The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The record of these efforts writes the history of the twentieth century. To begin with the most dramatic case, Adolf Hitler arrogated to himself a project for European unification and eventual Nordic or “Aryan” world leadership, accompanied by “purification” and reordering of the human race through eugenic measures that included the destruction of human groups deemed “unfit” to exist.*

  Stalin, a successful provincial revolutionary, was led by the theory of a dialectical and predetermined historical process, taken from Marx and Lenin, to employ state power to assist history to its necessary conclusion in rule by the working class (which was to say, by its self-appointed “vanguard,” the leaders of the Bolshevik Party). It was an undertaking inherently incredible, but became believed in by millions, until undone by its cruelty and futility. By contrast, Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, and the Marxist revolutionaries in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, found in Marxism a popular dynamism applicable to nationalist objectives—which are not utopian in the transformational sense.†

  The admixture of fantasy and romanticism in Nazism and Bolshevism was fatal to them.3 They would have failed even if they had not been defeated in war. Theirs were “unnatural” expectations—as Mikhail Gorbachev and his associates ultimately understood, when they finally acknowledged the Soviet system’s failure and launched glasnost—“truth-telling.”

  Fascism in Italy, where it began, was on the other hand a version of romantic nationalism whose objective was the creation of a new Roman Empire, impossible militarily and politically for twentieth-century Italy, but not unimaginable. While it attracted nationalist (and anti-Semitic—which Italian Fascism initially was not) imitators in Romania, Hungary, and elsewhere, it was never an international movement as such, nor a transcendant and transformational ideology. When Mussolini died, so did Fascism, other than for a few Italian nostalgics. Nazism, because of its base in the notion of a superior “race,” has a marginal international survival, including in the United States.

  We are astounded today to think that at the time educated people actually believed Nazi racial theories, or Communism’s naive notion of an eventual proletarian paradise. But millions did. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, like the Chinese Communists in their “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution,” justified humiliation and murder of the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and even the merely educated and those corrupted by living in cities, so as to give humanity a new start and a renewed innocence.

  In each of these cases, the effort to achieve the new program so as to change man and society has caused or provoked a destructive war or campaign of oppression. Violence in the service of a secular utopia has consistently tended to be remorseless and total—since so much is at stake, with so little time to achieve it. “What vileness would you not commit … to change the world?” the German Communist poet Bertolt Brecht asked in 1931. The answer was found in the practices of the Soviet and Nazi states.

  The United States, with its traditions of pragmatism and practicality, and the national myth of unlimited opportunity, has not in the past been susceptible to this kind of ideology. Its style has been populist and nationalist . Since abandoning isolationism, however, and in search of an international vocation, the nation’s ideological immunity has waned, and the utopianism of the nation’s origins recurs. The American conception of Manifest Destiny, originally seen as transcontinental expansion, has been recast since the time of Woodrow Wilson as the creation of a world order that is nominally pluralistic but under ultimate American leadership—which, it is taken for granted, would be welcome to nearly all.

  A program to bring the world to democracy reflects a large consensus of views in the American professional foreign and political communities today. It constitutes a version of secular utopian thought that sees man as “naturally” democratic if only he can be freed from the repressive national, cultural, and religious bonds that confine him, and if the despots who rule him are removed. It is a highly romantic view of society that demonstrates how far the policy’s main modern theoreticians, most of whom in the George W. Bush administration identified themselves as neoconservatives, have actually been from real conservatism, and how close to a sentimental leftism.*

  Their view of how this transformation of international society is to come about, which has roots deep in the American political consciousness and history (including the liberal and Democratic party traditions), envisages the democracies initially forming an association or federation under American leadership (or in another and highly unlikely version, the transformation of a much-strengthened NATO into a political as well as security federation). In whatever version, it reflects the policy tradition that in the past produced the League of Nations and the United Nations, both great disappointments to Washington because they included no effective executive power. The group now envisaged would form a political union that would also have a common economy. (The international credit collapse that began in America in 2008 cooled enthusiasm for a deregulated capitalist economic and trading system centered upon the United States.)

  A federation of the democracies is powerfully seductive to American policy elites. It was in the presidential platform of John McCain in 2008 and was endorsed as a goal by Barack Obama. It is fair to say that among American political and professional foreign policy elites, including those prominent in the Obama administration, this, or something very much like it, is widely (if vaguely) assumed to be the ultimate objective of American foreign policy. It is unrealistic, and has virtually no chance of occurring.4

  Previously, when religion dominated nations and the moral reasoning and expectations of the societies of Western civilization, the meaning of human existence, its necessary norms, and the future of mankind were usually understood in the terms provided by religious prophecy and doctrine. It was a human duty to analyze, understand, and respect these doctrines. To set one’s own interpretation of the universe against that believed to have been revealed by God and his prophets was presumption, heresy, or indeed madness.

