The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  I owe a special note of acknowledgment to my friend Patrick Seale, the well-known British writer and authority on the Middle East, for his critical review of what now is chapter V. Needless to say, he bears no responsibility for what I have made of his criticisms.

  The book has grown out of an article published in the New York Review of Books on February 15, 2007, “Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America.” In it I set down reflections inspired by nearly sixty years of engagement with international affairs and American foreign relations.

  My indebtedness to the thought and work of many others dealing with these matters—particular that of George F. Kennan—will be evident (and conscientiously acknowledged, I believe) in my text.

  I must finally acknowledge the crucial moral and philosophical influence of Frank O’Malley at Notre Dame so many years ago.

  Notes

  An Introductory Note

  1. Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985).

  2. According to Foreign Policy in Focus, Washington, February 2009.

  3. “Manifest Destiny” seems to have entered the national political vocabulary as a newspaper editorialist’s phrase, first used in 1845 in connection with the annexation of Texas. Stephen Douglas is so quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Deutsch, 1962) xxiii.

  I. A Manifest Destiny

  1. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Random House, 1961).

  2. In an address by the then U.S. National Security Advisor in London to the 2003 Annual Conference of the International Institute for Security Studies.

  3. One of Hannah Arendt’s deepest insights into the totalitarian phenomenon concerned its all but total disregard of practicality in state policy. Christopher Lasch writes that she wished to call special attention to “the astonishing growth of moral and political nihilism, the emergence of the mentality that ‘anything is possible,’ with its ‘indifference even to elementary considerations of political utility and expediency’”—a mentality that exists among many contemporary American policy makers, for whom “reality” is not a constraint; it is merely what is already past . Their “reality” has yet to be created. Introduction to a special issue on Hannah Arendt, “Politics and the Social Contract,” Salmagundi 60 (1983).

  4. There is “virtually no support” for this idea elsewhere in the democracies as Thomas Carothers noted in “A League of Their Own” (Foreign Policy July-August 2008). For an eloquent plea for achieving a “global nation,” consisting of “multilateralism far beyond anything the world has achieved to date,” see Strobe Talbott, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009). As is apparent in the present book, I regard this objective as unachieveable, undesirable, and dangerous, but it has seduced American policy elites since at least the time of Woodrow Wilson.

  5. George F. Kennan’s eight-thousand-word telegram to his superiors in Washington was composed in February 1946 while Ambassador Averell Harriman was absent from Moscow and Kennan was chargé d’affaires. Its reception in Washington was sensational, and it was rapidly circulated through the highest levels of government, becoming the founding document of the Containment policy.

  In summer 1947—sixteen months later—its substance was printed as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs (July 1947) under the pseudonym “X.” While restrained in tone, and confident that his forecast of eventual Communist collapse would be fulfilled, Kennan emphasized the crucial role of power, noting in the “Long Telegram” that while the Soviet view of the world was a “neurotic” one, and the Soviet leaders “impervious to the logic of reason,” the Kremlin was “highly sensitive to the logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point.”

  Kennan’s initial views on the postwar Soviet Union were set forth both in the “X” article and in the essay “America and the Russian Future,” published in Foreign Affairs in April 1951. The two were published that year, together with his Walgreen Foundation Lectures at the University of Chicago on American foreign relations, in the volume American Diplomacy 1900–1950. His later views appeared in his many books, and notably in Memoirs: 1925–1950, published in 1967, Memoirs: 1950–1963 (1972), a “personal and political philosophy” published in 1993 as Around the Cragged Hill, and a final personal volume in 1996, At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982–1995.

  The distinguished historian John Lukacs has published his fifty-year correspondence with Kennan concerning the early Cold War in George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment 1944–46: The Kennan–Lukacs Correspondence (1996) as well as a wise and moving appreciation, George Kennan: A Study of Character (2007).

  6. Simon Serfaty (of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington), “The Pressures for a New Euro-Atlantic Security Strategy,” Europe’s World (Brussels, Summer 2008).

  II. The Enlightenment Invention of Secular Utopia

  1. The commonly accepted account; however, the argument is made that the Greek legacy was preserved in monastery libraries and known by scholars in the Middle Ages, particularly in southern Italy and Sicily among the Greek Christian diaspora, and in such Western centers of scriptural and philosophical translation as Mont Saint-Michel in France. (See Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne (Paris: Seuil, 2008). Aquinas’s theological and philosophical work in the thirteenth century rested on Aristotelian foundations.

  2. The doctrinal differences were expressed in arbitrary but significant formulations, such as whether the Holy Spirit “proceeded” from the Son as well as the Father, as the Latin Church held, or simply from the Father, as asserted by the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381. This was a matter of great significance to the Eastern Christians, who at the time were defending the divinity of the Holy Spirit against a challenge by Macedonian Christians.

