Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  World War II, he wrote, had “not only destroyed fascism abroad, but a lot of isolationist notions here at home.” War and technological advance had “buried the whole ostrich of isolation.” At least it should have. Unfortunately, some Republicans hadn’t gotten the word. They were “internationally minded in principle but not in practice.” Stevenson feared that when the chips were down such head-in-the-sand inclinations might come roaring back. This he was determined to resist. “The eagle, not the ostrich,” he proclaimed, “is our national emblem.”

  In August 1957, the Times magazine was at it once again, opening its pages to another Illinois Democrat, Senator Paul Douglas, for an essay familiarly entitled “A New Isolationism—Ripples or Tide?” Douglas claimed that “a new tide of isolationism is rising in the country.” United States forces remained in Germany and Japan, along with Korea, where they had recently fought a major war. Even so, the senator worried that “the internationalists are tiring rapidly now.”

  Americans needed to fortify themselves by heeding the message of the Gospels: “Let the spirit of the Galilean enter our worldly and power-obsessed hearts.” In other words, the senator’s prescription for American statecraft was an early version of “What Would Jesus Do?” Was Jesus Christ an advocate of American global leadership? Senator Douglas apparently thought so.

  Then came Vietnam. By May 1970, even Times men were showing a little of that fatigue. That month, star columnist James Reston pointed (yet again) to the “new isolationism.” Yet in contrast to the paper’s scribblings on the subject over the previous three decades, Reston didn’t decry it as entirely irrational. The war had proven to be a bummer and “the longer it goes on,” he wrote, “the harder it will be to get public support for American intervention.” Washington, in other words, needed to end its misguided war if it had any hopes of repositioning itself to start the next one.

  A Concept Growing Long in the Tooth

  By 1980, the Times showed signs of recovering from its brief Vietnam funk. In a review of Norman Podhoretz’s The Present Danger, for example, the noted critic Anatole Broyard extolled the author’s argument as “dispassionate,” “temperate,” and “almost commonsensical.”

  The actual text was none of those things. What the pugnacious Podhoretz called—get ready for it—“the new isolationism” was, in his words, “hard to distinguish from simple anti-Americanism.” Isolationists—anyone who had opposed the Vietnam War on whatever grounds—believed that the United States was “a force for evil, a menace, a terror.” Podhoretz detected a “psychological connection” between “anti-Americanism, isolationism, and the tendency to explain away or even apologize for anything the Soviet Union does, no matter how menacing.” It wasn’t bad enough that isolationists hated their country; they were, it seems, commie symps to boot.

  Fast forward a decade, and—less than three months after US troops invaded Panama—Times columnist Flora Lewis sensed a resurgence of you-know-what. In a February 1990 column, she described “a convergence of right and left” with both sides “arguing with increasing intensity that it’s time for the U.S. to get off the world.” Right-wingers saw the world as too nasty to save; left-wingers saw the United States as too nasty to save the world. “Both,” she concluded (of course), were “moving toward a new isolationism.”

  Five months later, Saddam Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait. Instead of getting off the world, President George H. W. Bush deployed US combat forces to defend Saudi Arabia. For Joshua Muravchik, however, merely defending that oil-rich kingdom wasn’t nearly good enough. Indeed, here was a prime example of the “New Isolationism, Same Old Mistake,” as his Times op-ed was entitled.

  The mistake was to flinch from instantly ejecting Saddam’s forces. Although opponents of a war against Iraq did not “see themselves as isolationists, but as realists,” he considered this a distinction without a difference. Muravchik, who made his living churning out foreign policy analysis for various Washington think tanks, favored “the principle of investing America’s power in the effort to fashion an environment congenial to our long-term safety.” War, he firmly believed, offered the means to fashion that congenial environment. Should America fail to act, he warned, “our abdication will encourage such threats to grow.”

  Of course, the United States did act and the threats grew anyway. In and around the Middle East, the environment continued to be thoroughly uncongenial. Still, in the Times’ world, the American penchant for doing too little rather than too much remained the eternal problem, eternally “new.” An op-ed by up-and-coming journalist James Traub appearing in the Times in December 1991, just months after a half-million US troops had liberated Kuwait, was typical. Assessing the contemporary political scene, Traub detected “a new wave of isolationism gathering force.” Traub was undoubtedly establishing his bona fides. (Soon after, he landed a job working for the paper.)

  This time, according to Traub, the problem was the Democrats. No longer “the party of Wilson or of John F. Kennedy,” Democrats, he lamented, “aspire[d] to be the party of middle-class frustrations—and if that entails turning your back on the world, so be it.” The following year Democrats nominated as their presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who insisted that he would never under any circumstances turn his back on the world. Even so, no sooner did Clinton win than Times columnist Leslie Gelb was predicting that the new president would “fall into the trap of isolationism and policy passivity.”

  Get Me Rewrite!

  Arthur Schlesinger defined the problem in broader terms. The famous historian and Democratic Party insider had weighed in early on the matter with a much-noted essay that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly back in 1952. He called it—you guessed it—“The New Isolationism.”