  The secular era has no divine reference, and frequently has constructed its substitute for that reference in the form of a synthetic religion whose god is the nation and people themselves. For that reason the modern political ideology has generally proven to be a project to control the world. The nature of an ideology is the purported discovery of the universal truth about society and history, implying a line of action necessary to conform to or exploit this discovery. A program is implied, and a national policy.

  The United States has dramatically departed from the isolation of its colonial origins into the global arena to become the ideologically expansionist military power it is today. Why and how this happened is important to understand, along with the historical and cultural circumstances that shaped this development . For the United States, this is comprehensible only in the context of the Western rationalist civilization that has existed since the time of the Enlightenment . American ideology now claims to know the direction in which history is headed. It proposes an explanation of the role being played—or that should be played—by the American state, as well as suggesting the risks of that role. This is presented in the language of pragmatism, as well as of national interest, international interest, and world peace. But it amounts to a nationalist American ideology.

  The implications of this are dangerous to the United States, to its allies, and to international peace, because of its lack of realism. The American project to bring democracy to a recalcitrant world has already, under the Clinton and two Bush administrations, produced in the first decade of the new century a series of unsuccessful military interventions in weaker societies, with a fragile truce (at this writing) in Iraq, a second war in Afghanistan that risks a destructive American military and political intervention in nuclear-armed Pakistan, and failed or inconclusive interventions in Somalia and other parts of Africa and Arabia.

  The current enemy, identified as “Islamic terrorism,” consists of an ensemble of groups making up a num
ber of separate if related movements of nationalist, puritanical, and anti-Western political reform, of religious inspiration, active in several parts of the Muslim world. Such a movement is implanted in a part of the ethnic and linguistic community composed of the forty million Pashtuns of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, unconquered since the time of Alexander the Great.

  A certain tradition of political realism in the interpretation of international affairs, influential in the American government during the period between the last world war and the fall of the Soviet Union, now has been abandoned. Associated with George F. Kennan, author of the Containment policy; with another distinguished diplomat, Charles Bohlen; and with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and certain other major twentieth-century American diplomatic and intellectual figures, it was responsible for the analysis that identified the postwar Soviet Union as a dangerous and expansionist ideological power whose ambitions needed to be calmly appraised, “contained,” and countered by American policy and that of the other wartime Allies.5 This went against much sentimentality among Americans during the last year of the Second World War and the early postwar years about the legacy of the Popular Front, gratitude for the immense Russian war effort, and a popular notion of Stalin as a benevolent figure (whom Roosevelt told Churchill he was confident he “could handle”).

  “Containment,” despite its militarization during the 1950s, was ultimately a great success, due to the reality perceived in 1951 by Kennan that the Soviet “grand design [was] a futile and unachievable one, persistence in which promises no solution of their own predicaments and dilemmas,” so that its containment offered the prospect of “eventual breakup or gradual mellowing of Soviet power,” which in fact occurred, exactly as predicted.

  In place of this modest, humane, and effective realism about the Soviet Union, the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has substituted a political ideology based on faith in universal human progress toward democracy, validating the superiority of American institutions, ideas, and practices. During the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, this faith hardened in the face of the terrorist challenge, and was recast as authorizing aggressive international intervention, and when necessary military preemption, to destroy obstacles to the American vision of the future—a policy that George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address amounted to an American mission to abolish evil from the world (a task in the past ordinarily thought reserved to God).

  Eventually the conception of America’s enemy became extended to radicalism of most kinds, to disorderly states, conflict, and failure in the non-Western world, to poverty and social disorder (“breeding grounds” for terrorism—as President Obama reiterated in March 2009, when justifying interventions into Pakistan), as well as to “rogue nations,” meaning those that defy the United States. A senior figure in the Washington policy community, listing what were “increasingly agreed” (in summer 2008) to be the “nontraditional” threats to Europe and America, began with “terrorist groups of global reach and potential access to weapons of mass destruction,” and continued with “WMD diversification and proliferation, failed states, organized crime, access to energy, climate change, pandemics, and more.” He urged a “complex mixture of military and civilian capabilities along with a combination of institutional tools, both national and multilateral,” to resolve them.6

  This left out resurgent superpowers (presumably “traditional” threats), but otherwise would seem to add up to war against most of international society’s failings in the early twenty-first century. One might think the challenge uninviting to even the most utopian, optimistic, and ambitious of American leaders.

