The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The Irony of Manifest Destiny

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

  Fear, Anger and Failure: A Newspaper Column Chronicle

  of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror,

  from 9/11/2001 to 12/29/2003

  Barbarian Sentiments: How the New Century Begins

  The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the

  Furies of Nationalism

  Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends

  Condemned to Freedom

  WITH EDMUND STILLMAN

  Power and Impotence: The Failure of American Foreign Policy

  The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of

  Twentieth-Century Conflict

  The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World

  Copyright © 2010 by William Pfaff

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

  Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  ISBN: 978-0-8027-1699-6

  Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  First U.S. edition 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Worldcolor Fairfield

  To Juliet, Alexander, James, Josephine, and Jason,

  To their mothers and their fathers,

  Alexandra and Adamandia, Fréderic and Nicholas,

  And to their wise and beautiful grandmother

  The knowledge of past events is the sovereign corrective of human nature.

  —Polybius of Megalopolis

  (ca. 201–120 b.c.)

  Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald,

  “Notebooks,” The Crack-Up

  We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.

  —George W. Bush (quoted in

  Bob Woodward, Bush at War, 2003)

  Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill…

  For mine own good,

  All causes shall give way: I am in blood

  Stepp’d insofar, that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er…

  strange things I have in head, that will to hand,

  which must be acted, ere they may be scanned.

  …we are yet but young in deed.

  —Macbeth, Act III

  Contents

  An Introductory Note

  I. A Manifest Destiny

  II. The Enlightenment Invention of Secular Utopia

  III. The Sources of America’s Moral and Political Isolation from Europe

  IV. From American Isolationism to Utopian Interventionism

  V. America’s Elected Enemy

  VI. How It Ends

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  An Introductory Note

  This essay proposes an interpretation of the transformation in Western Enlightenment civilization between the founding political events of modern times, the French Revolution and the creation of the American Republic, and our twentieth- and twenty-first-century experience of extreme ideological violence.

  It is primarily addressed to Americans, as the United States is the most influential, as well as the most powerful contemporary nation and is committed to a secular utopian ideology of universal democracy: an intellectually unsustainable idea as well as politically impossible to achieve, hence a cause for global concern. As Kenneth Minogue, the Australian political philosopher, has observed, a political ideology is implicitly a project to control the world.1

  This is inevitably a work of sweeping, “journalistic” generalizations, many of which may give the reader pause, as departing from the conventional opinion. However, both its argument and its general conclusions are founded in the realities of the present day. Religion has a larger place in my discussion than is usual in books of this kind. It is conspicuously absent from much serious political discussion, except when invoked as the cause of irrational violence or as an idiosyncratic factor in American domestic politics. Little attention is paid to the complexity of religion’s power over how men and women see, and have conducted themselves, historically. This is a lamentable lacuna in the discussion.

  My thesis develops from the Western Enlightenment’s substitution of secular for religious assumptions about society, human values, and destiny: the subject of Chapter II. This changed the expectations held in the West about human progress, and put secular utopian aspirations or expectations in place of those religious beliefs and hopes that previously had dominated Western civilization and Western thought. It thereby deeply altered subsequent history. It was responsible for the extreme violence of the twentieth century and, it may prove, the twenty-first.

  The era in which we live began with Allied victory in the Second World War, the objective of the Allied coalition; but the progressive administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a secondary goal, which was to put an end to European imperialism, seen in Washington as an obstacle to a large and generous reformation of the international system. The Axis defeated, the Soviet-Western alliance disappointed these ambitions by metamorphosizing into the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West that continued until 1989. While the European empires collapsed, most of their former colonies experienced much difficulty in establishing stable sovereign governments.

  International war, usually undeclared, proved not to be over. It subsequently was waged by the United States and various of its allies in Korea in 1950–1953, in Vietnam in the 1960s–1970s, and in the last few years twice against the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq, and then against the insurrectionary eruption caused by the second Iraq intervention, and against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and subsequently against the Taliban insurrection. Informal international conflict, involving major states, continues today in the Middle East. The American military or quasi-military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America in the 1950s and after were continuation of a century-old semi-imperialism, exploitative if paternalistic, justified in the North American mind by the Monroe Doctrine. Concern about the possibility of future major wars is responsible for the present deployment of American forces in some one thousand U.S. military bases and stations throughout the world.2

  This surely was not what President Roosevelt and the American people had in mind during the final months of the Second World War. Nor did they expect a Cold War with the Soviet Union, with the domination of Europe at issue, or with the Chinese Communists.

