Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillment (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption—acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets. By the end of the twentieth century, many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that “to consume was to be free.” The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006—with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with “Islamofascism”—an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?” In the conduct their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative. Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows “the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,” Cross comments, it also imposes “the duty to spend for the ‘good of the economy.’”

  Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today, consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic well-being. In recent years “Black Friday” has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar—the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last.

  American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution—both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right—massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders, who see our reigning conceptions of freedom as shallow and corrosive.

  Empire of Red Ink

  Still, this consumer’s paradise retains considerable appeal for outsiders looking in. The many millions from south of the border or across the seas seeking entry testify to this fact. In the eyes of the typical Third Worlder, to be American is to be rich, pampered, and profligate. Entrance into the United States implies the prospect of being well-fed, well-housed, and well-clothed—to walk where streets are paved with gold. But how real are our riches? In the recent book Among Empires, Charles Maier, professor of history at Harvard, has chronicled the shift from what he calls America’s postwar Empire of Production, when we made the steel, the cars, and the TVs, to today’s Empire of Consumption, when goods pour in from Japan and China. The implications of this shift for foreign policy are profound. If we are still paving our streets with gold, we’re doing so with someone else’s money. In paradise, it turns out, the books don’t balance. The federal budget is perpetually in the red. The current account deficit mounts from one year to the next, now topping $800 billion per annum. The national debt is closing in on $9 trillion. The Republican-controlled Congress of the past decade has dealt with this troubling problem precisely as Congress did back when Democrats called the shots: it has routinely raised the ceiling to allow the debt to balloon ever upward.

  Despite these alarming trends, we Americans refuse to live within our means. We have discarded old-fashioned notions of thrift, deferred gratification, and putting up for a rainy day. We have forgotten how to save. We won’t trim entitlements. We adamantly ignore what President Bush himself refers to as our “addiction” to foreign oil. To sustain the Empire of Consumption we are acquiring a mountain of debt, increasingly owed to foreign countries. The unspoken assumption is that our credit line is endless and that the bills won’t ever come due. Once upon a time, Americans would have dismissed such thinking as twaddle. No more. Having made a fetish of freedom-as-consumption, we have become beholden to others. Dependence, wrote Jefferson two centuries ago, “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.” As our dependence has deepened, the autonomy that from 1776 through the 1950s ranked as the nation’s greatest strategic asset has withered away. Although periodically bemoaning this slide toward dependence, the nation’s political leaders have done little to restore our economic house to order. In practice, ensuring the uninterrupted flow of foreign oil and borrowing from abroad to feed the consumer’s insatiable appetite for cheap imports have become categorical imperatives.

  Back in 1992, when the immediate issue related to curbing greenhouse gases, President George H. W. Bush cut to the heart of the matter: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” Compromise, accommodation, trimming back the expectations implied by that way of life—none of these are to be countenanced. Dependence has large foreign-policy consequences. It circumscribes freedom of action. A week after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld spelled out the implications. In formulating a response to the terrorist attack, the United States had only two options. “We have a choice,” Rumsfeld remarked, “either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter.”

  More Than a Comma

  The global “war on terror” represents the Bush administration’s effort to do just that—to change the way that they live. “They,” of course, are the 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit an arc stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The overarching strategic aim of that war is to eliminate the Islamist threat by pacifying the Islamic world, with particular attention given to the energy-rich Persian Gulf. Pacification implies not only bringing Muslims into compliance with American norms. It also requires the establishment of unassailable American hegemony, affirming the superiority of US power beyond the shadow of doubt and thereby deterring attempts to defy those norms. Hegemony means presence, evidenced by the proliferation of US military bases throughout strategically critical regions of the Islamic world. Seen in relation to our own history, the global “war on terror” signifies the latest phase in an expansionist project that is now three centuries old. This effort to pacify Islam has foundered in Iraq. The Bush administration’s determination to change the way Iraqis live has landed us in a quagmire. Today the debate over how to salvage something positive from the Iraq debacle consumes the foreign-policy apparatus.

  Just beyond lie concerns about how events in Iraq are affecting the overall “war on terror.” Expressing confidence that all will come out well, President Bush insists that historians will eventually see the controversies surrounding his Iraq policy as little more than a comma. Rather than seeing Iraq as a comma, we ought to view it as a question mark. The question posed, incorporating but also transcending the larger “war on terror,” is this: Are ongoing efforts to “change the way that they live” securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise?

