Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  To explain actual outcomes, whether for good or ill, in terms of what some individual achieved or might have achieved if given the authority to act is clearly to misunderstand the workings of history. As an explanation for why the United States does what it does in the world, the original sin of American exceptionalism or the machinations of the national security state offer a closer approximation to truth than do the scribblings of wise men, whether “architects” inside the policy apparatus or self-proclaimed prophets on the outside looking in.

  The Kennan Diaries reveal in excruciating detail what made one such architect, or prophet, tick. But Kennan himself makes plain just how limited, flawed, and unwise he was. In that revelation may be found whatever redeeming value this book possesses.

  ____________

  1. George F. Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, ed. Frank Costigliola. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).

  5

  Tom Clancy

  Military Man

  (2014)

  Word of Tom Clancy’s passing in October reached me at a local gym. Peddling away on an elliptical trainer, I welcomed the distraction of this “breaking news” story as it swept across a bank of video monitors suspended above the cardio machines. On cable networks and local stations, anchors were soon competing with one another to help viewers grasp the story’s significance. Winning the competition (and perhaps an audition with Fox News) was the young newsreader who solemnly announced that “one of America’s greatest writers” had just died at the relatively early age of sixty-six.

  Of course, Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator. Both satisfy a quantitative definition of eminence. Although political historians are unlikely to rank Cruz alongside Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, his recent twenty-one-hour-long denunciation of Obamacare, delivered before a near-empty Senate chamber, demonstrated a capacity for narcissistic logorrhea rare even by Washington standards.

  So too with Clancy. Up in the literary Great Beyond, Faulkner and Hemingway won’t be inviting him for drinks. Yet, as with Ted Cruz, once Clancy got going there was no shutting him up. Following a slow start, the works of fiction and nonfiction that he wrote, cowrote, or attached his moniker to numbered in the dozens. Some seventeen Clancy novels made it to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, starting with his breakthrough thriller The Hunt for Red October. A slew of titles written by others appeared with his imprimatur. Thus, for example, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Choke Point or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath.

  Similarly, on those occasions when Clancy partnered with some retired US four-star to craft the officer’s memoirs, the result was a tome “by” Tom Clancy “with” General So-and-So, the difference in font size signaling who was the bigger cheese. And then there is Tom Clancy’s Military Reference series, another product line in the realm of fictive nonfiction. Each title—Fighter Wing, for example, or Armored Cav—promises a Clancy-led “guided tour” of what really goes on in the elite corners of the United States military.

  Clancy did for military pop-lit what Starbucks did for the preparation of caffeinated beverages: he launched a sprawling, massively profitable industrial enterprise that simultaneously serves and cultivates an insatiable customer base. Whether the item consumed provides much in terms of nourishment is utterly beside the point. That it tastes yummy going down more than suffices to keep customers coming back.

  If Clancy was a hack, as he surely was, he was a hack who possessed a remarkable talent for delivering what his fans craved. Nor did the Tom Clancy brand confine itself to the written word. His oeuvre has provided ideal fodder for Hollywood too. Movie adaptations chronicling the exploits of Jack Ryan, Clancy’s principal protagonist, and starring the likes of Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Affleck became blockbuster hits. Then there are the testosterone-laced video games, carrying titles like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.

  Clancy-approved video games captured the Pentagon’s fancy. In 2007, Red Storm Entertainment, the gaming arm of Clancy’s empire, released America’s Army: True Soldiers, advertised as an “Official U.S. Army Game.” (“Created by Soldiers. Developed by Gamers. Tested by Heroes.”) The accompanying copy assures prospective purchasers/recruits that “combat action doesn’t get any more authentic than this.”

  Become one of America’s bravest in this game developed in conjunction with the U.S. Army. See what it’s like to live life as an infantryman. Take on the role of a Rifleman, Grenadier, Automatic Rifleman, or Sniper. Develop skills including Valor, Marksmanship, Stealth, and more.

  Here profit and propaganda blend into a seamless package.

  Did I mention Clancy-themed board games, music CDs, toys, and apparel? There is even a Clancy line of pseudo-military collectibles. Among the items available for purchase is the Ghost Recon “Future Soldier”—your choice: statuette or stuffed toy.

  Don’t expect Clancy’s departure to stem this tsunami of stuff. Although the founder himself may have left the scene, Clancy Inc. gives every indication of carrying on. A new Clancy novel called Command Authority arrived in December. And a new Jack Ryan movie, this one not based on previously published material, is in the works.

  Yet to argue that Clancy’s books and ancillary byproducts offer little in terms of lasting value is not to say that they have lacked influence. Indeed, just the reverse is true. As a shaper of the zeitgeist, Tom Clancy may well rate as one of the most influential creative entrepreneurs of the last several decades.