  What has occurred since 1945 has amounted to an American effort to control the consequences of the twentieth-century crisis in Europe and the breakdown of imperial order in Asia, the Near and Middle East, and latterly in Africa, while maintaining that supervisory role over the Americas first claimed by the United States in 1823. All this has been done with the best of intentions, as in the ultimate interests of the beneficiaries of American attentions, as well as serving what have been conceived to be American national interests, combining to form a harmonious whole.

  These are the subjects of my third and fourth chap
ters, and the fifth chapter is devoted to the character of what unfortunately has become an unnecessary and unwinnable war by the United States against radical currents in the Islamic religion.

  This all occurs within a conception of “manifest” American destiny, initially articulated during the transcontinental expansion of the nineteenth century, matured in twentieth-century world affairs, now extended far beyond the continental limits within which it was first imagined.3 My final chapter provides my conclusions, which regrettably are sober, even apprehensive.

  I

  A Manifest Destiny

  The Enlightenment broke the continuity of Western history and civilization in many ways, but one aspect of what then happened seems little understood; yet it is of great importance today, as the United States makes a bid to consolidate its ideological assumptions and historical legacy in a universalization of the power and leadership it has assumed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  Before the era of monotheistic religion in the Mediterranean world, religious controversy and speculation over the origin and nature of man and creation, and over the existence or nonexistence of an identifiable creator, arose from the philosophical reflections or rationales of individual cultures and societies. From these ultimately came Western monotheism, which has since been accepted as one of the defining characteristics of Western civilization. The Jewish prophets asserted that there was One God, revealed to them as “I Who Am,” or, as Isaiah quoted God, “Apart from me, all is nothing.” Christianity, of Judaic origin, was considered by Christians to be an elaboration of the messianic fulfillment of the One God’s intentions with respect to mankind. Islam, subsequently, was in its own view a further extension of existing divine prophecies, and foresaw the completion of God’s plan.

  The Enlightenment substituted a secular utopianism for the religious beliefs about a celestial future that had been all but universal in Western society since antiquity. The Enlightenment proposed that there was no God (or if there should be one, he occupied a distant position as primordial “clockmaker” to existence, far from human concerns). What Peter Gay, the American historian of the Enlightenment, calls the Modern Paganism was substituted.1

  This much is uncontroversial. One consequence of this, however, seems not to have been fully understood, or to have been widely ignored or denied. This is the connection of Enlightenment secularism to the terrible turn taken by Western history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ideological extremism that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what may be called the exterminatory violence of the 1914–1918 war, followed by the “totalitarian” ideological movements that characterized the twentieth century, are related to the secularization of Western utopian thought.

  A powerful universalizing utopian ambition exists in Western civilization, a creativity and desire for power that have given the West overall global domination since the Renaissance. I do not say this in particular celebration of the West, but to state a reality. The West’s history is distinguished by a creativity and dynamism that have allowed it to shape the modern world, and also by much violence and ruthless aggrandizement as well. The West is what it is, and we are its products.

  The classical and religious cultures that formed the West assumed their ideas to be of universal validity. There was a Greek cultural adventurism and moral daring expressed in the myths of Prometheus, who seized fire from the gods for the benefit of mankind, and of Pandora, the first woman, sent by Zeus to punish humans and their Promethean benefactor by way of an incorrigible curiosity that caused her to open the box containing all of the ills that would ever after afflict mankind. She also appears among us as the Jews’ and Christians’ Eve. She is essential to our humanity.

  In the centuries of Western religious belief that preceded the Enlightenment, utopian expectations were essentially religious and their fulfillment lay outside the limits of human life and time. Perfection and true happiness could only be found in the afterlife. The New Paganism of the European Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century, and the French Revolution that followed a century later, changed the fundamental nature of the envisaged utopia from religious redemption to secular transformation.

  Now utopia had to be fulfilled within human time, and on earth. This made utopian thinking extremely dangerous, above all in a modern Western society that has largely repudiated the idea of “eternal” values and norms, and makes its own rules of conduct, sometimes high-minded and altruistic, and sometimes not. If God is dead, as the Enlightenment asserted, nothing is prohibited—as Dostoyevsky concluded—other than what we decide to prohibit to ourselves.

