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History suggests post-pandemic peace is rare

Bloomberg Opinion Today
Bloomberg

Joe Biden Could End Up Being a Wartime President — Niall Ferguson

Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war. Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is. The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.

First, the Democratic Party's amazing century-plus track record of running on progressive policies and then going to war. Consider Woodrow Wilson, reviled by today's progressives for his racist views, but nominated and elected in 1912 as a progressive.

Wilson's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Baltimore was a classic in the genre of American uplift. "We must speak," he told the delegates, "not to catch votes, but to satisfy the thought and conscience of a people deeply stirred by the conviction that they have come to a critical turning point in their moral and political development. We stand in the presence of an awakening Nation, impatient of partisan make-believe. … Nor was the country ever more susceptible to unselfish appeals to the high arguments of sincere justice."

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