  3. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York and London: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 34. The responsibility of religion for modern violence (and much else that blights the world) has been argued in several recent books (and even on red double-decker London Transport buses), recommending what is called the new atheism (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, for example). Their authors are notable for their invincible theological and historical ignorance in extrapolating the reality of two thousand years of Christian religion from popular modern superstitions associated with it, as commented upon by secular as well as religious reviewers. Speaking for the defense, the British critic Terry Eagleton wrote that Dawkins “falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. Hitchens makes the same crass error … Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything … It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.” He accuses the two “of superstition in their belief in the march of progress; their commitment to individual freedom … is an article of faith that has no grounding in science” (Commonweal March 27, 2009).

  4. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). The Anabaptists were a sixteenth-century sect that rejected the efficacy of infant baptism and rebaptised its adherents as adults, by immersion. It soon divided into several currents. The Anabaptists were distant forerunners of the mainstream Baptist movement of the seventeenth century in Britain, which preached the total liberty of the individual to interpret the sole source of religious truth, the Bible. The Flagellants were adepts of violent and public physical penances and were a recurrent marginal Christian phenomenon, beginning in Italy and Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Among Muslims, self-flagellation is a practice during the annual Shiite penitential observation of the failure to
save from death Husayn, son of the sect’s founder, Ali, supposedly the rightful successor to Muhammad.

  5. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796–1797. Trans. Bertha Pritchard and Lily C. Freeman. (New York: Walker & Company, 1961) 297–299.

  6. Luigi Barzini, an author and famous journalist who knew Mussolini, wrote: “He was perhaps the best popular journalist of his day in Italy, addressing himself not to the sober cultured minority but to the practically illiterate masses … Those very qualities that made him an excellent rabble-rousing editor made him a disastrous statesman: his intuitive and superficial intelligence; his capacity to oversimplify and dramatize; a day-to-day interest only in the most striking events; a strictly partisan point of view; the disregard for truth, accuracy, objectivity and consistency when they interfered with his aims; … an instinctive ability … to know what people wanted to be told … [Of course he] used deceit as a tool to govern with … All great statesmen have had recourse to occasional distortions, misinterpretations and outright lies. Mussolini merely lied more than all other past statesmen, a little more than some of his contemporary competitors, less than Hitler anyway … He, too, believed his own slogans. He, too, was amazed by the fake statistics, thrilled by empty boasts, stirred to tears by his own oratory. He, too, confused appearances for reality … It is well known that Hitler’s favorable opinion of his partner, of Italian military preparations, and the [Italian] people’s devotion to the régime and to the Axis, made him commit fatal miscalculations, one of which probably cost him the war. He believed, in the end, that he lost the Russian campaign because he had started four weeks too late; he was four weeks late because he wasted time to rescue the Italians bogged down in Albania, in their ill-prepared attack on Greece. If this were true, Mussolini could be considered the greatest negative military genius the world has ever seen, who defeated two great nations single-handed, his own and Germany … Thirteen years before his death he had told [the writer] Emil Ludwig: ‘Everybody dies the death that corresponds to his character.’ He had deluded the people, that was his crime. But his fatal error was that he had not known that the people were also deluding him. They led him to the catastrophe which was the only way they knew to get rid of him.” Barzini in The Italians (New York: Atheneum, 1964).

  7. Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1961). In addition to Darkness at Noon, his celebrated, politically plausible and psychologically penetrating novel about the Stalinist show trials. (As it turned out, it was mistaken in its attribution of political motivation to its main character’s false show-trial confession, supposedly made to protect the Party. Such confessions usually were extracted by torture or threats to the victim’s family.) Koestler in 1951 published The Age of Longing, a novel set in postwar Paris that includes an equally plausible portrait of a convinced prewar Nazi. The Nazi officer enthusiastically describes Europe’s future unification and transformation by Nazi Germany (which ironically, in scope and ambition, was not unlike that of the present-day democratic European Union, enabled and inspired by Nazism’s destruction of the Europe of 1940).

  III. The Sources of America’s Moral and

  Political Isolation from Europe

  1. “The European Vision of America” was organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art with the collaboration of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris. It was shown at the National Gallery of Art from December 7, 1975, to February 15, 1976; at the Cleveland Museum of Art, from May 6 to August 8, 1976; and as “L’Amerique vue par l’Europe,” at the Galeries nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris, from September 17, 1976, to January 3, 1977.

  2. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harvest, 1965) 4–5. The passage from Robert Baird is quoted by Miller from Baird’s Religion in America (1844).