  In whatever medium, Clancy’s abiding theme is the never-ending struggle between good guys and bad guys. His bad guys tend to be irredeemably bad. His good guys are invariably very, very good—Americans devoted to the cause of keeping their countrymen safe and the world free. As good guys, they subscribe to old-fashioned virtues while making skillful use of the latest technology. Whether garbed in battledress or trenchcoats, they are cool, professional, dedicated, resourceful, and exceedingly competent. These are, of course, the very qualities that Americans today ascribe to those who actually serve in uniform or who inhabit the “black world,” whether as CIA agents or members of highly specialized units such as Delta Force or SEAL Team Six.

  What’s worth recalling is that the prevailing view of America’s warriors was not always so favorable. In the wake of Vietnam, shortly before Clancy burst onto the scene, the books that sold and the scripts attracting Hollywood’s attention told a different story. Those inhabiting positions of responsibility in the United States military were either venal careerists or bunglers out of their depth. Those on the front lines were victims or saps. When it came to military-themed accessories, the preferred logo was FTA.

  Clancy was among the first to intuit that the antimilitary mood spawned by Vietnam represented an opportunity. The legions who did not find Catch-22 particularly amusing, who were more annoyed than entertained by M*A*S*H, and who classified Jane Fonda as a traitor were hungry to find someone to validate their views—someone who still believed in the red, white, and blue and who still admired those fighting to defend it. Clancy offered himself as that someone.

  To be more accurate, Ronald Reagan had already offered himself as that someone. What Clancy did was seize the role of Reagan’s literary doppelgänger—what the Gipper might have become had he chosen writing instead of politics after ending his acting career.

  Clancy’s own career took off when President Reagan plugged Red October as “my kind of yarn.” As well he might: Clancy shared Reagan’s worldview. His stories translated that worldview into something that seemed “real” and might actually become real if you believed hard enough. Reagan was famous for transforming the imagined into the actual; despite never having left Hollywood during World War II, he knew, for example, that he had personally witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps. Similarly, Clancy, who never served in the military, imagined a world of selfless patriots performing feats of derring-do to overcome evil—
a world that large numbers of Americans were certain had once existed. More to the point, it was a world they desperately wanted to restore. Clancy, like Reagan, made that restoration seem eminently possible.

  Soon after Clancy’s death, the Washington Post published an appreciation entitled “How Tom Clancy Made the Military Cool Again,” written by a couple of self-described Gen-Xer policy wonks. “Clancy’s legacy lives on in the generations he introduced to the military,” they gushed, crediting Clancy with having “created a literary bridge across the civil-military divide.” His “stories helped the rest of society understand and imagine” the world of spooks and soldiers. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who served or aspired to serve found those stories to be especially gratifying. Clancy depicted American soldiers and would-be soldiers precisely as they wished to see themselves.

  But any understanding gained by either soldiers or society, whether engaged in Patriot Games or fending off The Sum of All Fears, was illusory, rooted in fantasies that sanitized war and conveyed a false sense of what military service really entails. Instead of bridging the civil-military divide, Clancy papered it over, thereby perpetuating it. By extension, he contributed in no small way to the conditions breeding the misguided and costly military adventurism that has become the signature of US policy.

  Clancy did prove to be a figure of consequence. Alas, almost all of those consequences have proven to be pernicious. And there’s no Jack Ryan anywhere in sight to come to our rescue.

  6

  Robert Kagan

  The Duplicity of the Ideologues

  (2014)

  “Almost seventy years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States.” Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, “that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing.” Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that “something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine,” as he writes in the New Republic (“Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire”). Indeed, “the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us.”

  These changes “signal a transition into a different world order,” one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don’t bother to look for material explanations. “If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring,” Kagan writes, “it is not because America’s power is declining.” The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is “an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose.” Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons.

  Writing in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks hails Kagan’s New Republic essay as “brilliant.” A more accurate appraisal would be slickly mendacious. Still, Kagan’s essay also qualifies as instructive: Here, in some 12,700 carefully polished words, the impoverished state of foreign-policy discourse is laid bare. If the problem hobbling US policy is an intellectual one, then Kagan himself, purveyor of a fictive past, exhibits that problem in spades.

  That Robert Kagan, a bona fide Washington insider currently housed at the Brookings Institution, possesses very considerable talents is doubtless the case. A well-regarded historian, he is also a skilled polemicist and an ideologue. Here he combines all three callings to fashion a historical narrative that advances two claims. The first enshrines the entire period since 1945—until Obama sounded retreat, anyway—as a kind of golden age when freedom, democracy, and liberal values flourished as never before. The second attributes this golden age almost entirely to enlightened American leadership. Policymakers in Washington, he writes, manifested a “sense of global responsibility that equated American interests with the interests of many others around the world.”

