Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  To be fair, US troops have labored under handicaps. Among the most severe has been the absence of a common agreement regarding the mission. Apart from the brief period of 2002–2006 when George W. Bush fancied that what ailed the Greater Middle East was the absence of liberal democracy (with his Freedom Agenda the needed antidote), policymakers have struggled to define the mission that American troops are expected to fulfill. The recurring inclination to define the core issue as “terrorism,” with expectations that killing “terrorists” in sufficient numbers should put things right, exemplifies this difficulty. Reliance on such generic terms amounts to a de facto admission of ignorance.

  When contemplating the world beyond their own borders, many Americans—especially those in the midst of campaigning for high office—reflexively adhere to a dichotomous teleology of good versus evil and us versus them. The very “otherness” of the Greater Middle East itself qualifies the region in the eyes of most Americans as historically and culturally alien. United States military policy there has been inconsistent, episodic, and almost entirely reactive, with Washington cobbling together a response to whatever happens to be the crisis of the moment. Expediency and opportunism have seldom translated into effectiveness.

  Consider America’s involvement in four successive Gulf Wars over the past thirty-five years. In Gulf War I, which began in 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, and lasted until 1988, the United States provided both covert and overt support to Saddam Hussein, even while secretly supplying arms to Iran. In Gulf War II, which began in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States turned on Saddam. Although the campaign to oust his forces from Kuwait ended in apparent victory, Washington decided to keep US troops in the region to “contain” Iraq. Without attracting serious public attention, Gulf War II thereby continued through the 1990s. In Gulf War III, the events of 9/11 having rendered Saddam’s continued survival intolerable, the United States in 2003 finished him off and set about creating a new political order more to Washington’s liking. United States forces then spent years vainly trying to curb the anarchy created by the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

  Unfortunately, the eventual withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011 marked little more than a brief pause. Within three years, Gulf War IV had commenced. To prop up a weak Iraqi state now besieged by a new enemy, one whose very existence was a direct result of previous US intervention, the armed forces of the United States once more returned to the fight. Although the specifics varied, US military actions since 1980 in Islamic countries as far afield as Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Somalia have produced similar results—at best they have been ambiguous, more commonly disastrous.

  As for the current crop of presidential candidates vowing to “smash the would-be caliphate” (Hillary Clinton), “carpet bomb them into oblivion” (Ted Cruz), and “bomb the hell out of the oilfields” (Donald Trump), Americans would do well to view such promises with skepticism. If US military power offers a solution to all that ails the Greater Middle East, then why hasn’t the problem long since been solved?

  Learning

  Lessons drawn from this alternative narrative of twentieth-century US military history have no small relevance to the present day. Among other things, the narrative demonstrates that the bugaboos of isolationism and appeasement are pure inventions.

  If isolationism defined US foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s, someone forgot to let the American officer corps in on the secret. In 1924, for example, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur was commanding US troops in the Philippines. Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall was serving in China as the commander of the 15th Infantry. Major George S. Patton was preparing to set sail for Hawaii and a stint as a staff officer at Schofield Barracks. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s assignment in the Pacific still lay in the future; in 1924, Major Eisenhower’s duty station was Panama. The indifference of the American people may have allowed that army to stagnate intellectually and materially. But those who served had by no means turned their backs on the world.

  As for appeasement, hang that tag on Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, if you like. But as a description of US military policy over the past century, it does not apply. Since 1898, apart from taking an occasional breather, the United States has shown a strong and consistent preference for activism over restraint and for projecting power abroad rather than husbanding it for self-defense. Only on rare occasions have American soldiers and sailors had reason to complain of being underemployed. So although the British may have acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind,” as apologists once claimed, the same cannot be said of Americans in the twentieth century. Not only in the Western Hemisphere but also in the Pacific and Europe, the United States achieved preeminence because it sought preeminence.

  In the Greater Middle East, the site of our most recent war, a similar quest for preeminence has now foundered, with the time for acknowledging the improbability of it ever succeeding now at hand. Such an admission just might enable Americans to see how much the global landscape has changed since the United States made its dramatic leap into the ranks of great powers more than a century ago, as well as to extract insights of greater relevance than hoary old warnings about isolationism and appeasement.

  The first insight pertains to military hegemony, which turns out to be less than a panacea. In the Western Hemisphere, for example, the undoubted military supremacy enjoyed by the United States is today largely beside the point. The prospect of hostile outside powers intruding in the Americas, which US policymakers once cited as a justification for armed intervention, has all but disappeared.

