Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Even so, many gullible (or cynical) observers endorsed President Bush’s interpretation. September 2001 became December 1941 all over again. Once again World War II—unwelcome or inconvenient details excluded, as always—was pressed into service as “a moral memory palace.” As the bellicose authors of a great agitprop classic published in 2004 put it, “There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.” And so a new crusade—preposterously dubbed World War IV in some quarters—commenced.

  We gather here more than a decade later. Although President Bush is gone, the war he declared continues. Once commonly referred to as the Global War on Terror (World War IV never really caught on), today we hardly know what to call the enterprise. Bush’s attempt to graft the putative rationale for war during the Short Twentieth Century onto the new wars in the Greater Middle East didn’t take. His Freedom Agenda withered and died. Even so, with Bush’s successor closing down some fronts, ratcheting up others, and opening up new ones in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya, the conflict itself persists. It’s become the Long War—a collection of nominally related “overseas contingency operations,” defined chiefly by their duration. Once begun, campaigns continue indefinitely.

  What then of the American conviction, drawn from the remembered experience of the Short Twentieth Century, that “war works”? What evidence exists to suggest that this proposition retains any validity?

  Others may differ, but I see little to indicate that our affinity for war is making the country more powerful or more prosperous. If anything, a plethora of socio-economic indicators suggest that the reverse is true. Whatever the United States is experiencing today, it’s not a reprise of World War II. Newsmagazines may enthuse over today’s Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as our “New Greatest Generation,” but they overlook a rather large distinction. In contrast to the opportunities that awaited the previous “Greatest Generation” when its members came home, the wars fought by today’s veterans point toward a bleaker rather than a brighter future.

  History—the version that privileges the Short Twentieth Century above all other possibilities—makes it difficult to grasp the quandary in which we find ourselves as a consequence of our penchant for using force. After all, that account instructs us that “war works” or at least ought to if we simply try hard enough.

  Yet it’s just possible that a more expansive and less self-congratulatory accounting of the recent past—one that treats the Long Twentieth Century with the respect it deserves—could potentially provide a way out. To put it another way, we need to kick down the doors of the moral memory palace. We need to let in some fresh air.

  I am not thereby suggesting that the classic lessons of the Short Twentieth Century have lost all relevance. Far from it. Yet it’s past time to restock our storehouse of policy-relevant parables. This means according to Sykes-Picot, Hussein-McMahon, Deir Yassin, TPAJAX, Suez, Iran-Contra, and, yes, Operation Iraqi Freedom pedagogical weight equal to that habitually accorded to Munich, Pearl Harbor, and Auschwitz. We need a bit less of the Churchill who stood defiantly alone against Hitler and a bit more of the Churchill who, in seeking to police the Middle East on the cheap, proposed shortly after World War I “experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas” as a way to “inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives.”

  Implicit in the standard American account of the Short Twentieth Century is the conviction that history is purposeful, with the vigorous deployment of US power the best way to hasten history’s arrival at its intended destination. A sober appreciation of the surprises, miscalculations, and disappointments permeating the Long Twentieth Century, beginning with Great Britain’s cavalier decision to dismember the Ottoman Empire and running all the way to George W. Bush’s ill-fated attempt to transform the Greater Middle East, should temper any such expectations. What the Long Twentieth Century teaches above all is humility.

  “Ideas are not mirrors, they are weapons.” The words are George Santayana’s, written back when the twentieth century was young. “[T]heir function,” he continued, “is to prepare us to meet events, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true themselves.”

  The ideas, assumptions, and expectations embedded in the received account of the Short Twentieth Century may not be entirely false. But they are supremely inadequate to the present.

  As historians, our obligation to the students who pass through our classrooms includes this one: to provide them with a usable past, preparing them as best we can to meet events as they unfold. Measured by that standard, military historians are falling short.

  William Faulkner famously said of the past, “It’s not dead. It’s not even past.” As a general proposition, there’s something to be said for that view. Not in this case, however. The past that Americans know is worse than dead; it’s become a cause of self-inflicted wounds. As historians, we need to do better. The means to do so are readily at hand.

  26

  The End of (Military) History?

  (2010)

  “In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.

  Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident . . . in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

  Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.

  For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.

  Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas and atomic bombs—the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.

  All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in the simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

  Grand Illusions

  That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914–18 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war’s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers—thanks to war, now great in name only—that faith disappeared altogether.

  Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more c
onfident. The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, “peace” was a code word. The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations—not yet intimate allies—stood apart from the rest of the Western world.

  So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.

  Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. “Peace through strength” easily enough becomes “peace through war.” Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.

  A quarter-century later, US forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H. W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops, like Israeli soldiers, knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated—even eclipsed—the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.

  For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.

  On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel—disregarding Washington’s objections—set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet “facts on the ground” created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.

  In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.

  During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet US bases dotting the Islamic world and US forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.

  Stuck

  No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel’s near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.

  So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren’t intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.

  Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. United States forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West’s gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.

  And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the IDF’s glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars—unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987–93), the Second Intifada (2000–2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008–9 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.

  Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.

  Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF’s experience. Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington’s efforts to transform (or “liberate”) the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as US forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to “shock and awe,” Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:

  We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace. . . Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority.

  The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: “decision superiority.” At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.

  Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.

  Winless

  If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it’s this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today’s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.

  Meanwhile, as the US economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel’s “demographic bomb”—a “fiscal bomb.” Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.

  By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning—at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in US military command posts, the avoidance of outright defea
t emerged as the new gold standard of success.

  As a consequence, US troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to “protect the people,” consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping US commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.

  A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, “military solutions” do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, “we can’t kill our way out of” the fix we’re in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare for the last two centuries.

  The Unasked Question

  What, then, are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history? In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.

  With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.