The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  The salient elements in this introduction were as follows:

  The three principal responsibilities of the American armed forces are to:

  Conduct a global struggle against a violent extremist ideology that seeks to overturn the international system.

  Deal with the threats of rogue-nation quests for nuclear weapons.

  Confront the rising military power of other states.

  These are described as “requiring the orchestration of national and international power over years or decades to come.” The National Defense Strategy statement continues with the following specific requirements that American military services are expected to meet:

  Develop long-term innovative approaches to deal with the urgent challenge of al Qaeda’s rejection of state sovereignty, violation of borders, and attempts to deny self-determination and human dignity.

  Address the inability of many states to police themselves effectively or work with their neighbors to ensure regional security. Armed subnational groups must be dealt with, including but not limited to those inspired by violent extremism, which if left unchecked will threaten the stability and legitimacy of key states and allow instability to spread and threaten regions of interest to the United States, its allies, and its friends.

  Form local partnerships and conceive creative approaches to deny extremists the opportunity to gain footholds in ungoverned, undergoverned, misgoverned, and contested areas affecting local stability and regional stability.

  Counter Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology and enrichment capabilities, and deal with the ability of rogue states such as Iran and North Korea to threaten international order, sponsor terrorism, and disrupt fledgling democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defend South Korea from the North Korean regime’s nuclear and missile proliferation, its counterfeiting of U.S. currency, trafficking in narcotics, and brutal treatment of its people.

  Plans must be considered to meet possible challenges from more powerful states that might actively seek to counter the United States in some or all domains of traditional warfare or to gain an advantage in developing capabilities that offset our own, as well as nations that might choose niche areas of military capability and competition in which they might find an operational or strategic advantage, even though some of these competitors may also be diplomatic, commercial, or security partners of the United States.

  In the foreseeable future, while pursuing peacetime engagement between defense establishments, hedge against China’s growing military modernization and the effect on international security of China’s strategic choices, which are likely to include “anti-access and area denial” assets including development of a full range of long-range strike, space, and information warfare capabilities.

  In the light of Russia’s [pre–Georgian crisis] “retreat from openness and democracy” and “bullying of its neighbors” and its more active military stance, resumption of long-range bomber flights, withdrawal from certain arms control and force reduction treaties, and signaled increase in reliance on nuclear weapons for its security, the security implications for the United States, its European partners, and those in other regions must be reassessed as well as the appropriate reaction to Russia’s seeming exploration of “renewed influence and seeking a greater international role.”

  A mastery of irregular warfare must be achieved to counter measures by prospective adversaries, especially nonstate actors and their state sponsors, to adopt asymmetric methods of warfare and develop or acquire chemical, biological, and especially nuclear weapons. Preparations must be made to deal with worrisome anti-access technology and weaponry that can restrict America’s future freedom of action, and also with adversary use of traditional means of influence such as “manipulating global opinion using mass communications venues and exploiting international commitments and legal avenues.”

  Strategic measures need to be explored to “secure [meaning to be in a position to control access to] the global commons [space, international waters, aerospace, and cyberspace] and with them access to world markets and resources,” using military capabilities and alliances and coalitions, participating in international security and economic institutions, and employing “diplomacy and soft power to shape the behavior of individual states and the international system, and using force when necessary.”

  The previous National Defense Strategy Statement, of March 2005, had stressed the importance of “new legal arrangements to foster greater operational flexibility and rapid deployment,” with Status of Forces Agreements demanded from the legal authorities of the states harboring American bases to “protect personnel” and contractors from arrest or prosecution and to “guarantee against transfer to International Criminal Courts.”

  The striking feature about all these documents is that they say virtually nothing about the physical defense of the United States. Their whole preoccupation is the defense of American forces present in, or operating in, foreign countries, the prevention of measures by foreign states to “deny” American efforts to intervene in their countries, and foreign states’ possible development of measures and technology to resist American intervention.

  China and Russia are mentioned in implied terms of possible major hostilities, but otherwise with exclusive attention to the prospect that they might increase their international or regional influence. With respect to major American allies, concern is expressed that they might discover “niche” measures or technologies that might give them an advantage over the United States.

