The Irony of Manifest Destiny
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7. Washington policy ignored the so-called Sino-Soviet split that had developed rapidly after Stalin’s death in 1953 and that was deepened by the “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin, made by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev at the Community Party’s Twentieth Congress in 1956. The divergence between the Maoist government and post-Stalinist Russia rested fundamentally on different national as well as party interests, but official Washington at this period was so mesmerized by Communist ideology as to refuse the notion that national interest could prevail over ideology. This blindness caused the American failure to recognize that the Communist Viet Minh and Viet Cong in Indochina were fundamentally motivated by nationalism, with Communism being the vehicle for mobilizing and disciplining the national resistance. This conceptual error was responsible for the prolonged U.S. involvement in that war, with its deeply tragic consequences for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as well as for Americans.
8. John Gray in a review in the New York Review of Books (October 9, 2008) of Leszek Kolakowski, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
9. Bush policy was greatly influenced by the opportune publication of a book by the former Soviet dissident and Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky, arguing that international stability is possible only when democracy prevails. (Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, New York: Public Affairs, 2004.) This is a pleasing thought but has no evidence to sustain it . The United States, for example, is a democracy, and yet, in part under the influence of this proposition, is the greatest national source of instability in the contemporary world because of its efforts to impose stability on others who do not want it in its American form. The Sharansky book came to the attention of the White House at a convenient moment, when the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was having an electoral impact .
In a talk given at the Woodrow Wilson Scholars’ Center following the Soviet collapse, Alan Greenspan said: “The dismantling of the central planning function in an economy does not, as some had supposed, automatically establish [market capitalism]. After 1989 we discovered that much of what we took for granted in our free market system and assumed to be human nature was not nature at all but culture.” Mr. Greenspan had actually discovered not the force of culture but of sin—original sin, which the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has described as “the one empirically verifiable Christian tenet .”
10. The India-Pakistan case is an exception since the perceived threat is strictly bilateral, and the concerned countries have simply replicated for themselves, at great expense, the “balance of terror” that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The danger of terrorist-held nuclear weapons exists, if barely. It would require the complicity of a nuclear state, and the political plausibility of any government allowing terrorists to control such weapons seems next to nil, while the technical and logistical complexity of such an operation would be great . In any case there is little to be done about the possibility that is not already being done. In nuclear military matters one would do well to consult the writings of my former colleague, the late Herman Kahn, whose exhaustive and deliberately provocative analyses are the reference for serious consideration of the subject. However, most discussion of “rogue-state” nuclear weapons is simple scare-mongering, meant to promote fear of and hostility toward countries that the nation issuing such propaganda wishes to undermine for entirely different reasons. Iraq and Iran provide obvious examples of such manipulation.
V. America’s Elected Enemy
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
2. David Levering Lewis, “Islam and the Making of the First Europe, A Counter-Narrative,” Berlin Journal (Spring 2008). Adapted from Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008).
3. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). Feldman is a jurist and historian, Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard.
4. Malise Ruthven, “The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists,” New York Review of Books (May 29, 2008).
5. Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
6. Chen Tu-hsiu, accepted leader of the literary renaissance associated with the National Peking University (established 1898). Quoted in K. Madhu Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1953).
7. See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983).
8. Wendy Kristianasen, “Who Is a Salafist?” Le Monde diplomatique (English Edition), Paris, February 3, 2008. See also Samuel Helfont, “The Sunni Divide: Understanding Politics and Terrorism in the Arab Middle East,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, November 2009.
9. Malise Ruthven, “The Rise of the Muslim Terrorist .”
10. Jean-Pierre Filiu, “Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Fantasy of the Caliphate,” Le Monde diplomatique (English edition), Paris, June 2008.
11. Henry Kissinger, op-ed, International Herald Tribune (April 7, 2008).
12. Condoleezza Rice, address to the Annual Convention of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 2003.
13. McCain quoted in David Whitford, “The Evolution of John McCain,” Fortune, June 28, 2008.
14. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century (New York and London: Knopf, 2008).
15. Bruce Riedel, “Armageddon in Islamabad,” National Interest, Washington, D.C., July–August 2009.
16. Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian, London, August 7, 2009.
17. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Random House, 2007).
VI. How It Ends
1. Mr. Brzezinski himself claimed responsibility for the mujahideen uprising against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in an interview with the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur (January 15–21, 1998). “The reality, secretly guarded until now, [is that] it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention … We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would” as translated by the present writer, New York Review of Books, April 8, 2004.
2. Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: A.M. Kelly, 1951). “Fifty years ago … ” from Stillman and Pfaff, The New Politics.