  Every modern effort to universalize a nation’s power and values so as to establish a “new” human society has rested upon Western illusions of progress that were understood by the Attic Greeks to be illusions, preoccupying Greek myth, religion, and philosophy. This survives in a variety of philosophic and artistic formulations, including the Greek tragedies themselves. The same understanding appears in the medieval Christian conception of Faust and the temptation to seize total power or knowledge through the agency of Satan, at the cost of one’s eternal soul.

  The common theme is that human effort to attain preeminence and unlimited power or knowledge carries a cost; it “presumes” on God or the gods, and is punished by them—or by “fate.” Power produces hubris, defiance of the gods or of the appropriate human order, and this is punished. Tragedy accompanies the exercise of power; and pride ends in ruin. Tragedy follows guilt, according to Aristotle: unavoidable guilt on the part of a person of high spiritual or moral status.

  As a general proposition applied to international relations this has a very old human warrant and might be called the Greek Paradigm or Paradox since it is known today mostly by way of the classical Greek theater and specifically from Greek tragedy. Hubris causes overreaching, which meets defeat and retribution. Modern societies are not exempt.

  Secular utopianism exists in two versions. One is idealistic political action to obtain an unlikely or difficult but attainable goal. After 1945 many worked successfully for a united and peaceful Western Europe, however utopian such a goal seemed amid the ruins of the Second World War. In the 1950s many Americans thought it utopian to expect racial integration, and all but inconceivable that there could be a black American president. Others would have considered it hopelessly utopian to think that without a war the Soviet Union would ever give up its ideology, and of its own accord come to peaceful terms with the Western countries.

  By contrast, the utopianism of a millenarian or transformational kind promises the emergence of a New Man, a “great dawn” providing an ultimate resolution of the human story that makes sense of everything that has gone before. This is a secular substitution for religious belief. Anarchism was such a doctrine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It proposed by acts of terrorism to undermine or discredit existing systems of government and society, revealing their oppressive nature and inspiring people to rise up against them. The rejection of existing society was expected to liberate man’s “natural” disposition to peaceful cooperation. This romantic notion reflected the Enlightenment idea that civilization corrupts the original innocence and reasonableness of humans.

  Something like this was believed by many young people during the upheavals of 1968 and after in Europe and the United States, and later during the period of a certain European and North American enthusiasm for “Maoism” that resulted in “Red Brigade” bombings, murders, and kidnappings, all in the cause of permanent human happiness. Certain sectarian Trotskyite parties still exist that profess the transformation of human society through a “permanent revolution,” whatever that may be.

  The rise of modern violence, as in the events of the French Revolution, accompanied the Enlightenment quest for a secular utopia. The French revolutionary wars were meant to defend the Revolution itself against foreign intervention, and to universalize popular republican government by the overthrow of here
ditary rule throughout Europe. Napoleon, whom Hegel at first celebrated as embodying the “world spirit” of the Enlightenment age, began by defying the prevailing military codes and rules of eighteenth-century limited warfare, which is one reason for his initial successes. He subsequently made profound reforms in European political and social institutions. Their success caused him to appropriate them as the foundation for his own Empire, appointing his generals and his relations as princes of his realm. Though his career ended in military defeat at Waterloo, most of his reforms endured, which is not true of the secular revolutionaries who have followed him. Nonetheless, with his career, an exemplary historical pattern was evident, that of the Greek Paradigm, when prideful ambition inspires overreaching and defiance of the gods, ending in ruinous defeat: Heroic ambition, Hubris, Nemesis.

  Beginning with the French Revolution and Napoleon, there have been a series of efforts by ideological leaders in individual nations to establish European—and, in the twentieth century, international—political and military domination in the name of a secular utopian theory, representing the ideas of a group newly come to power, or the new articulation or rationalization of forces already at work in a society. The new ideology typically is put forward as the next and concluding step in human liberation.

  In each case, the nation concerned holds that its advanced system of values and political vision has outmoded the prevailing international and national systems, requiring them to be destroyed and replaced, necessitating, as well, the repudiation of established legal and moral norms of society and of the international community, so as to make it possible to install its new world order.

  This was the case with the George W. Bush administration, even leaving aside the issues of human rights, torture, and wars of aggression. From early in the war in Iraq, Condoleezza Rice called for discarding the Westphalian international system of autonomous and sovereign nations, a system which implied the need for a diplomacy of balance of power, achieved through negotiation and alliance. She (implicitly) advocated its replacement by American global leadership.2 Historically, in each new attempt to overturn the international order and replace it with a new ideological system, or with the hegemony of one superior nation, the effort has proven unreasonable, provoking wide and ultimately successful resistance. The goal has proven impossible to achieve.*