"We've been told repeatedly over the past generation — and especially since 9/11 — that the world is more complicated than it used to be. The bipolarity of the Cold War is gone for good, and even a term like "multi-polar" seems naively tidy for an unprecedented and bewildering global era increasingly driven by nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, terrorist networks, insurgent groups, tribal councils, warlords, drug cartels and other non-state actors and organizations. Our times may be baffling, but they are hardly unprecedented. States have always shared the international arena with non-state actors. However, abetted by professional historians, states have usually promoted international narratives that leave non-state actors trivialized, distorted or ignored altogether.
Consider the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. Historians on both sides of the border have framed the war as a story about states. They've crafted narratives of the conflict with virtually no conceptual space for the people who actually controlled most of the territory that the two counties went to war over: the Navajos, Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas and other independent Indian peoples who dominated Mexico's far north. These native polities are invisible, or at best trivial, in history books about the U.S.–Mexican War, Manifest Destiny and Mexico's own early national period.
This fact testifies to a colossal case of historical amnesia because Indian peoples fundamentally reshaped the ground upon which Mexico and the United States would compete in the mid-19th century. In the early 1830s, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos and several tribes of Apaches abandoned imperfect but workable peace agreements that they had maintained with Spanish-speakers in the North since the late 1700s. They did so for complex reasons that varied from group to group, but declining Mexican diplomatic and military power and expanding American markets were the backdrop for the region's overall plunge into violence. Groups of mounted Indian men, often several hundred and sometimes even a thousand strong, stepped up attacks on Mexican settlements. They killed or enslaved the people they found there and stole or destroyed animals and other property. When they could, Mexicans responded by doing the same to their Indian enemies…."
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Amicalement
Armand
dips his toe into the Russo-Japanese War.
