A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER – AT 6:38 A.M. ET:   The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on another Sunday, December 7th, in 1941.  That began the American phase of World War II.

Today the youngest veteran of Pearl Harbor would have been born about 1924 and would be 90.  There are few left.  The World War II generation will soon be gone.   That generation paid a terrible price for the mistakes that led to Pearl Harbor:  1) a failure to take foreign threats seriously and properly prepare the nation for war...which might have deterred war;  2) a failure to understand fanatical ideology, with a smug belief that "nobody really means that talk"; 3) an attitude that we could go it alone, remain in isolation, as if the oceans would protect us.

Sound familiar?

History doesn't repeat itself, but the psychology of history does repeat itself.  And we are experiencing the same delusions today as we did before we were so rudely awakened on that Sunday in December.  We are reducing our forces as our enemies strengthen theirs.  We are dismissing radical Islam as simply a manageable police problem, and their rhetoric as "misunderstood" words.  And, even within the Republican Party, there are new isolationists.

Now, as then, our universities seem to live in their own worlds.  In the 1930s it was common for leading American colleges and universities to welcome Nazi officials and soldiers as honored guests.  In 1939, students at Barnard College in New York flashed faces filled with disappointment when conditions in Europe made it impossible for them to live their dream – to spend a year studying in Nazi Germany. 

The eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson said last week that we are approaching the conditions for a major war.  He is right.  The psychology of history repeats itself once more.  The difference is that, this time, we have a president who doesn't care.

December 7, 2014