  Yet when it comes to actually existing security concerns, conventional military power possesses limited utility. Whatever the merits of gunboat diplomacy as practiced by Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson or by Eisenhower and JFK, such methods won’t stem the flow of drugs, weapons, dirty money, and desperate migrants passing back and forth across porous borders. Even ordinary Americans have begun to notice that the existing paradigm for managing hemispheric relations isn’t working—hence the popular appeal of Donald Trump’s promise to “build a wall” that would remove a host of problems with a single stroke. However bizarre and impractical, Trump’s proposal implicitly acknowledges that with the Hundred Years’ War for the Hemisphere now a thing of the past, fresh thinking is in order. The management of hemispheric relations requires a new paradigm, in which security is defined chiefly in economic rather than in military terms and policing is assigned to the purview of police agencies rather than to conventional armed forces. In short, it requires the radical demilitarization of US policy. In the Western Hemisphere, apart from protecting the United States itself from armed attack, the Pentagon needs to stand down.

  The second insight is that before signing up to fight for something, we ought to make sure that something is worth fighting for. When the United States has disregarded this axiom, it has paid dearly. In this regard, the annexation of the Philippines, acquired in a fever of imperial enthusiasm at the very outset of the War for Pacific Dominion, was a blunder of the first order. When the fever broke, the United States found itself saddled with a distant overseas possession for which it had little use and which it could not properly defend. Americans may, if they wish, enshrine the ensuing saga of Bataan and Corregidor as glorious chapters in US military history. But pointless sacrifice comes closer to the truth.

  By committing itself to the survival of South Vietnam, the United States replicated the error of its Philippine commitment. The fate of the Vietnamese south of the seventeenth parallel did not constitute a vital interest of the United States. Yet once we entered the war, a reluctance to admit error convinced successive administrations that there was no choice but to press on. A debacle of epic proportions ensued.

  Jingoists keen to insert the United States today into minor territorial disputes between China and its neighbors should take note. Leave it to the likes of John Bolton, a senior official during the George W. Bush Administration, to advocate “
risky brinkmanship” as the way to put China in its place. Others will ask how much value the United States should assign to the question of what flag flies over tiny island chains such as the Paracels and Spratlys. The answer, measured in American blood, amounts to milliliters.

  During the twentieth century, achieving even transitory dominion in the Pacific came at a very high price. In three big fights, the United States came away with one win, one draw, and one defeat. Seeing that one win as a template for the future would be a serious mistake. Few if any of the advantages that enabled the United States to defeat Japan seventy years ago will pertain to a potential confrontation with China today. So unless Washington is prepared to pay an even higher price to maintain Pacific dominion, it may be time to define US objectives there in more modest terms.

  A third insight encourages terminating obligations that have become redundant. Here the War for the West is particularly instructive. When that war abruptly ended in 1989, what had the United States won? As it turned out, less than met the eye. Although the war’s conclusion found Europe “whole and free,” as US officials incessantly proclaimed, the epicenter of global politics had by then moved elsewhere. The prize for which the United States had paid so dearly had in the interim lost much of its value.

  Americans drawn to the allure of European culture, food, and fashion have yet to figure this out. Hence the far greater attention given to the occasional terrorist attack in Paris than to comparably deadly and more frequent incidents in places such as Nigeria or Egypt or Pakistan. Yet events in those countries are likely to have as much bearing, if not more, on the fate of the planet than anything occurring in the ninth or eleventh arrondissement.

  Furthermore, “whole and free” has not translated into “reliable and effective.” Visions of a United States of Europe partnering with the United States of America to advance common interests and common values have proved illusory. The European Union actually resembles a loose confederation, with little of the cohesion that the word “union” implies. Especially in matters related to security, the E.U. combines ineptitude with irresolution, a point made abundantly clear during the Balkan crises of the 1990s and reiterated since.

  Granted, Americans rightly prefer a pacified Europe to a totalitarian one. Yet rather than an asset, Europe today has become a net liability, with NATO having evolved into a mechanism for indulging European dependency. The Western alliance that was forged to deal with the old Soviet threat has survived and indeed expanded ever eastward, having increased from sixteen members in 1990 to twenty-eight today. As the alliance enlarges, however, it sheds capability. Allowing their own armies to waste away, Europeans count on the United States to pick up the slack. In effect, NATO provides European nations an excuse to dodge their most fundamental responsibility: self-defense.

  Nearly a century after Americans hailed the kaiser’s abdication, more than seventy years after they celebrated Hitler’s suicide, and almost thirty years after they cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall, a thoroughly pacified Europe cannot muster the wherewithal to deal even with modest threats such as post-Soviet Russia. For the United States to indulge this European inclination to outsource its own security might make sense if Europe itself still mattered as much as it did when the War for the West began. But it does not. Indeed, having on three occasions over the course of eight decades helped prevent Europe from being dominated by a single hostile power, the United States has more than fulfilled its obligation to defend Western civilization. Europe’s problems need no longer be America’s.