  Nuclear weapons proliferation is more than ever an American preoccupation. As in the North Korean case, the most important incentive for obtaining nuclear weapons is to deter the threat of American (or in Iran’s case, Israeli) intervention. The only advantage provided by such weapons is defensive: the ability to deter foreign intimidation. As some American policy makers and commentators seem not to have learned from more than sixty years of Cold War nuclear strategy studies, nuclear weapons have no offensive (aggressive or blackmail), or wartime, value unless they are linked to what the strategic studies community describes as a secure second-strike capacity, which is entirely beyond the means of the “rogue” states that preoccupy the United States today.10

  The juxtaposition of global threat and Wilsonian world reform seems the only way the American national imagination has found to deal with the anxieties and fears produced by the loss of that geographical isolation which for more than a century kept Europe, with its disorders and corrupting influences, and its wars and tragedies, at a seemingly safe distance. The neo-Wilsonianism of the project for extending democratic government to the world is a virtual form of isolationism, a fictional solution to a problem whose previous solution has vanished. Moreover it is a solution in which few of its practitioners truly believe, but for which they lack a plausible alternative.

  The United States, as the last-born offspring of the Enlightenment, is the nation perhaps most susceptible to the notion that men and women are all natural democrats waiting to be freed. Thus the administration’s apparent conviction at the time of the invasion of Iraq, that once Saddam Hussein and his police and army were defeated, democratic institutions would spontaneously spring up. Similarly, Alan Greenspan expressed astonishment when he found that dismantling Communism in Russia had not “automatically” established a free-market economy.

  It is evident that democracy on the American model is not going to be made to prevail in the contemporary world. This leaves the American government and public with an irreconcilable contradiction between the chaotic international realities and stubbornly unsolvable wars they see around them, and the theory on which the government asserts that it acts, and in the service of which it now is engaged in further strengthening its military and foreign political services.

  The League of Nations and the United Nations organization, both of them American conceptions, expressions of the American ideology of democratic universalism, were intended to furnish the United States with the security that isolationism had s
upplied in the nineteenth century. The League, American membership in which was rejected by the Senate, soon succumbed to the forces of totalitarian nationalism in Italy and Germany and of ethnic nationalism in Central and Balkan Europe. The Second World War drew Soviet power, animated by another millenarian ideology, into Central and Eastern Europe and into a place on the UN Security Council—and the Cold War followed.

  Two American efforts to reorganize society in order to make the world safe for democracy—which is to say, safe for the United States—had thus failed. The Wilsonian idea, the conviction that the world has to be remade to give the United States security, remained the only solution Washington could imagine to its latest crisis, the challenge of Islamic radicalism. The policy of the George W. Bush administration to make the Islamic states democracies was supported by a neoconservative misreading of history—that after the Second World War the United States had “made” Germany and Japan into democracies. Both of those nations in the past were constitutional monarchies, with parliaments, sophisticated administrative institutions, advanced legal systems and courts, and national political parties. They had little need of instruction in representative institutions, only the motive to reestablish them—which defeat in the Second World War and Allied military occupation amply supplied.

  President Bush’s second-term inaugural announcement that America’s foreign policy objective thenceforth was “ending tyranny in our world” might cruelly be described as the reductio ad absurdum of the Wilsonian theme in American foreign policy. What eventually will follow is the mystery.

  * Not everyone is aware that the Monroe Doctrine also renounced any United States role “in the wars of the European powers” or “in matters relating [to the European states].”

  * Hailing the Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912, Wilson said this could be the most momentous event of the generation, and he considered that as a matter of course the American minister to China should be an Evangelical Christian so that China could be “made” both democratic and Christian, thus to exercise a stabilizing influence on Asian affairs—an ambition with a distinct Bush-administration ring. As quoted in Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 1941–50 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 5. On Wilson’s personal conviction, see Louis Anchincloss, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Viking, 2007), 44.

  * I have not included the Kennedy administration in this list because a recent book by Gordon M. Goldstein, the collaborator of the late McGeorge Bundy in the preparation of the memoirs of the latter, who was Kennedy’s national security adviser, has published evidence that John F. Kennedy had ordered the withdrawal of all American military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1965—a step that Bundy himself opposed. Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 2008).

  * The Mission, (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004).

  * “Rethinking the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs (July–August 2008).

  * Available on the U.S. Department of Defense Web site, defense.gov.

  V

  America’s Elected Enemy

  By the year 2000, the United States had “won” both the Second World War and the Cold War. The Soviet system and the governments of the satellite states had all collapsed. History, one was assured, had concluded in the triumph of the liberal-capitalist democratic economic and political systems. American military bases ringed the world. American arms faced no challenge. The globalized American economy dominated international investment and finance; the American budget was in surplus.

  The United States had no major enemies. It was respected by most of its former enemies and enjoyed the esteem of nearly all its past and present allies. One might have thought the “manifest” destiny Americans envisaged for themselves had been achieved. But this was not to prove so: External events, in combination with unsatisfied and unconfessed national ambitions, meant there was more “history” to come.