  Neither one of these claims stands up to even casual scrutiny. Rather than describing the prevailing realities of the post-1945 era, phrases like “world order” and “global responsibility” obfuscate. Purporting to clarify, they merely gloss over. Kagan employs these as devices to beguile, while constructing a version of “truth” that ignores inconvenient facts. There’s a name for this technique: It’s called propaganda.

  The “world order” of the decades following World War II exists only in Kagan’s imagination. You’d hardly know it from reading his essay, but the postwar world was divided into three distinct camps: the American-led West, the Soviet-led Communist bloc, and the so-called Third World, which had its own problems, unrelated to the East-West rivalry, to worry about.

  Furthermore, even to refer to these as camps involves considerable oversimplification. Within each, sharp divisions existed. Nominally allies, France and the United States frequently found themselves at odds, for example. Although Communists ruled Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito refused to take orders from the Kremlin. Some countries—Yugoslavia offers one example, Castro’s Cuba another—consciously sought to keep a foot in more than one camp. Then there was Israel, which occupied a camp all its own. After President Richard Nixon’s famous visit, so too did China, openly antagonistic toward the USSR, but by no means part of the West.

  To the extent that we can credit this disorderly conglomeration with producing anything worthy of note, its chief accomplishment was to avoid a cataclysmic third world war. Here, the United States, sole practitioner of nuclear warfare and possessor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, did play a role. Yet apart from sheer dumb luck, what kept Armageddon at bay was not farsighted global leadership on Washington’s part but prudent self-restraint.

  In October 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev’s rashness handed John F. Kennedy the chance to liberate Cuba from communism, the president judged it the better part of valor to cut a deal instead. Rather than confrontation, he opted for negotiation, offering the Soviets an unearned concession—in exchange for their missiles out of Cuba, ours would come out of Turkey. Cubans remained unliberated.

  Similarly, when brave Europeans under the boot of Soviet dominion periodically rose up—East Germans in 1953, Poles and Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968—Washington’s commitment to freedom and democracy took a backseat to its preference for avoiding a potentially climactic East-West showdown. In each case, the United States stood by as the Kremlin brutally restored discipline in its empire.

  Of course, much like the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Washington asserted the prerogative of policing its own sphere of influence. When it did so—overthrowing regimes not to its liking in Guatemala, Iran, and South Vietnam, for example—the “promotion of a liberal world order” did not rank high on the list of American motives. So too with the roster of despots, dictators, and kleptocrats that the United States assiduously supported. From Batista and Somoza in the 1950s to Musharraf and Mubarak in the past decade, a regime’s adherence to liberal values seldom determined whether it was deemed a worthy American ally.

  Such matters do not qualify for inclusion in Kagan’s celebration of American global leadership, however. Guatemala he simply ignores—not worth the bother. Iran gets mentioned only as a “rogue state” with an inexplicable hankering to acquire nuclear weapons. As for Vietnam, Kagan contents himself with an ambiguous reference to its “uncertain and unsatisfying” outcome, as if the war were a risky stock purchase that still might show a modest profit.

  Other disruptions to a “world order” ostensibly founded on the principle of American “global responsibility” included the 1947 partition of India (estimated 500,000 to 1 million dead); the 1948 displacement of Palestinians (700,000 refugees); the exodus of Vietnamese from north to south in 1954 (between 600,000 and 1 million fled); the flight of the pied noir from Algeria (800,000 exiled); the deaths resulting directly from Mao Zedong’s quest for utopia (between 2 million and 5 million); the mass murder of Indonesians during the anti-Communist purges of the mid-1960s (500,000 slaughtered); the partition of Pakistan in 1971 (up to 3 million killed; millions more displaced); genocide in Camb
odia (1.7 million dead); and war between Iran and Iraq (at least 400,000 killed). Did I mention civil wars in Nigeria, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that killed millions? The list goes on.

  Kagan mentions none of those episodes. Yet all occurred during the Cold War, when the United States was, in his words, “vigilant and ready to act, with force, anywhere in the world.”

  By what standard does a system in which such things occur qualify as a “world order”? With the United States reacting passively to human misery on an epic scale (where not actively abetting the perpetrators), what is the operative definition of “global responsibility” that squares with US behavior? If, as Kagan argues, “the American project has aimed at shaping a world different from what had always been, taking advantage of America’s unique situation to do what no nation had ever been able to do,” then how can it be that such awful events persist?

  The answers to these questions are clear. First, to the extent that a postwar liberal order existed, it was fragile, tentative, and incomplete. It was a club. Membership criteria were strictly enforced. Residents of the Anglosphere were in, of course. So too were certain favored Europeans. After a time, Japan and South Korea gained entry. As far as Washington was concerned, however, most others could fend for themselves.

  Second, in defending this less-than-global order, American leaders by-and-large understood what Kagan refuses to acknowledge: The United States wielded limited power and influence. For the most part, these leaders sought to husband that power. Rather than “ready to act, with force, anywhere in the world,” they confined their actions to places and situations thought to matter.