The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  American business in the past also functioned in a culture of important religious influence and an Anglo-Saxon ethos of chivalric service and obligation, as expressed, for example, in the correspondence and speeches of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (and incidentally, in the philosophical writings of Adam Smith). These articulated the values of a Protestant elite, and notions of public obligation, that despite their inevitable hypocrisies provided an important influence on the governing classes in the United States.

  In the Second World War, General of the Army George C. Marshall, army chief of staff and later Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, never wore on his uniform the decorations and service ribbons to which his First World War service entitled him. He said that it would be unseemly for him, working in a Washington office, to wear honors deserved by the young men he was responsible for sending into battle. (Compare U.S. general officers today, who even when wearing combat camouflage are decorated like operetta supernumeraries.) Following the war, Marshall was offered a million (1945) dollars for his memoirs, but he refused, saying that it would not be correct for him to profit from his public duties. This ethic was reflected in public behavior until, I suppose, the time of Vietnam—implicated in so much that has gone bad in the United States.

  The prevailing ethical norms of American business came to an end partially under the influence of academic and professional innovations that declared ethical values to be exogenous obstacles to policies essential to maximum economic efficiency, and that made the elevation of return on capital the determinant of business and industrial success, excluding as inefficiencies earlier norms of duty to community, workforce, and public interest . It is difficult to say to what extent American policy makers really did, or do, believe that a global democratic order is advanced by the nation’s current policies, as American policy has avowed, or even believe that it is possible. If you dispassionately state the policy’s goals, which are “defeat” or suppression of an aggressively anti-Western fundamentalist religious movement throughout a considerable part of the approximately billion members of the Islamic religion, and winning such people over to political values and institutions (and necessarily to an outlook on the political role of religion) resembling those of Americans or Europeans, the policy possesses no credibility.

  The current practical measures of the American Defense and State departments in reorganizing and redirecting the American military and civilian services toward the goals of rebuilding the political culture and institutions of the Muslim countries in which the United States is intervening nonetheless have this as their official purpose. As Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson have remarked (in The National Interest), fall 2005, such a policy of global “liberation” finds no support in the American Constitution, and such a policy alters the definition of threats to America from what other nations “do” to what they “are,” thus redirecting foreign policy from the pursuit of limited and practical goals to unlimited action for nonmaterial and unachievable purposes (actually implying unending war).

  The eminent economist (and U.S. ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration) the late John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his 1999 memoir that “a major feature of our foreign policy [is] its institutional rigidity, which holds it on course even when it is visibly wrong. So it was on Vietnam, as is now accepted; so on … military alliances with the poor lands. So it is or was on such matters as the unnecessary enlargement of NATO or the continuing trade and travel sanctions on Cuba. … ” So it remains.8

  War in the post-Enlightenment age has reflected the Enlightenment’s creation of a new intellectual and moral structure resting on human reason and commitment to science, and on the assumption, although not the evidence, of human moral progress. The sinister aspect of the phenomenon of secular utopianism, the twenty-first century’s principal source of mass popular political mobilization, has been its association with a value-free scientific rationalism that lends itself to what in another day would have been yet considered objectively criminal political policies and practices, in recent times too often have found progressive justification.

  Only since the early twentieth century have there been the scientific and technological means for gassing, burning, bombing, and otherwise destroying millions of civilians in an industrial manner, employing the bureaucratic and managerial resources of a modern state. Examples include the Nazi death camps; the aerial attacks on civilians during the last months of the Second World War that reached their crescendo in the deliberate ignition of fire-storms in German cities, designed to kill by sucking oxygen out of the air (and out of the victims themselves, leaving their corpses shriveled); and the devastating incendiary attacks on wooden Japanese cities. These constitute a Western moral inheritance that cannot be ignored. Even the atrocities of Maoism and Pol Pot’s Cambodia incorporated elements of Western provenance, in Marxism-Leninism and its romantic elaboration in European radical circles during the mid-twentieth century.

  Today, the United States is bound by its 2002 Strategic Offensive Treaty (SORT) with Russia to reduce its total number of deployed strategic weapons warheads to 2,200 by 2012 (tactical weapons are not included). In its most recent START (Strategic Arms Revelation Treaty) declaration, for 2003, the United States listed a total of 5,968 deployed nuclear weapons of all categories. What are these for?

  In the ability of leaders to conceptualize and prepare the means for the annihilation of an enemy during the Second World War and the Cold War, and in plans for future wars, twentieth-century Western war has expressed, as never was possible before, the Faustian spirit of extreme and defiant ambition and extreme risk. The Enlightenment created a Western intellectual and moral structure that was expected to rest on reason, scientific knowledge, and secular progress, but in this matter notably does not .

  American war in the past decade has itself changed in a fundamental respect . In the twentieth century it was defensive and, since at least the time of the war with Spain in 1898, was conceived in other terms than national self-aggrandizement . The Western—notably American—retention of nuclear weapons during the Cold War possessed a deterrent logic, but in the perpetuation and in some cases modernization of existing nuclear arsenals there would seem to be evident connection to unavowed fantasies of omnipotence, impossible to gratify but also impossible to renounce, linked to a pattern of secular utopianism or utopian nationalism.

