America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  141. Cf. Molly Ivins, “Cheney’s Card: The Empire Writes Back,” Washington Post, December 30, 2003.

  142. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1952; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 31.

  Chapter Five

  1. Quoted in Warren Leslie, Dallas, Public and Private: Aspects of an American City (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998), 222.

  2. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 293.

  3. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 246.

  4. Cf. Joshua Micah Marshall, “Vice Grip,” Washington Monthly (January/February 2003); and Nicholas Lemann, “The Quiet Man” (profile of Dick Cheney), New Yorker (May 7, 2001); for the importance of the cold war as a moral and political paradigm among the radical Right, see David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 469–470.

  5. David Hume Kennerly, quoted in Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 93; see also Derek Leebaert, The Fifty Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2002); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt/Owl Books, 2003).

  6. The best book on the neoconservatives is Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Joshua Micah Marshall, “Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2003).

  7. Cf. Lars-Erik Nelson, “Military-Industrial Man,” New York Review of Books 47, no. 20 (December 21, 2000).

  8. Cf. Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 69.

  9. Quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–94 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 42.

  10. Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 45–46.

  11. Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations: And the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 301–321.

  12. Jacob Weisberg, “The Family Way: How Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himelfarb, and Bill Kristol became the family that liberals love to hate,” New Yorker (October 21, 1996); and (October 28, 1996).

  13. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1976), 181–182, 316–325.

  14. Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 61–87.

  15. Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 279.

  16. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000).

  17. Jonathan Clarke, “The Guns of 17th Street,” National Interest 63 (Spring 2001).

  18. Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time 157, no. 9 (March 5, 2001).

  19. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), 235–273.

  20. Vaisse, Neoconservatism, 267–268.

  21. Bacevich, American Empire, 167; Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 29–45.

  22. In the words of a U.S. senator (from the Democratic Party) to me in January 2002.

  23. See David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper Collins, 1986); David Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002), 71; see also the profile in the Washington Post, “Zealous Norquist Plans Conservative Golden Era,” January 12, 2004.

  24. Mark Almond, “Your Tyrant or Ours?” New Statesman (London), November 17, 2003.

  25. See Howard Kurtz, “Conservative David Frum Loses Think Tank Job After Criticizing GOP,” Washington Post, March 26, 2010. For the attack on Frum in the Wall Street Journal, see “The GOP and Obama Care,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2010.

  26. Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” National Interest (Spring 1993).

  27. Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed—1962,” in The Radical Right (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1963), 8–12.

  28. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (London: Penguin, 1990), 48.

  29. Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War Against Terrorism (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).

  30. Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and John Bolton, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010).

  31. John Bainbridge, The Super-Americans: A picture of life in the United States, as brought into focus, bigger than life, in the land of the millionaires—Texas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 237.

  32. Cf. Nicholas Lemann, “The Quiet Man” (profile of Dick Cheney), New Yorker (May 7, 2001), 69.

  33. Aaron Klein, The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists (New York: WND Books, 2010).

  34. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 184.

  35. Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 417.

  36. Cf. Michael T. Klare, “America’s Military Revolution: Cold War Government with No War to Fight,” Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), July 2001.

  37. Quoted in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 44–45.

  38. Cf. Gordon Alexander Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 288, 293–296, 307–308; Eckart Kehr, Economic Interest, Militarism and Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 75ff; Richard Owen, “Military Industrial Relations: Krupp and the Imperial Navy Office,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1978); V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 136–143.

  39. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty Year Wound, 230–231, 243–246.

  40. Cf. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 306–334.

  41. Cf. Anatol Lieven, “The (not so) Great Game,” National Interest (Winter 1999/2000). For the later stages of the debate on the Russian threat to India and British responses, see Max Beloff, Imperial Sunset, vol. 1, Britain’s Liberal Empire, 1897–1921 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 20–25, 31–39; Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 212–280; and David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828–1914 (London: Methuen, 1977). For the mid-nineteenth-century origins of the particular British fear and dislike of Russia, see John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).

  42. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 88–89.

  43. Cf. the premise of John Milius’s 1984 film of heroic American resistance to a Soviet–Cuban–Nicaraguan occupation, Red Dawn.

  44. See Stephen W. Mosher and Chuck DeVore, China Attacks (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2000); Carl Berryman, 2013: World War III. AuthorHouse, 2004); Ian Slater, Choke Point: World War III (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).