  Finally, there is this old lesson, evident in each of the four wars that make up our alternative narrative but acutely present in the ongoing War for the Greater Middle East. That is the danger of allowing moral self-delusion to compromise political judgment. Americans have a notable penchant for seeing US troops as agents of all that is good and holy pitted against the forces of evil. On rare occasions, and even then only loosely, the depiction has fit. Far more frequently, this inclination has obscured both the moral implications of American actions and the political complexities underlying the conflict to which the United States has made itself a party.

  Indulging the notion that we live in a black-and white world inevitably produces military policies that are both misguided and morally dubious. In the Greater Middle East, the notion has done just that, exacting costs that continue to mount daily as the United States embroils itself more deeply in problems to which our military power cannot provide an antidote. Perseverance is not the answer; it’s the definition of insanity. Thinking otherwise would be a first step toward restoring sanity. Reconfiguring the past so as to better decipher its meaning offers a first step toward doing just that.

  22

  History That Makes Us Stupid

  (2015)

  “History is now and England,” the expatriate poet T. S. Eliot wrote back in 1942. Not any more. Today, as far as Americans are concerned, the History That Matters centers on the recent past—the period from 1914 to 1989, to be exact—and on the United States. My aim in this brief essay is to explain why that’s a problem.

  In Donald Rumsfeld’s famous taxonomy of known knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, the History That Matters—hereinafter the HTM—occupies a special niche of its own. That niche consists of mythic knowns.

  All history is selective and interpretive. In the HTM, mythic knowns determine the process of selection and interpretation. Chief among the mythic knowns to which most Americans (academic historians excepted) subscribe are these:

  • that history itself has an identifiable shape, direction, and endpoint;

  • that history is purposeful, tending toward the universal embrace of values indistinguishable from American values;

  • that in the interest of propagating those values, history confers on the United States unique responsibilities and prerogatives.

  None of these propositions qualifies as empirically true. Yet pretending that they are facilitates the exercise of power, which describes the HTM’s underlying, even if unacknowledged, purpose.

  By no means does the HTM purport to tell the whole story. Rather, it reduces the past to its pith or essence. Like the Ten Commandments, it identifies specific shalts and shalt nots. Like the Sermon on the Mount, it prescribes a code of conduct. In doing so, the HTM makes the past usable and, by extension, suitable for exploitation.

  This usable past, laced throughout with mythic knowns, finds expression in a simple and straightforward narrative. This narrative depicts the twentieth century—nothing occurring earlier possessing real importance—as the first American Century, shaped throughout by the actions (or inaction) of the United States. Although incorporating setbacks and disappointments, the narrative culminates in triumph, which signifies vindication and offers reassurance. On balance, things are headed in the right direction.

  In this sense, the HTM concerns itself as much with the present and future as it does with the past. Endlessly reiterated in political speech and reinforced by popular culture, its “lessons” prescribe what the United States—the indispensable nation—is called upon to do and what it must refrain from doing. Paying homage to the HTM affirms and renews its validity.

  That history consists of a drama in three acts, each centered on a large-scale military undertaking. Cast in the principal roles are politicians, generals, bankers, press barons, industrialists, and functionaries of various types acting in the capacity of warlords. Serving as a chorus of sorts are millions of ordinary soldiers sent into harm’s way. The HTM is nothing if not bloody.

  The first act in this drama, initially known as the Great War, subsequently renamed World War I, occurred between 1914 and 1918. When this conflict began, Americans were having none of it. Yet after considerable hesitation, urged on by a president who believed it incumbent upon the New World to save the Old, they took the plunge. The United States went off to fight, Woodrow Wilson declared, “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples.”1 That this u
plifting vision was considerably at odds with the actual war aims of the several belligerents on both sides did not trouble the president.

  Alas, before permanent peace was fully achieved and the liberation of peoples well and truly won, Americans began having second thoughts and reneged on Wilson’s vow. Disaster ensued. World War I thereby set the stage for another even more horrific conflict just two decades later, widely attributed to the refusal of Americans to fulfill the duties to which destiny had summoned them.

  In the interim, a group of historians had mounted an energetic challenge to this interpretation of World War I as a worthy enterprise prematurely abandoned. In effect, they launched a preemptive attack on the HTM even before it had fully formed. These so-called revisionists argued forcefully that US entry into the Great War had been a huge blunder. This became a rare occasion when scholarship both reflected and reinforced the popular mood of the moment. When the moment passed, however, revisionism fell out of fashion and the HTM’s onward march resumed.

  As an episode in the History That Matters, therefore, World War I derives its significance not from the baleful events that actually occurred—devastation and slaughter, starvation and revolution—but from what came next. Act One represents missed opportunity, warning of the consequences likely to result should the United States fail to lead.