Between the Alps and a Hard Place

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T
HE SECOND WORLD WAR continues to teach a half century after its end because the greatest wars force people to deal with the full range of human experiences. It is especially useful to reflect on war's lessons during history's rare lengthy periods of peace because during such periods people tend so to misrepresent the harsh realities of war that they intellectually disarm themselves for future trials.

Switzerland's peculiar experience in World War II—managing to retain a degree of independence despite being surrounded by the Axis of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy—teaches much about the complex meaning of deterrence, subversion, economic leverage, neutrality, the balance of power, and the balance between what a people want and what they can have. In short, the Swiss staved off Nazi occupation through military preparations, political ambivalence, and economic machinations—a combination of defiance and cooperation stemming less from calculation than from internal clashes. During the war, Allied economic warriors used to jest that the Swiss worked six days a week for the Axis, and on the seventh day prayed for an Allied victory. They could jest because they knew reality well.

But between 1995 and 1999, a publicity campaign orchestrated by the Clinton administration in conjunction with Edgar Bronfman, billionaire owner of a liquor and media empire, so
caricatured the role of Switzerland in World War II that it led those unfamiliar with the realities of war to some dangerously wrong conclusions about how the world works. Bronfman, the largest family donor to the U.S. Democratic Party,
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president and financier of the World Jewish Congress, used his formidable power to enlist the president of the United States, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, a network of state and local officials, a battery of lawyers, and the media to tell a startling tale: New discoveries showed that Switzerland had really been an ally of Nazi Germany, that the Swiss people shared culpability for the Holocaust, and that Swiss banks had stolen the assets of murdered Jews. Of course there was not a shred of new information in all of this. Bronfman nevertheless managed to convince Switzerland's two largest banks, which together make about $4 billion in profits per year in the United States, that they could do no more business in New York City unless they put a great deal of money at his disposal. So, on August 12, 1998, when these banks agreed to turn over $1.25 billion over three years to be administered chiefly by Mr. Bronfman's organization, the campaign came to an abrupt halt. The campaign, and Swiss actions in World War II, faded away. Too bad.

This campaign was significant in itself: A powerful private party induced officials of the United States, as well as the American legal system, to force foreigners who do business here to pay a huge bribe. Public officials served private interests without any legislative body taking a single vote, any executive official making a decision for which he might be held accountable, any court pronouncing a judgment or even ruling on the admissibility of evidence. This is another example of America's continuing movement away from the rule of law, as well as from a serious foreign policy.

That unseriousness consists in part of the franchising of foreign policy to domestic supporters of the Clinton administration—a policy constructed, as one commentator has put it, “by adding up the demands of domestic interest groups . . . whose discordant voices . . . are each allowed to dictate policy for a season.”
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The result, writes another wise observer, is that “[f]oreign governments have learned not to take seriously administration statements of its general policy goals and to take very seriously administration actions devoted to commercial and ethnic interests.”
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The fundamental reason why the American people permit such unseriousness is ignorance about the realities of international affairs in general as well as of the specific instances in which foreign policy is exercised.

The anti-Swiss campaign is as good an example as any. Reporters, editors, and the few who paid attention to the campaign failed to understand that they were being manipulated, in part because they were ignorant of history and of how nations deal with one another when they are serious. They should have known better than to accept uncritically a documentary showing munitions rolling off Swiss assembly lines while the voice professed shock, shock, that a self-proclaimed neutral country could have sold munitions to the Nazis. Anyone schooled in international affairs would have noted that the documentary never revealed that the Swiss were surrounded, and utterly bereft of the coal and oil they needed to sustain their army and to keep from starving and freezing. The Germans alone decided how much fuel the Swiss would get, at what price, and what they would accept in exchange. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich would not be satisfied with chocolate. What were the alternatives to selling precision instruments and munitions? How much could Switzerland shave from the amount that
Germany demanded? In the same documentary, Rabbi Israel Singer, the chief operating officer of the World Jewish Congress, called Switzerland's neutrality, and the fact that it did not declare war on Germany, an attempt at equidistance between evil and good. But anyone familiar with the balance of power in World War II would have known a Swiss war against Germany could only have produced millions more dead and enslaved—and unrestricted passage for military trains between Germany and Italy. Sophisticated audiences might also have asked what the anti-Swiss campaign meant to the purses and powers of its authors.