3. Andrew Bacevich, in his introduction to Bacevich, ed., The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), xii.
4. My remarks about the American army are not meant to denigrate the institution but to comment upon how it has been used. I myself had a long and positive association with the U.S. Army, donning its uniform at the age of fourteen, in Junior ROTC in a Southern army town, and taking the uniform off for the last time at the age of twenty-eight, leaving the active reserve.
5. John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6. Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Civilian and Military, rev. ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1959) 13–15. William Lind quoted by Chalmers Johnson in an interview published on the Web site www.Tomdispatch, March 2, 2009.
7. Robert G. Kaiser, So Damned Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Random House, 2009). See also John R. MacArthur, You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing, 2008). Kaiser is the associate editor of the Washington Post and MacArthur is the publisher of Harper
’s magazine.
8. John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999).
9. Claes G. Ryn, America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003). For a splendid account of the neoconservatives’ origins and the influence of Leo Strauss, see Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
10. Christopher Caldwell, “The Politics of Self-Abasement,” Financial Times, June 5, 2009.
11. George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1993), chapter 9, passim.
12. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said on September 29, 2008, what “everybody” had already known but no Israeli leader in power had had the courage to say: “That Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land that it held on to would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.” Interview in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, as reported in the International Herald Tribune on September 30, 2008. Unfortunately, Olmert on September 29, 2008, was caretaker prime minister and was incapable of acting on his words.
13. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill.
14. The Devil’s Share: An Essay on the Diabolic in Modern Society (Washington, D.C.: Bollingen Series of the Old Dominion Foundation,1994), 199–200. Copyright assigned to Bollingen Foundation, Inc., New York, NY. Meridian edition first published March 1956.
15. See George Steiner, review of Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War, in the New Yorker, March 11, 1991.
Index
’Abd al-Rahman III, 115
Abraham, 110
Adams, Henry, 54–55
Adams, Samuel, 46
Afghanistan
British troops in, 159
civilian volunteers in, 158n
private contractors in, 167
Soviet invasion, U.S. involvement in, 153–154, 206n1
U.S. invasion of, 161
Afghan-Pakistan war
American interests and goals, 165–170
Obama and, 85–86, 137, 163–165
strategy for, 144
Taliban and, 145–148
African nativist cults, 125–126
Age of Longing, The (Koestler), 199n7
Ahmed, Mohammad, 124
Albigensian Crusade, 25–27
Albright, Madeleine, 91
Algeria, 82, 140, 142–143
Allawi, Ali A., 128n
al Qaeda. See also bin Laden, Osama
Bush administration interest in seeing as global threat, 144–145
claimed connections to, 141–143
decline of, 140, 144
Foreign Policy Research Institute survey on, 138–141
motives of, 41
Muslim support, decline of, 143–144
new caliphate notion and, 134, 135
objectives of, 137–138
Americas, discovery and image of, 18–19
Anabaptists, 30–31, 197n4
anarchism, 5–6
Andalusia, 114–115
apocalyptic sectarianism, 28–29, 63
Appalachia, 57, 57n
Aquinas, Thomas, 196n1
Arab federation, 133
Arab Human Development Report, 118
Arendt, Hannah, 193n3, 199n3
Aristotle, 4, 185, 196n1
Arnaud-Amalric, 26
Atatürk, Kemal, 119, 121
atheism, new, 196n3
Athens, 87–88
Bacevich, Andrew, 157, 203n6
Bacon, Francis, 20
Baird, Robert, 50
Baptist movement, 197n4
Barzini, Luigi, 36, 197n6
bases, U.S., 89–91, 154, 162
Béziers massacre, 26
Bible, 20, 29–30, 56, 200n6
bin Laden, Osama, 26n, 41, 143, 149–150, 155
Black Mass (Gray), 27–28
Bobbitt, Philip, 136
Bohlen, Charles, 14
Bolshevism, 8–9. See also Soviet Union