  * The Westphalian peace settlement of 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War and effectively marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire. It replaced it with the system of individual states possessing (theoretically) absolute sovereignty that continues to the present day, notwithstanding the existence of such international organizations as the United Nations or the European Union, to which members have voluntarily, but not irrevocably, ceded some degree of their national sovereignty.

  * Eugenics was a theory influential at the time in many ostensibly progressive societies, including Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States; it was a form of Darwinism intended to improve humanity.

  † The pattern I describe does not extend to Japan’s effort in the 1930s and 1940s to create a Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere, as Japan at the time was a nationalist and racist state, but not an ideological one, meaning that its model of society was not exportable, and its motives were purely imperial and strategic. Maoism, later, was a utopian ideological system exploiting Chinese nationalist sentiments, but (characteristically for China) was never intended for export, even though it acquired many Western admirers who themselves attempted to import its ideas, always with disastrous consequences. A contrast is provided by the modern Islamist extremist groups that employ terrorism. Although the binding ideology is religious, the actual goals are a political utopia from which corrupting Western forces and values have been expelled to make possible the avowed (and unattainable) goal of global conversion to Islam and universal acceptance of Shari’a law.

  * Conservatism: “Disposed to maintain existing institutions or views; opposed to change; adhering to sound principles . . .” Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

  II

  The Enlightenment

  Invention of Secular Utopia

  The Enlightenment is today understood as the intellectual movement that liberated the Western mind from religious authority—or, as it was said, from religious superstition and ignorance. It proclaimed God’s death, or at least his displacement to a remote and impersonal role in the universe. It made men mortal, denying that salvation could be expected in an afterlife. Therefore a perfected world had to be made in the here and now. This was taken to require, or license, unprecedented measures to make people free and happy. It produced an immense psychological change as well as transforming the life of the mind—of thought itself, which now had to be taken as solipsistic and transient, and not as part of an established and eternal dialogue. The Enlightenment also inadvertently changed the nature of war, removing the limits imposed by Christian belief in human immortality and divine judgment . War was now logically limited only by reason and utility.

  Enlightenment thought examined theology to find ways to reconcile it with the new secular currents inspired by the philosophy and humanist values of classical Greece, rediscovered in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, thanks to the preservation of classical texts by Arab scholars.1 Europeans found themselves expected to live without an accepted structure of spiritual recourse or guidance; with only the resources of individual reason or unreasoned choice; without norms that transcended individual existence. Thus the ambition of the writers of the American Declaration of Independence—mostly Deists*—was no more than to enable the “pursuit” of happiness. Their theologian predecessors had proposed how to guarantee perpetual happiness. The religious “utopianism” of Christianity concerned the afterlife, because that was where “utopia”—eternal life—existed, at least in Christian belief. Enlightened thinkers had to act within the confines of time.

  The European Enlightenment assumed the possibility of a secular solution to human history. It asserted the ability of men and women to create a perfected society on earth. The Enlightenment led to the revolutions that ended the political and social domination of Western society by religion and an hereditary aristocracy.

  The image of a New World provided by the discovery and exploration of the Americas, whether conceived as a lost paradise, or reinforcing hope that reason and science had now empowered men to reform humanity, inspired a belief in eventual perfection of human society that remains widely accepted today. The argument for original innocence is incredible, disproved by history itself, as is the proposition of a utopian future, discredited by the events of the twentieth century and by what we have so far
seen of the twenty-first, as well as by history. But most Americans and Europeans continue to assume that the solutions for mankind lie ahead of us, and that the failures of the past were caused by trust in myth rather than in reason. This is an assertion of the moral responsibility of mankind, but expresses a claim which, like religion, rests on faith rather than material evidence.

  The European intellectual world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was greatly influenced by the findings of the maritime explorers, proving the existence of important and sophisticated non-Christian civilizations and cultures, and challenging the Christian claim to exclusive truth about God and his relation to human society: thus introducing relativist perceptions and skepticism concerning conventional thought and existing institutions. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne’s persistent question in his essays had already been “what do I know?” (ques’que j’sois?), a critical reexamination of the culture and morality of Christian Europe and its theological presuppositions.

  Enlightenment thinkers attempted to reconstruct philosophy and morality from a position of radical doubt (believed to be essential to a scientific approach to reality). Thus Descartes’s system begins with his affirmation of existence: “I think, therefore I exist .” If he could know without doubt that he existed, he could explore what logically followed, and although his conclusions were subsequently contested, his thought and his system of thinking survived as one of the foundations of the Enlightenment consciousness, and they remain today a force in French intellectual life.