
she feels about what y’all did!”
And then, his lower lip began trembling,
and he burst into tears, crying, Leave Brett
alone!
(Okay, that never happened. But at this
point, who would have been surprised if he
went full diva?)
You know by now who did not resort to
theatrics — that would be Judge Jackson.
But I suspect she’d have relished calmly
collecting her notes and sauntering, not
stomping, toward the exit to escape the
tyranny of such childishness.
Instead, she remained calm and digni-
fied throughout. If only her poise and
temperament could be bottled in a vial
(along with Cruz’s tears). For now, we
might have to settle for anger manage-
ment therapy for Graham and remedial
reading courses for Cruz, who, in another
fantastic foray, asked Jackson whether it
would be okay with her if he decided that,
instead of being Hispanic, he could be
Asian.
Sure, Ted. Whatever you say.
KATHLEEN PARKER
This isn’t the U.S. S enate. It’s d ay care.