  3. Mark A. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), quoted in a review by Ralph C. Wood, First Things (October 2001). With respect to the Franklin Constitutional Convention motion that failed, one can remark that Hannah Arendt has contrasted the “clear signs of divine origin” in the Declaration of Independence’s invocation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” with the desacralization of the political she saw as characteristic of modernity (David Armitage, “Birthday of Principle,” Times Literary Supplement July 6, 2007).

  4. Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

  5. The Richmond Dispatch, with the largest circulation of any newspaper in the Confederacy, commented in early 1863 on “the incongruous and discordant elements out of which the framers of the Constitution sought to create a homogeneous people. The great wonder is not that the two sections have fallen asunder at last, but that they held together so long. The dissimilarity between the moral constitutions, habits of thought, breeding and manners of the Cavalier and Roundhead must run in the blood for generations, and defy all the glue and cement of political unions” (February 27 and March 23). The historian James M. McPherson also quotes the Confederate soldier’s letter urging his wife in 1862 to teach their children “a bitter and unrelenting hatred of the Yankee race … so vile and cursed race” (letter by Captain Elijah P. Petty). Both in McPherson, review of works of the late George M. Frederickson in the New York Review of Books (December 4, 2008).

  6. Bryan as a populist progressive advocated the income tax, woman’s suffrage, free coinage of silver, and anti-imperialism, as well as Prohibition, but in 1925 he volunteered to testify in the celebrated Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee, where a young teacher, John Thomas Scopes, was charged with teaching evolution in violation of a just-passed state law. Under the baiting questioning of Scopes’s attorney, Clarence Darrow, Bryan, as a witness for the prosecution, defended the literal truth of the book of Genesis’s account of creation and affirmed his personal belief that this event had taken place in 4004 b.c., that the Flood occurred around 2348 b.c., and that Jonah had indeed been swallowed by “a big fish.” The judge took pity, stopped the questioning, and struck it from the record. He found Scopes guilty, and fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later sustained the law but freed Scopes on a technicality, preventing a further appeal. Bryan died five days after the trial. Needless to say this settled nothing; during the presidential primary campaign in 2008 the genial ex-governor of Arkansas and one-time Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, who won the Republican caucus nomination in the Iowa primary, was asked about evolution. He replied, “If people want to believe they’re descended from a primate, they can go right ahead.” (He did not disclose the species of his own parents.)

  7. Review of Richard Kyle, Evangelicalism: An Americanized Christianity (New York and London: Transaction, 2006), in the Times Literary Supplement (June 8, 2007).

  IV. From American Isolationism to

  Utopian Interventionism

  1. See R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922), 18.

  2. Walter Millis, The Road to War: 1914–1917, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

  3. George F. Kennan, “America and the Orient,” American Diplomacy 1900–1950, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 49.

  4. See entry on R. A. Taft in the Columbia Encyclopedia, fifth ed. (New York, 1975).

  5. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct .” What later was said in criticism of Kennan and Containment by armchair warriors—“a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example, in practice of a policy of cowardice and dishonor,” according to William Kristol and Robert Kagan (Foreign Affairs, July–August 1996)—is actually a criticism of the Republican John Foster Dulles, who was secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, the time about which Kristol and Kagan wrote. Kennan was a major influence in the post–Second World War reorganization of American clandestine intelligence services and was regarded as the “father” of the Free Europe Committee’s radio
, press, and organizational political warfare operations, and of other CIA initiatives to counter the widespread and influential Comintern propaganda of the period (which was very effective, especially in liberated Western Europe; the present writer was for a time in the mid-1950s an executive at the committee).

  Kennan left the State Department by 1953, after Moscow had rejected his appointment as U.S. ambassador (he knew too much!). His influence was replaced by that of another diplomat, Paul Nitze, who, according to a recent book by Nicholas Thompson, Nitze’s grandson, was author of the policy document (NSC 68) and chiefly responsible for the huge buildup of American military power and shift of emphasis to military force replacing Kennan’s political Containment policies, (The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2009). When the Berlin Wall fell, Kennan said, “I believe it would have happened earlier, if we had not militarized the rivalry.”

  6. Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World (New York and London: Coward-McCann and Victor Bollancz, 1961). Among other critics of the established policy of the period were the Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr (whom Kennan called “the father of us all”), Louis Halle, Ronald Steel (whose important books The End of Alliance and Pax Americana appeared in 1964 and 1966, respectively), and to a qualified extent, as the Vietnam War developed, Walter Lippmann, the columnist . The most important recent critics of interventionism include Chalmers Johnson; John Newhouse; Anatol Lieven (America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lieven and John Hulsman (Ethical Realism, New York: Pantheon, 2006); and Andrew Bacevich (The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008, and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).