  In June 1994, more than forty years later, with the Cold War now finally won, Schlesinger was back for more with a Times op-ed that sounded the usual alarm. “The Cold War produced the illusion that traditional isolationism was dead and buried,” he wrote, but of course—this is, after all, the Times—it was actually alive and kicking. The passing of the Cold War had “weakened the incentives to internationalism” and was giving isolationists a new opening, even though in “a world of law requiring enforcement,” it was incumbent upon the United States to be the lead enforcer.

  The warning resonated. Although the Times does not normally give commencement addresses much attention, it made an exception for Madeleine Albright’s remarks to graduating seniors at Barnard College in May 1995. The US ambassador to the United Nations had detected what she called “a trend toward isolationism that is running stronger in America than at any time since the period between the two world wars,” and the American people were giving in to the temptation “to pull the covers up over our heads and pretend we do not notice, do not care, and are unaffected by events overseas.” In other circumstances in another place, it might have seemed an odd claim, given that the United States had just wrapped up armed interventions in Somalia and Haiti and was on the verge of initiating a bombing campaign in the Balkans.

  Still, Schlesinger had Albright’s back. The July/August 1995 issue of Foreign Affairs prominently featured an article of his entitled “Back to the Womb? Isolationism’s Renewed Threat,” with Times editors having published a CliffsNotes version on the op-ed page a month earlier. “The isolationist impulse has risen from the grave,” Schlesinger announced, “and it has taken the new form of unilateralism.”

  His complaint was no longer that the United States hesitated to act, but that it did not act in concert with others. This “neo-isolationism,” he warned, by introducing a new note into the tradition of isolationism-bashing for the first time in decades, “promises to prevent the most powerful nation on the planet from playing any role in enforcing the peace system.” The isolationists were winning—this time through pure international belligerence. Yet “as we return to the womb,” Schlesinger warned his fellow citizens, “we are surrendering a magnificent dream.”

  Other Times contribu
tors shared Schlesinger’s concern. On January 30, 1996, the columnist Russell Baker chipped in with a piece called “The New Isolationism.” For those slow on the uptake, Jessica Mathews, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, affirmed Baker’s concerns by publishing an identically titled column in the Washington Post a mere six days later. Mathews reported “troubling signs that the turning inward that many feared would follow the Cold War’s end is indeed happening.” With both the Times and the Post concurring, “the new isolationism” had seemingly reached pandemic proportions (as a title, if nothing else).

  Did the “new” isolationism then pave the way for 9/11? Was al-Qaeda inspired by an unwillingness on Washington’s part to insert itself into the Islamic world?

  Unintended and unanticipated consequences stemming from prior US interventions might have seemed to offer a better explanation. But this much is certain: as far as the Times was concerned, even in the midst of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, the threat of isolationism persisted.

  In January 2004, David M. Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, worried in a Times op-ed “that the United States is retracting into itself”—this despite the fact that US forces were engaged in simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among Americans, a concern about terrorism, he insisted, was breeding “a sense of self-obsession and indifference to the plight of others.” “When Terrorists Win: Beware America’s New Isolationism,” blared the headline of Malone’s not-so-new piece.

  Actually, Americans should beware those who conjure up phony warnings of a “new isolationism” to advance a particular agenda. The essence of that agenda, whatever the particulars and however packaged, is this: if the United States just tries a little bit harder—one more intervention, one more shipment of arms to a beleaguered “ally,” one more line drawn in the sand—we will finally turn the corner and the bright uplands of peace and freedom will come into view.

  This is a delusion, of course. But if you write a piece exposing that delusion, don’t bother submitting it to the Times.

  24

  The Ugly American Telegram

  (2013)

  On August 24, 1963, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, received a top-secret message with the bureaucratically anodyne title Deptel 243. But the content of the message was anything but routine. Hastily drafted and cleared over the course of a single day, with most of official Washington on vacation, Deptel 243, also known as the Hilsman telegram, signaled a major shift in American policy. A few days later Mr. Lodge remarked, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back.”

  For years the witticism “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem”—the South Vietnamese president—had captured the essence of America’s position regarding the Southeast Asian country. Nearly a decade before, the United States had helped install Mr. Diem in power and had supported him ever since. On a trip to Southeast Asia in 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson affirmed Mr. Diem’s standing in Washington’s eyes, hailing him as the “Churchill of Asia.” He was our guy.

  Now, according to Deptel 243, he wasn’t.

  Mr. Diem’s principal offense was his refusal to do America’s bidding. Fiercely anti-Communist, he was also fiercely nationalistic, and an autocrat to boot. He resented outsiders telling him how to run a country that was his, not theirs.

  Unfortunately, his insistence on exercising power outstripped his aptitude for doing so. Internal opponents besieged his regime. Insurgents supported by Communist North Vietnam controlled large swaths of the countryside. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or A.R.V.N., built under American tutelage, was neither militarily effective nor politically reliable.

