The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  Instead of a general assurance in his Cairo speech in June 2009, addressed to the Muslim world, that the United States intended to withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and wished to have no bases there, to which there has been no sequel, President Barack Obama might have actually asked the governments of the region for their political assistance to the United States in accomplishing these desirable ends, as well as offering a withdrawal of American forces from South and Central Asia as a whole, and from the Middle East, whose well-being, manner of self-rule, and social and religious affairs might be considered of inherently limited importance to the United States and the affair of the peoples themselves rather than of Washington officials.

  Without entering further into what could become a futile discussion of the “mights” or “might nots” of the last half-century, one can say that the United States would certainly not have found itself at war in 2010 in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and indirectly in Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere in Africa), while still trying to extricate itself from the consequences of its invasion of Iraq seven years earlier.

  Israel, with its conventional and unconventional arms, is capable of assuring its own defense against external aggression, even if newly aware of the limits of its ability to win victories against irregular local and foreign resistance to its occupation of the Palestinian territories which can only increase as its demographic disadvantage mounts. It cannot expect total security without political resolution of the Palestinian question, a problem only it can solve, presumably by withdrawing from the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. With the arrival of the Obama administration in Washington, Israel was once again urged to search for such a solution but was given no new incentive to do so. Forty years of past American involvement have mainly enabled, or indeed encouraged, the Israelis to avoid facing facts, facilitating its colonization of Palestine, accompanied by the emergence of quasi-fascist settler groups hostile to the Israeli government itself, all contributing to that radicalization of Islamic society that inspires a continuing search for revenge. The major shifts in Israeli public opinion and in government policy following the attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008–2009 produced the formation of a government encouraging further seizure of Palestinian territory, a policy inviting new resistance.12 Elsewhere, a noninterventionist Washington might reasonably consider people who are victims of domestic despots, such as the Iraqis before 2003, to be responsible for their own solutions and usually capable of their own revolutions—if they really do want change or revolution. No foreign power occupied Iraq in 2003, imposing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and as 2010 began, the only foreign intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan is America’s (and NATO’s).

  This may be considered a hard-headed, or hard-hearted, doctrine concerning the responsibilities of people themselves, even shocking when international media audiences witness atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere. It does not necessarily imply passivity in the face of atrocity. The appalling nonintervention of the Western powers in Yugoslav ethnic cleansing during the initial UN intervention in that country in 1992 occurred because the Security Council (under U.S. pressure, motivated by Washington’s unwillingness to get involved) pusillanimously limited the UN mission to “peace-keeping” even while a war of aggression was taking place. Only after the Bosnian Serbs attacked UN soldiers, taking prisoners, was military intervention decided by the European governments involved, which the United States then insisted be placed under NATO command. The Dayton agreement that followed separated the combatants, but the situation of Kosovo, its Serbian minority population, and the Albanians of the region is still without a reliable settlement.

  A noninterventionist foreign policy is entirely compatible with multilateral international reaction to atrocious public crimes and the existence of international criminal courts (which the United States has generally opposed because of its present vulnerability to indictments and prosecution for a number of practices that have been or are national policy). However, it is extremely difficult to conduct international interventions in such matters with more positive than negative results, since many such emergencies have causes beyond decisive international remedy. The ultimate roots of the Darfur crisis are ethnic and climatic, since many arable regions of sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing gradual desertification, which causes conflict between the agricultural peoples of the border region and the nomadic or seminomadic people beyond, who are forced inland to feed their herds. Well-meant Western proposals to identify “villains” in such cases and impose military reprisals are usually futile. The Rwanda genocide was the result of the hypocrisies of colonialism and of decolonization and “democratization.” It was both ethnic in nature and a “class” war between the historically oppressed Hutu and their historic rulers, the Tutsi. The ironic outcome is that the ultimate consequence of the genocidal attack by the democratically empowered Hutu majority upon the Tutsi minority has been to restore Tutsi power in Rwanda. Humanitarian intervention itself often creates problems, as nongovernmental groups now readily acknowledge. UN and NGO action to feed and support refugees and casualties can, for example, reward an aggressor by taking his victims off his hands.

  At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when “humanitarian intervention” continued to be a subject of controversy and political manipulation, the Canadian intellectual and now Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff wrote that the United States was the “last hope for democracy and stability” in failed states. Since the Iraq invasion and what has followed, this is no longer a widely held view. Direct American intervention polarizes and politicizes, given not only the widespread present unpopularity of the United States in the non-Western world, but also the frequent incompetence and destructiveness of these interventions.