A sterile debate followed over whether the Swiss people had saved enough Jews. The answer to that question is “yes” if one compares the percentage of Jewish refugees in Switzerland's population (.5 percent) to the percentage of Jewish refugees in the population of the United States (.1 percent), and “no” if one compares the number of Jews that Switzerland sheltered with the number that it might have sheltered. Just as sterile was the debate about to what extent the Swiss bankers knew that the German gold they were converting into Swiss francs had been looted. This obscured the prior and more interesting questions: Why would the Swiss, who despised the Nazis viscerally, sell anything at all to that regime, what would they take in return, under what circumstances, and why?

This book explains why the Swiss corner of the vast tableau of World War II is interesting: The war forced a people whose degree of democracy and diversity is comparable only to America's to confront military, political, and economic challenges that are all too normal in international affairs. In 1940 Germany's unexpected military victories forced Switzerland to scrap long-standing military plans and adopt radically unpleasant new ones.
Especially interesting is how the new plans were built on a brutally cold assessment of the country's few military assets. In the political realm, Nazi Germany's encirclement of Switzerland, its dominance of Europe, and its powerful subversive apparatus almost succeeded in breaking the country's devotion to its ideals—but failed. The struggle between various Swiss “hard-liners” and “soft-liners” over the meaning of political prudence shows how important it is to get that meaning right.

The economic relationship between Switzerland and Germany is one of history's finest illustrations of the principle that the value of economic assets depends rather strictly on the balance of power. When Germany could have taken what it wanted by force, the Swiss ceded much on credit. When victory hung in the balance, Germany had to pay in gold. When the Germans were losing, the Swiss took advantage of them. In the end, Nazi gold became a liability.

The Axis's and Allies' dealings with Switzerland and other “neutrals” in World War II also teach the classic but oft forgotten lesson that what one nation can ask of another depends strictly on the extent to which it can help erase fear of others while enhancing fear of itself.

This book ends with an examination of how Edgar Bronfman's harnessing just a bit of the power of the U.S. government fits into American foreign policy at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book's aim is to lead Americans, after fifty years without a world war, to ponder the seriousness of foreign policy in general and war in particular.

In the twenty-first century as ever, unseriousness about these things has serious consequences. In March 1999 the United States led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into a war against Yugoslavia without really meaning to. Prior to
the war, discussion of objectives, military operations, and Yugoslav resistance was limited to terms that precluded proper consideration of the nature of the enemy and the enemy's objectives, what it would take to overcome them, and whether America or the “international coalition” was really willing to pay the price. Winston Churchill once warned his generals that in war one sometimes had to take the enemy into account. How much economic pressure on what part of the target would it take to accomplish what? What would the ground troops do? What sort of military operations would be required to impose one's will on the target? How much blood would it all cost?

Two weeks after the start of the 1999 Yugoslav war, a small article appeared in the
New York Times
titled “Conflict in the Balkans: Serbian Strategy.”
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It noted that Yugoslav troops were digging a sophisticated set of interlocking fortifications for their ground forces and air defenses in the country's mountainous terrain—which had been the essence of Yugoslavia's plan to impose maximum casualties on invading Soviet forces. The article also observed that the plan bore a striking resemblance to the strategy Switzerland employed to deter a German invasion during World War II by withdrawing of the bulk of its army into an “Alpine redoubt.” Indeed, American and NATO leaders made it plain that they no more intended to sacrifice blood and treasure to dig the Yugoslavs out of their redoubt than the Germans had to dig the Swiss out of theirs a half century before the American high altitude bombing campaign turned out barely to have scratched the Serbian army.