  In 1993, the late Professor Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University had predicted that the “next” world war—successor to the wars of nations, empires, and ideologies of 1914–1918 and 1939–1990—would be a war between civilizations. He said that what he called an “Islamic-Confucian military connection” was emerging as a challenger to Western civilization, led by the United States.1 He undoubtedly was writing what he intended as a new paradigm for Washington policy planners, to replace the bipolar Cold War policy paradigm that glasnost and perestroika were rendering irrelevant.

  He was mistaken in thinking that some bond would emerge between the Chinese and the Islamic peoples or authorities (at least so far as events have since developed). Arab resentment of the Israeli-American link was already very strong; the Iranian revolution and its seizure of the American embassy, and the Beirut bombings of American and French troops, were relatively fresh memories in 1993. Thinking in conventional Pentagon terms, Huntington proposed a “scenario” in which the Chinese would send advanced weapons to the Middle East for the Arabs to use in fighting the United States.

  He offered no clear explanation as to why the Chinese would wish to do this, nor why “the Arabs” would wish to cooperate, in view of the major risks involved and the cultural barriers and incompatibility of interests between Chinese and Arabs, nor did he explain why such a war should be considered a “clash of civilizations.” However, as anyone involved in the strategic debates of the late Cold War will recall, China was widely viewed in American policy circles as a potential political or military challenger to the United States (an assumption still widely held). It was believed that China intended to become the “next superpower.”

  Russia had eliminated itself from this contest and was becoming what it had been before 1917, a core European nation and empire of modest Eurasian scale. Its foreign policy ambitions in the 1990s were to become again one of the concert of international powers and to rebuild a certain regional eminence and security hegemony. China, on the other hand, was considered to be on the geopolitical ascent . It seemed to Huntington plausible to think that China might find arming the Arab states and encouraging them to fight the United States a useful means to its ends.

  Huntington failed to anticipate the new dimensions the Middle Eastern conflict would acquire, especially the evolution in contemporary warfare already tending to render conventional high-technology weaponry irrelevant in dealing with highly motivated and popularly supported irregular combatants—the mode of war embraced by Islamic radicals, with explosive international consequences. Writing in the 1990s, he failed to take account of the “lessons of Vietnam.” A new and all-professional American army was determined to put Vietnam behind it, so as “by a combination of creative strategies and advanced technologies … [to redefine] war on our terms” (as President George W. Bush unwisely said after the fall of Baghdad, in April 2003). This ambition foundered in the low-tech Iraq insurrection, sending the army in 2008 back to “nation-building” among potentially hostile or radical states—a program all but certain eventually to reveal itself (as it had in Indochina) to be equally irrelevant to social and political realities in the non-Western world.

  Finally, Huntington would scarcely have imagined that the United States and China would by the 2000–2010 decade have become mutually dependent economies, with the Chinese as mass suppliers to American markets (often as outsourced subsidiaries of American companies) and as financiers of the resulting American consumer trade deficit.

  Samuel Huntington made the profound conceptual and practical error of treating civilizations, which are cultural phenomena, as if they were nations. Civilizations usually obey no central authority nor have, as such, the political existence of nations. (What city, since Rome, has been the capital of Western civilization?) The United States today is part of Western civilization but does not itself embody it or command it . Western civilization includes all of Western Europe; Europe’s satellite societies such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia; and all of Latin America, to the exte
nt that the last has been culturally formed by Christian and European ideas and values as well as by its indigenous Amerindian cultures.

  China has always been a vast imperial nation with a powerful culture that radiates to the historical kingdoms and cultures on its periphery, but usually it has not directly ruled over the latter but has dominated them by its cultural influence and bureaucratic, military, and commercial power, asking deference from them and accepting their tribute. China also has always possessed an immense complacence, largely indifferent to the world beyond its cultural influence, which, during its history, it has made few attempts to explore—rapidly abandoning even those expeditions and their findings because there seemed to be nothing beyond the oceans to excite China’s attention. Its philosophy of existence, or religion if it is to be so called, has been contemplative and introspective, concerned with existence in a universe that is timeless or cyclically reproduces itself, but is not conceived of as progressing toward some purpose or goal (or was not, until the arrival of Western influences and ideas).

  Islamic civilization is huge, extending to more than thirty-two countries of majority Muslim population from Africa’s Atlantic coast to the Middle and Far East and incorporating most of the northern part of Africa, Zanzibar and Mauritania, part of the Caucasus and much of Central Asia, and including parts of Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia in Europe. There are an estimated one and a half billion Muslims in the world, with Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on earth, possessing the largest Muslim population.