  My argument from the beginning of this essay has been that the United States is reenacting in war and politics a classic progression in humanity’s collective as well as individual destiny in which the successive stages have consisted in the acquisition of great power—the increasing abuses of power that characterized the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the eight years of the Bush administration, and thus far of its aftermath, with a subordination of ethical values to an ideology of national triumphalism. A conception of American Manifest Destiny as of universal relevance and validity has been held to justify the arbitrary use of power to impose the national will.

  This sequence of events is not the result of any law of history, although humans experience its recurrence. It is recognized in literature, philosophy, and history as a characteristic pattern of human action. What is its culmination? How does it normally end? Aristotle, and the philosophers and artists of his time and before, found “pity and terror” in the artistic representation of such events and a moral catharsis in witnessing their tragic conclusion, considered ineluctable. Can tragedy and failure be avoided in the American case? George Kennan believed that it could if Americans looked within themselves. The nation might eventually discover that it is unable “to find in our relations with other countries or other parts of the world relief from the painful domestic confrontation with ourselves.” He wrote in 1993, “We are, for the love of God, only human beings, the descendants of human beings, the bearers, like our ancestors, of all the usual human frailties. Divine hands may occasionally reach down to support us in our struggles, as individuals, with our divided nature; but no divine hand has ever reached down to make us, as a national community, anything more than what we are, or to elevate us in that capacity over the remainder of mankind.”13

  Those were the words of an old man of eighty-nine, whose belief in the American republic remained very much alive. They might find a different validation in the nation’s simply becoming so distracted by simultaneous and continuing economic and domestic social crises and loss, and the loss of international economic and financial primacy, that it finds itself forced by uncontrollable forces to abandon military and political fantasy and retreat into a healing isolation.

  A second relatively sim
ple possibility is that the nation’s attempt by military means to control the evolution of radical and puritanical political forces in Islamic society, as well as the concomitant ills that afflict the modern world elsewhere, might simply exhaust itself in repeated and extensive military frustration. This could take a long time, as the recognition of failure will be resisted, ignored, or distorted in the minds of American leaders and policy thinkers, convinced that power has given them the means to “make new realities” (as the George W. Bush government tried and failed to do), able to overcome the grinding inertia of existing reality. Such would be a further exhibition of pride, one of the components of Hubris, introduction to Nemesis.

  Another result of such failures, if accompanied by national humiliation, could produce hatred against those Americans held responsible for the failure, as after America’s defeat in Vietnam. One must note that the most intense post-Vietnam hatred was not for those responsible for the war, but for those who had opposed it—and ominously, for those who had fought it: Its veterans to an extent found themselves pariahs, incomprehensibly to themselves. Anger may mount against enemies in the Muslim world, their allies, and their sympathizers, and also against the “so-called allies” who fail to support the United States.

  It was not an isolated segment of opinion that expressed the domestic bitterness that followed the Vietnam War. It included leading figures in the Republican Party and inside the army and air force who held the war’s opponents responsible for having blocked the measures of unlimited war they claimed could still have won in Vietnam (to what purpose, as we now have to ask). This certainly could happen again, and it may even be likely if the war in Asia lengthens, as the president warned the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2009 that it would.

  The Vietnam War aroused an enduring and corrosive hatred between certain groups of Americans. This hatred has reappeared since the 2008 presidential election. The conflicts that have followed have all seemed too intense for their articulated causes. Some said this was a return of racism, suppressed during the presidential campaign. I think not . It was as if a huge, uncomprehending disappointment lay across the land, especially among the poor and middle classes who had most believed in the American Dream and felt most betrayed by what the United States had become by 2010. I would think this is why Barack Obama has so stubbornly sought reconciliation and cooperation in governing the nation. This was to be his greatness. He has yet to find it . In matters of international policy he has followed the road laid out by his immediate predecessors, and by the dominant policy elites and interests that already have failed the nation.

  Imperial failure is more likely to begin in detail than in drama. The Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont has noted that

  one of the minor prophets of the modern era, Joseph de Maistre, wrote under Napoleon, “When a too preponderant power terrifies the universe, one is irritated to find no means to stop it; one abounds in bitter reproaches against the egoism and immorality of governments, which prevent them from uniting to confront the common danger. But at bottom these complaints are ill-founded. A coalition among sovereigns, formed on the principles of a pure and disinterested morality, would be a miracle. God, who owes no one any miracles, and who makes no useless ones, employs two simple means to reestablish the equilibrium: sometimes the giant cuts his own throat, sometimes a greatly inferior power throws in his path an imperceptible obstacle which, no one knows how, subsequently grows and becomes insurmountable; like a feeble reed, caught in the current of a river, which in the end produces an accumulation of silt which changes its course.”14