  If the survival of American freedom requires pacification of the Islamic world, as adherents of the old expansionist tradition believe, then this must be said: exertions made up to this point have been laughably inadequate. Changing the way they live presumes a seriousness hitherto lacking on the part of the American people or their elected representatives, including the president himself. If we intend to transform not only Iraq but also Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, prudence dictates that we stop kidding ourselves that the intended beneficiaries of our ministrations will welcome us with open arms.

  Why bamboozle ourselves with claims of righteousness that few others believe? Better to acknowledge, as the hawkish military analyst Ralph Peters has done, that we are actually engaged “in an effort to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assa
ult.” Doing so will prevent us from being surprised by the intensity of resistance that awaits us as we enforce President Bush’s so-called Freedom Agenda across the broad expanse of Islam. Mounting such a campaign implies mobilization, commitment, sacrifice, and reordering national priorities with the prerequisites of victory rising to first place. It will necessarily require the allocation of additional resources to satisfy the mushrooming requirements of “national security.” We will have to hire many more soldiers. A serious attempt to pacify the Islamic world means the permanent militarization of US policy. Almost inevitably, it will further concentrate authority in the hands of an imperial presidency. This describes the program of the “faster, please” ideologues keen to enlarge the scope of US military action. To paraphrase Che Guevara, it is a program that calls for “one, two, many Iraqs,” ignoring the verdict already rendered by the actually existing Iraq. The fact is that events there have definitively exposed the very real limits of American hard power, financial reserves, and will. Leviathan has shot his wad.

  Seeking an escape from our predicament through further expansion points toward bankruptcy and the dismantling of what remains of the American republic. Genuine pragmatism—and the beginning of wisdom—lies in paying less attention to “the way that they live” and more attention to the way we do. Ultimately, conditions within American society determine the prospects of American liberty. As early multiculturalist Randolph Bourne observed nearly a century ago, ensuring that authentic freedom will flourish at home demands that we attend in the first instance to “cultivating our own garden.” This does not imply assuming a posture of isolationism, although neoconservative and neoliberal proponents of the global “war on terror” will be quick to level that charge. Let us spare no effort to track down those who attacked us on 9/11, beginning with Osama bin Laden, still at large more than five years later. But let us give up once and for all any pretensions about an “indispensable nation” summoned to exercise “benign global hegemony” in the midst of a uniquely opportune “unipolar moment.” For too long now these narcissistic and fallacious claims, the source of the pretensions expressed by President Bush since September 2001, have polluted our discussion of foreign policy and thereby prevented us from seeing ourselves as we are.

  Cultivating our own garden begins with taking stock of ourselves. Thoughtful critics have for decades been calling for just such a critical self-examination. Among the very first canaries to venture into the deteriorating mineshaft of postwar American culture was the writer Flannery O’Connor. “If you live today,” she observed with characteristic bluntness a half-century ago, “you breathe in nihilism.” O’Connor correctly diagnosed the disease and other observers bore witness to its implications. Her fellow Southerner Walker Percy wondered if freedom American-style was not simply becoming the “last and inalienable possession in a sick society.” The social critic Christopher Lasch derided “the ideology of progress” manipulated by elites contemptuous of the ethnic, social, and religious traditions to which ordinary folk subscribed. Lasch foresaw an impending “dark night of the soul.” From his vantage point, Robert Nisbet detected the onset of what he called “a twilight age,” marked by “a sense of cultural decay, erosion of institutions . . . and constantly increasing centralization—and militarization—of power.” In such an age, he warned, “representative and liberal institutions of government slip into patterns ever more imperial in character. . . . Over everything hangs the specter of war.” Towering above them all was Pope John Paul II who, in a message clearly directed toward Americans, pointedly cautioned that a democracy bereft of values “easily turns into a thinly disguised totalitarianism.” Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it deadens our awareness of the danger it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning clichés about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe.

  We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation. Shedding or at least discrediting the spurious conceptions of freedom to which Americans have lately fallen prey qualifies as a large task. Still, when compared to the megalomania of those who, under the guise of “eliminating tyranny,” are intent on remaking the entire Islamic world, the restoration of our own culture appears to be a positively modest goal. At the end of the day, as William Pfaff has observed, “The only thing we can remake is ourselves.” And who knows? Should we, as a consequence of such a reformation, actually live up to our professed ideals—restoring to American freedom something of the respect that it once commanded—we may yet become, in some small way, a model worthy of emulation.