  45. Cf. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1952, repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  46. Norman Podhoretz, Present Danger: Do We have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), quoted in Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism:
Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 61 (note); cf. also Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism. 108–109.

  47. Norman Podhoretz, “How to Win World War IV,” Commentary 113, no. 2 (February 2002).

  48. Cf. Craig, Germany 1866–1945, 104–113; V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

  49. For another classic piece of later anti-Soviet paranoia, see Raymond Sleeper, ed., Mesmerized by the Bear: The Soviet Strategy of Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1987), with contributions by Jack Kemp and Paul Nitze.

  50. For an account of the link between Russian military defeat and the condition of Russian culture and society, see Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

  51. See, e.g., William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric, Commonwealth or Empire: Russia, Central Asia or the Caucasus (New York: Hudson Institute, 1996); William E. Odom, “Realism About Russia,” National Interest (Fall 2001); George Will, “Back in the USSR,” Washington Post, September 3, 2000; William Safire, “Dangerous Consequences,” New York Times, November 4, 1999; Bill Gertz, “Defense Official says US still needs nukes; threat remains from Russia, others,” Washington Times, February 13, 1997; Ariel Cohen et al., “Making the World Safe for America,” in Issues 96: The Candidates’ Briefing Book (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1996); and Richard Pipes, “Russia’s Past, Russia’s Future,” Commentary (June 1996). For a challenge to such views, see Stephen Sestanovich, “Geotherapy: Russia’s Neuroses, and Ours,” National Interest 45 (Fall 1996). For a discussion of these views, see Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power.

  52. For the role of institutional vested interests in perpetuating hatred and fear of Russia in the 1990s, see Owen Harries, “The Dangers of Expansive Realism,” National Interest (Winter 1997/98).

  53. Cf. Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January/February 2000); press conference by President Bush, February 22, 2001, http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2001/02/iraq 010222zwb.htm; for a critique of this approach, see Owen Harries, “The Dangers of Expansive Realism.”

  54. See Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Appeasement Is the Proper Policy Towards Confucian China,” Daily Telegraph, January 22, 2011.

  55. Walter Russell Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 36–37.

  56. Irwin Stelzer, “Our Broken China Policy,” Weekly Standard (January 17, 2011).

  57. See Michael T. Klare, “Containing China: The US’s Real Objective,” Asia Times, April 20, 2006.

  58. The Project 2049 Institute website is at http://project2049.net/.

  59. See http://www.house.gov/coxreport; for critiques of the Cox Report, see Walter Pincus, “Hill Report on Chinese Spying Faulted; Five Experts Cite Errors, ‘Unwarranted’ Conclusions by Cox Panel,” Washington Post, December 15, 1999. See also the critique by Jack Kemp and Gordon Prather quoted by John McCaslin, “Kemp and Cox,” Washington Times, July 15, 1999; Tom Plate, “Cox Report was ‘an Exercise in Amateur-Hour Paranoia,’” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1999; Editorial, “Lessons of the Cox Report,” Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1999. For an overview of relations in the 1990s, see David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing US-China Relations 1989–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

  60. Quoted in Cal Thomas, “Damage assessments…and duplicity,” Washington Times, May 28, 1999.

  61. Thomas, “Damage assessments,”

  62. Juliet Eilperin, “DeLay Assails China, Urges Taiwan Trade Talks,” Washington Post, June 3, 2003. For the views of conservative Republican colleagues, see, e.g., Representative Dick Armey, “Saying No to China,” Washington Times, October 30, 1997; and Senator Trent Lott, “Ten Ways to Engage China,” Washington Times, June 24, 1998.

  63. Cf. John Bolton, “Democracy Makes All the Difference,” Weekly Standard (April 3, 2000); “Beijing’s WTO Double-Cross,” Weekly Standard (August 14, 2000). See also Bush’s remarks on China in the South Carolina Republican Primary Debate, February 15, 2000, shown on Larry King Live.

  64. Nancy Gibbs et al., “Saving Face,” Time 157, no. 15 (April 16, 2001).

  65. Gibbs et al., “Saving Face”.

  66. Joshua Cooper Ramo, Time 157, no. 10 (March 12, 2001); Johanna McGeary, “Dubya talks the talk,” Time 157, no. 13 (April 2, 2001.