  The United States may simply find itself with no choice but to fall back on itself, no doubt embittered by disappointment . That might provide a soft ending to empire. The hard ending would be palpable defeat in crucial undertakings. These would have to be defeats that cut through the insulation of ignorance, misinformation, and complacency that has prevailed in the country during the first decade of the new century and such is perhaps impossible. The external crisis would have to be deeper, and be more personal in its effects, than the Vietnam defeat, and that too seems unlikely. The American army thwarted in Vietnam was the people’s army: hence millions of men and their families were involved. It was the corrupted remnant of those American people’s armies that fought the Revolutionary, Civil (on two sides), and world wars, in which, in this new Vietnam version, the privileged of society, and the cowards, stood aside, finding themselves with “other priorities”—as former vice president Richard Cheney told us—and were able to find the complacent doctor, academic dean, or draft board to make it happen. The new all-volunteer American army is working and lower-middle class, and it increasingly is composed of, and recruited from, poor foreigners, in need of a route to legal immigration.

  I suppose there could also be a catastrophic end, in which a maddened American elite would show an ungrateful world why all those nuclear weapons had been saved. That is harder to imagine, almost impossible, but as I have suggested, the personalities and ideologies to constitute an elite of revenge-seekers clearly are latent in modern American political society, having already revealed themselves by their responsibility for American torture sites around the world, our hired assassins, and all the others who have pitilessly killed or been killed in empty causes since 2001. Even to speak of such a possibility is confirmation that the post-Enlightenment crisis of Western civilization is not over.

  Today the conviction is all but unanimous that the First World War was purposeless, entered into without objective cause and finished in general ruin. Everyone agrees that the totalitarian-instigated Second World War, and the delirious ambitions of those who caused that war, displayed man at his most bestial. What then should we say about today’s worldwide struggle between Americans and “the rest” that does not have behind it even a convincing positive ideological cause—such as Marxism-Leninism, which was plausible and seemingly progressive to many in the circumstances of those times? The struggle is not powered by a claim to national vindication after defeat and seeming betrayal—as in Germany’s case after 1918, put together by Hitler with a national project of racial conquest, national expansion, and world domination. America’s only rationale is that as the sole superpower it seeme inevitable that it impose its own values as universal.

  Thucydides, writing of the war between Athens and Sparta, dismisses, as if beyond comment, the evidence of human bestiality loosed on the weak, the arrogance of leaders, the greed of the profiteers, and the criminal complacence of the demagogue, in order to speak of something more important : political stupidity.

  The stupidity is “the belief that military measures and massacres can resolve intricate political-territorial contrarieties of interest; the collective folly that seems to infect civic sensibility, making it tribal and infantile, in moments of victory; the incapacity of statecraft and sheer common sense to halt, to reexamine rationally the mechanism of waste and of mutual crippling, which wars set in motion.”15

  Americans today conduct a colossally militarized but morally nugatory global mission supported by apparent majorities of the political, intellectual, and academic elites of the nation. It has lacked from the very beginning an attainable goal. It cannot succeed. George W. Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward as having said that American strategy was “to create chaos, to create vacuum,” in his enemies’ countries. This was very unwise. The United States risks becoming such a strategy’s ultimate victim.

  * A December 22, 2009, report in the International Herald Tribune said there already were nearly 1,000 American civilian volunteers in Afghanistan, and soon would be 1,200 to 1,300 as part of a “civilian surge” to improve the lives of Afghanis. This is “the most ambitious civilian campaign” in a foreign country “in a generation.” Their mission, officials said, is to stabilize Afghanistan, and “will require cleaning up its government, weaning its farmers from poppy cultivation, making its people healthier, even teaching them to read.” Afghanistan’s estimated present population is well ov
er the 1994 official figure of 20.5 million, most of it illiterate.

  * The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  * This military faction believes that the United States’ Vietnam defeat was caused by a “stab in the back” by the press and television in the 1960s–1970s, by Congress, and by the Nixon administration, which negotiated an agreement with Hanoi by which the United States abandoned that war at just the moment when, in these military critics’ view, victory had become possible.

  † See, for example, Bruce Riedel, “Armageddon in Islamabad,” National Interest, Washington, July–August 2009. Riedel forecast a terrorist threat to nuclear-armed Pakistan that would be “felt around the globe.” Riedel, formerly of the CIA, was an adviser to the Obama campaign and is now at the Brookings Institution.

  * Confusion is sometime produced because the “realist” and noninterventionist policy recommendations put forward in the 1950s and 1960s were at the time pejoratively called “neo-isolationist,” which they were not (whatever that term may mean in contemporary practice). The possibility of a modern American isolationist foreign policy was exhaustively considered by the Brown University political scientist Eric A. Nordlinger in his 1995 book (pre-globalism and pre-9/11), Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century. It ends (unhelpfully) by recommending “moderated idealistic activism.”

  Acknowledgments

  I must thank George Gibson and Steve Wasserman for their painstaking contributions to the task of drawing coherence from disorder in drafting this book.