  Things came to a head in the spring of 1963. In major South Vietnamese cities, Buddhist monks mounted large anti-Diem protests, culminating in dramatic acts of self-immolation. The American government pressed President Diem to calm troubled waters. His government responded by roiling them further.

  His influential sister-in-law Tran Le Xuan, commonly known as Madame Nhu, mocked the ritual suicides as “barbecues.” Her husband, Mr. Diem’s brother and right-hand man Ngo Dinh Nhu, used the protests as a pretext to launch a violent crackdown—which he then blamed on the army, angering A.R.V.N. generals.

  Worse still were rumors about Mr. Nhu secretly approaching North Vietnam to explore a possible peace deal. Any such deal would strike at the foundations of America’s Cold War policy, based on the premise that the United States presided over a bloc of freedom-loving peoples devoted to preventing the spread of tyranny. Allowing lesser nations to opt out by reconciling with tyrants would leave the self-anointed “leader of the free world” looking foolish.

  This was the situation facing the Kennedy administration on Saturday, August 24, 1963, when the White House received word of an A.R.V.N. plot to overthrow Mr. Diem. In Saigon, embassy officials sought guidance.

  Seizing the moment, three second-tier officials—Michael V. Forrestal, W. Averell Harriman, and Roger Hilsman—set out to provide it. Within hours, the United States government had thrown in with the coup plotters. Mr. Diem had become expendable.

  “No one made a decision,” the historian Howard Jones later observed. More or less in a fit of exasperation, senior policy makers “merely signed off on one that they all thought someone else had made.”

  Released at 9:36 p.m. that night, Deptel 243 instructed American officials in Saigon to notify A.R.V.N. leaders that providing further military or economic support had become “impossible” unless “steps are taken immediately” by the South Vietnamese president to remove Mr. Nhu—in essence offering Mr. Diem a chance to come around. If, however, “Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.”

  Although providing Mr. Lodge with no specifics on how to make all this happen, the cable assured him that “we will back you to the hilt on actions you take to achieve our objectives.” The ambassador had a free hand.

  The August plot came to nothing, but the change in American policy proved irreversible. Assured of Washington’s backing, disgruntled A.R.V.N. generals eventually got their act together. On November 1, 1963, they overthrew—and murdered—Mr. Diem and his brother. The prospect of a reinvigorated war effort beckoned.

  This, of course, was not to be. If anything, conditions grew worse. Inept generals proved unable to govern. In Saigon, political chaos reigned. Away from the capital, prosecution of the war flagged. Mr. Diem’s departure from the scene had opened a Pandora’s box, setting in motion the sequence of events that culminated in 1965 with the disastrous decision to Americanize the Vietnam War.

  Reflecting on American complicity in Mr. Diem’s overthrow a quarter-century after the fact, the diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke, who was in South Vietnam at the time of Mr. Diem’s overthrow, expressed hope that the mistakes had at least left policy makers a bit wiser. Perhaps, he speculated, they “learned to ask themselves more searching questions about what kind of regime might follow the incumbents; about the real extent of American influence, and of its ability to control events.”

  They hadn’t then. They haven’t since. In Washington, the conviction that removing obstreperous leaders, whether adversaries like Saddam Hussein or “friends” like Hosni Mubarak, facilitates Washington’s ability to steer events remains the most persistent—and dangerous—of illusions. Yet time and again, the effect has been to let loose the forces of anarchy.

  25

  The Revisionist Imperative

  (2012)

  Not long before his untimely death, the historian Tony Judt observed that “for many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works.” Judt might have gone even further. Well beyond the circle of experts and insiders, many ordinary Americans at least tacitly share that view.

  This reading of the twentieth century has had profound implications for US policy in the twenty-first century. With the possible exception of
Israel, the United States today is the only developed nation in which belief in war’s efficacy continues to enjoy widespread acceptance. Others—the citizens of Great Britain and France, of Germany and Japan—took from the twentieth century a different lesson: war devastates. It impoverishes. It coarsens. Even when seemingly necessary or justified, it entails brutality, barbarism, and the killing of innocents. To choose war is to leap into the dark, entrusting the nation’s fate to forces beyond human control.

  Americans persist in believing otherwise. That belief manifests itself in a number of ways, not least in a pronounced willingness to invest in, maintain, and employ military power. (The belief that war works has not made soldiering per se a popular vocation; Americans prefer war as a spectator sport rather than as a participatory one).

  Why do Americans cling to a belief in war that other advanced nations have long since abandoned? The simple answer is that for a time, war did work, or seemed to anyway– at least for the United States, even if not for others.

  After all, the vast conflagration we remember not altogether appropriately as “World War II” vaulted the United States to the very summit of global power. The onset of that conflict found Americans still struggling to cope with a decade-long economic crisis. Recall that the unemployment rate in 1939 was several percentage points above the highest point it has reached during our own Great Recession. Notwithstanding the palliative effects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the long-term viability of liberal democratic capitalism remained an open question. Other ideological claimants, on the far left and far right, were advancing a strong case that they defined the future.