  28

  What Happened at Bud Dajo

  (2006)

  One hundred years ago this past week, on March 7, 1906, the American military’s first sustained incursion into the Islamic world reached a climax of sorts. At Bud Dajo, on an island in the southern Philippines, US troops massacred as many as a thousand Filipino Muslims.

  In the conventional narrative of America’s rise to greatness, Bud Dajo hardly qualifies for a footnote. Yet the events that occurred there a century ago deserve their own chapter. For those hankering today to use American power to transform the Islamic world, Bud Dajo offers a cautionary tale.

  The US troops had arrived on a mission of liberation, promising to uplift the oppressed. But the subjects of American beneficence, holding views of their own, proved recalcitrant. Doing good required first that the liberators pacify resistance and establish order. Before it was over, the Americans’ honor had been lost, and uplift had given way to savagery.

  Although it had seized the Philippines in 1898 during the course of its war with Spain, the United States made little immediate attempt to impose its authority over the Muslim minority—known as Moros—concentrated in the southern reaches of the archipelago. Under the terms of the 1899 Bates Agreement, American colonial administrators had promised the Moros autonomy in return for acknowledging nominal US sovereignty. But after the US suppressed the so-called Philippine Insurrection of 1899–1902, during which US forces defeated Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo, authorities in Manila turned their attention to the Moros. In 1903, they abrogated the Bates Agreement and ordered Major General Leonard Wood to assert unambiguous jurisdiction over what the Americans were now calling the Moro Province.

  The imperious Wood, President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite general, viewed his new charges as “nothing more nor less than an unimportant collection of pirates and highwaymen.” He did not bother to disguise his intentions: the Moros would either submit or suffer harsh consequences. As one of Wood’s subordinates noted approvingly, “We are going after Mr. Moro with a rough hand, we are holding him up to all the high ideals of civilization.”

  A rough hand it proved to be. Personally offended by the Moro propensity for blood feuds, polygamy, and human trafficking, Wood set out to render Moro culture compatible with prevailing Western values. Doing so meant first creating a new political order.

  Certain that a generous dose of American firepower would make the Moros amenable to his program of reform, he arrived at his new headquarters in Zamboanga hankering for a fight. As he assured the president, “one clean-cut lesson will be quite sufficient for them.”

  Wood miscalculated. Neither one, nor a dozen, nor several dozen such lessons did the trick. His efforts to root out offending Moro customs—issuing edicts that declared ancient Moro practices illegal, demanding that Moro tribal chiefs profess their fealty to Washington, and visiting reprisals on those who refused—triggered a fierce backlash.

  An ugly war ensued, pitting poorly armed Moro warriors against seasoned US Army regulars. The Moro weapon of choice was the kris, a short sword with a wavy blade; the Americans toted Springfield rifles and field gu
ns. As in present-day Iraq, the Americans never lost an engagement. Yet even as they demolished one Moro stronghold after another and wracked up an impressive body count, the fighting persisted. The Moros remained incorrigible.

  At Bud Dajo, a volcanic crater on the island of Jolo, things came to a head. In late 1905, hundreds of Moros—determined to avoid paying a US-imposed head tax, which they considered blasphemous—began taking refuge on the peak. Refusing orders to disperse, they posed, at least in the eyes of nervous American officials, an intolerable threat. In “open defiance of the American authority,” the district governor on Jolo complained, the Moros of Bud Dajo were setting themselves up as “patriots and semi-liberators.”

  These would-be revolutionaries had to be crushed. So Wood dispatched several battalions of infantry to Bud Dajo with orders to “clean it up.” On March 5, 1906, the reinforcements arrived and laid siege to the heights. The next day, they began shelling the crater with artillery. At daybreak on March 7, the final assault commenced, the Americans working deliberately along the rim of the crater and firing into the pit. Periodically, “a rush of shrieking men and women would come cutting the air and dash amongst the soldiers like mad dogs,” one eyewitness reported, but the results were foreordained. When the action finally ended some twenty-four hours later, the extermination of the Bud Dajo Moros had been accomplished. Among the dead lay several hundred women and children.