Bosniaks, 26
Brecht, Bertolt, 10
Brown, Gordon, 159
Bryan, William Jennings, 54, 200n6
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 153–154, 206n1
Bundy, George, 81n
Burnham, James, 77–78
Bush, George H. W., 154–155
Bush, George W., and administration
influences on, 27–28, 64–65, 82, 101, 173–175
military expansion, 154
nation-building and, 91–93, 105
preemption and prevention, 173
rhetoric of, 15, 134–135, 144–145, 160, 190
war on terror, 37n, 82–83, 108–109
Westphalian system discarded by, 7, 136
business interests, 166, 167–169
Cadogan, Alexander, 76
Caldwell, Christopher, 176–177
caliphate, “new,” 132–137
Calvinism, 23–24, 28–29, 56
Cambodia, 9–10, 80, 126, 180
Canada, 44n, 141
Carter, Jimmy, 153–154, 206n1
Castro, Fidel, 8
Catharist movement, 25–27
Catholic Church, 22–23, 117. See also Christianity
Charlemagne, 23
Cheney, Richard, 173, 189
China
“clash of civilizations” theory and, 104–105, 106–107
communist utopianism, 9–10
Cultural Revolution and Red Guards movements, 126–127
geopolitical ascent of, 105
in National Defense Strategy, 97
New Tide movement, 124–125
real interests of, 79
Sino-Soviet split, 203n7
T’ai P’eng Rebellion, 124
Vietnam and, 82
Wilson’s reaction to Revolution, 71n
Chirac, Jacques, 64–65
Christianity. See also Evangelical Protestantism; religion
Anabaptists, 30–31, 197n4
apocalyptic sectarianism, 28–29
Calvinism, 23–24, 28–29, 56
conflict within, 24–25, 31–32
Crusades, 22, 25–27
eschatology, 29–30, 63, 64–65, 86
Great Schism, 25, 196n2
heresy, 22, 25–28, 30–31
as missionary, 21–24
monotheism, 1–2, 110–113
within Ottoman Empire, 115n
pope-emperor structure, 116–117
rationalism in, 30
Reformation, 22–23
Churchill, Winston, 77
civilizations, “clash of,” 104–110
Civil War, 61, 69–70
“clash of civilizations” theory, 104–110
“clear-and-hold” approach, 144, 165
Cleveland Museum of Art, 47–48, 199n1
Cohn, Norman, 30–31, 37
Cold War, xii–xiii, 75–82
Communism
Asia and, 79–80, 81–82, 125, 159
Containment policy, 14–15, 76, 79, 194n5
Soviet, 38–40, 79
conservatism, 11, 11n, 75, 173. See also neoconservatism
Constitution, U.S., 170
Containment policy, 14–15, 76, 79, 194n5
corporate interests, 166, 167–169
courts, international, 183
Cronin, Audrey Kurth, 144
Crusades, 22, 25–27
Darrow, Clarence, 200n6
Darwin, Charles, 54
Dawkins, Richard, 196n3
Declaration of Independence, 18, 43–44, 199n3
De Gaulle, Charles, 150
Deists, 18
democracy and democratization
Athenian, 87–88
conservative and liberal agreement on, 173
federation of democracies, 11–12, 194n4
in Germany
and Japan, 101
ideology of progress toward, 15, 86–88, 87, 122
nation-building, 91–94
realism and, 177
security policy and, 100–101, 157
as solution for global military struggle, 89
violence from expansion, 13–14
Wilsonianism and, 71
Descartes, René, 20
Douglas, Stephen, 193n3
Dulles, John Foster, 76–77, 81, 82, 202n5
Eagleton, Terry, 196n3
Egypt, 130–131
Eisenhower, Dwight, 76
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 52, 53–54
enemy, conception of
bipolar perspective and, 82–83
extension to nontraditional threats, 15–16, 84
“global,” 80
“Islamic terrorism,” 13–14
semipermanent war and, 159
energy interests, 166
Enlightenment, Western. See also utopianism, secular
American republic and, 48
changes created by, 17–18
as continuity break, 1
ideological extremism and, 2
limited in U.S., 48–50
modern violence, rise of, 6
radical doubt position, 19–20
religion and, 2, 3, 18, 20, 50–51, 54
eschatology, 29–30, 63, 64–65, 86
eugenics, 8n
“European Vision of America” exhibition (Cleveland Museum of Art), 47–48, 199n1
Evangelical Protestantism
Bush administration and, 64–65, 175
“Christian Right,” 174
Evangelical
eschatology, 29–30, 63, 64–65, 86
history of, 50, 55–56, 62
military converts, 63–64
political significance of, 62, 64–65
Wilson and, 71n
executive power, 160, 174–175
expatriates, 54–55
fascism
Italian, 9, 36
Nazism, 8, 9, 36–37, 132
Faulkner, William, 61
federation of democracies, proposed, 11–12, 194n4
Feldman, Noah, 119–120, 124
Ferguson, Niall, 136
Ferrero, Guglielmo, 32–33
Filiu, Jean-Pierre, 134, 135n
Flagellants, 30, 197n4
foreign intrusion and occupation, resistance to, 122–127
Foreign Policy Research Institute survey, 138–141
Fourier, Charles, 21n