  67. Cf. James Lilley and Carl Ford, “China’s Military: A Second Opinion,” National Interest 57 (Fall 1999). This formed part of an exchange with Bates Gill and Michael O’Hanlon, who, in “China’s Hollow Military,” National Interest 56 (Summer 1999), had taken a much more sober view of Chinese power. See also “China Viewed Narrowly,” New York Times, June 10, 2000; for an extreme anti-Chinese view, see Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000). See also the review essay, “Peking Won’t Duck,” by Tom Donnelly, Weekly Standard (December 4, 2000). For the campaign to adopt a strategy of “containment” against China, see Robert G. Kaiser and Steven Mufson, “Blue Team Draws a Hard Line on Beijing; Action on Hill Reflects Informal Group’s Clout,” Washington Post, February 22, 2000; Jay Branegan, “A ‘Blue Team’ Blocks Beijing,” Time (April 16, 2000); Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 82–88.

  68. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004).

  69. Kurt M. Campbell (former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs), “China Watchers Fighting a Turf War of their Own,” New York Times, May 20, 2000, quoted in Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 62.

  70. See, e.g., Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on September 8, 2010, http://www.cfr.org/diplomacy/conversation-us-secretary-state-hillary-rodham-clinton/p22896.

  71. Xu Yunhong quoted by Claude Arpi, “To Overlook Reality Would Be Stupid,” Indian Defence Review, March 2, 2011. For the Project 2049’s advocacy of an anti-Chinese military alliance including Vietnam, see Dan Blumenthal et al., “Asian Alliances in the 21st Century,” http://project2049.net/documents/Asian_Alliances_21st_Century.pdf. See also D. S. Rajan, “China: Media Fears Over India Becoming Part of Western Alliance,” South Asia Analysis Group paper 2350, August 29, 2007. For critiques of the idea of an anti-Chinese alliance, see Gwynne Dyer, “US Bending Over Backwards to Secure Indian and Japanese Alliance,” Japan Times, August 27, 2007; Gregory Clark, “Australia’s Anti-China Pact,” Japan Times, April 12, 2007; Hisane Misaki, “‘Alliance of Democracy’ Flexes Its Military Muscles,” Asia Times, March 31, 2007.

  72. For neoconservative advocacy of a global alliance of democracies, see Robert Kagan, “The Case for a League of Democracies,” Financial Times, May 13, 2008, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2008/05/13/case-for-league-of-democracies/3fp. This is not explicitly directed against China—but would certainly be seen in Beijing as anti-Chinese.

  73. Max Boot, “Project for a New Chinese Century: Beijing Plans for National Greatness,” Weekly Standard (October 10, 2005).

  74. See Charles King, “Potemkin Democracy: Four Myths About Post-Soviet Georgia,” National Interest (July 1, 2001).

  75. Cf. Colonel H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

  76. For Shinseki’s views, see Thom Shanker, “Retiring Army Chief Warns Against Arrogance,” New York Times, June 12, 2003. For the attacks on Shinseki, see Rowan Scarborough, “Wolfowitz Criticizes ‘Suspect’ Estimate of Occupation Force,” Washington Times, February 28, 2003; Michael O’Hanlon, “History Will Get the Last Word: Rumsfeld and Shinseki’s Tough Relationship,” Washington Times, June 20, 2003.

  77. Cf. Michael T. Klare, “America’s Military Revolution: Cold War Government with No War to Fight,” Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), July 2001.

  78. Cf. David M. Lampton and K
enneth Lieberthal, “Heading off the Next War,” Washington Post, April 12, 2004.

  79. President Bush and Premier Wen Jiabao, remarks to the press, December 9, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031209–2.html.

  80. John Ikenberry, “The End of the Neo-Conservative Moment,” Survival 46, no. 1 (Spring 2004). See also Martin Walker, “And Now, the End of US Unilateralism,” The Globalist, March 5, 2004, http://www.theglobalist.com.

  81. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 5 (September/October 2002).

  82. Cf. David Frum and Richard Perle, “Beware the Soft-Line Ideologues,” Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2004; for an early radical nationalist reaction to the change of official wind, see Michael Ledeen, “Grim Anniversary,” National Review Online, September 11, 2003, http://www.nationalreview.com/search/apachesolr_search/Michael%20Ledeen%20grim%20anniversary.