  This pattern ordinarily is meant to enforce a system of values held not only to embody the nation’s virtues but to be of universal historical importance, a step toward a future that will provide a transformation of such importance that the existing system must be overturned and replaced, necessarily at a cost to existing international law and political and moral convention. After 9/11, American strategy was reconceived as preemptive and “preventive,” the first denoting action against an imminent threat and the second meaning to eliminate a threat conceived to lie in the future. This characterized the George W. Bush presidency, and might reasonably be expected to return if, or when, a Republican administration replaces the present one.

  In today’s policy debate, Republicans generally as well as neoconservatives and a great many people from the liberal camp remain supporters of the idea that the world’s destiny is democracy, so that this should be accounted the “strong trend” in contemporary history which a positive American policy should reinforce to its own advantage. It argues that there has been a steady trend toward the integration of nations and the development of cooperative institutions that can reasonably be expected eventually to end in a global order that resembles the traditional goals of American “Wilsonianism.” This edifying ambition does not alter the fundamental moral nature of society as we have always known it .

  In this respect a word must be said about the neoconservative influence on the Bush presidency. The neoconservatives assumed a place on the active American political right that had not before been occupied. At the time of Mr. Bush’s election, the American right thereby empowere
d could be said to range from the vice president, Richard Cheney, with his corporate interests and connections, especially with the oil industry, to the so -called Christian right, a force of consequence in the Republican electorate and the Congress. This community included many with apocalyptic expectations about international developments inspired by what seem to them Biblical prophecies being fulfilled in events preceding the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States—above all the founding of Israel and the return of Jews to Jerusalem.

  These conservatives are all American in origin. The neoconservatives are, in part, the product of certain European currents of thought, notably by way of Leo Strauss, classicist and political philosopher of German origin who emigrated to the United States in 1938 and taught for many years at the University of Chicago, and Carl Schmitt, a German legal scholar and jurist who remained active in Germany during the Nazi period. Their influence was chiefly in emphasizing the primacy of the state as a national community in opposition to “others,” in justifying exceptional and extreme uses of power to assure state security in times of crisis, and in their identification of American liberalism—especially in its 1968 American manifestation—as a force of national political and cultural decline.

  Their view of the state has coincided with the position defended by the legal school of unitary executive power in American government, which had attracted attention if not notoriety before the Bush administration came to power, and whose disciples were appointed to major legal positions in his administration. The argument made by Bush administration lawyers that in times of war a president exercises the totality of the government’s executive power (the “unitary executive”), overriding existing legal and constitutional limits on that power, coincides with the position of Carl Schmitt. This view of executive power rationalized the president’s authorization of torture in violation of established international and domestic law, and his radical position holding that “signing statements” by the executive can override the intent or enforcement of Congressional law. Many of the neoconservatives became Mr. Bush and his cabinet’s counselors and were implementers of these White House policies. Together, they furnished the intellectual rationale for the use by the United States of its military power and political resources to promote a new American-led international order consistent with the apocalyptic view they take of contemporary world affairs. The Straussians hold that “moral clarity” is essential to counter the destructive liberalism inhibiting the state’s necessary use of power to sustain a necessary order in the West. They claim the privilege of using deception to gain posts in which this clarity would serve the state. Claes G. Ryn of the Catholic University of America in Washington has accused them of a new version of ideological Jacobism, in what he calls a conspiracy against democracy as it actually exists in the United States. He writes that part of the appeal of Strauss to his students was his claim that

  only a few sophisticated minds can really understand and face the truth about politics. To protect themselves against the ignorant and to be able to influence the powers-that-be, the philosophers must, according to Strauss, hide their innermost beliefs and true motives, not least from rulers whom they want to advise. Following Plato’s recommendation, they must tell “noble lies” that are more palatable to others than the truth … 9

  Since the 2008 presidential election the neoconservatives have been out of power in Washington, but they remain important members of the intellectual and political community that dominates Washington’s international policy. They occupy “think-tank” and academic positions and have founded new institutions to combat the Obama administration. Christopher Caldwell, senior editor of the most important neoconservative magazine, Washington’s Weekly Standard, characterized President Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009 as “penitent, humbled and even sycophantic,” the purpose of which, Caldwell felt, was to “break faith with Israel,” an act of weakness as well as an acknowledgment that enemies now “have the upper hand” in what Caldwell (like other neoconservatives) continues to regard as a battle by the United States, “whether it likes it or not, … ” for civilization’s survival.10

  There has always been, and remains, a noninterventionist alternative to the foreign policy followed by the United States since the beginning of the 1960s. This would discard ideological and historicist generalizations, minimize interference in the affairs of other societies, and accept the existence of an international system of plural, legitimate, and autonomous powers and interests.*

  It would emphasize pragmatic and empirical judgment of the interests and needs of the American nation, and of others. It would accept the realism of George Kennan’s stark judgment that democracy along West European and American lines cannot prevail internationally. “To have real self-government, a people must understand what this means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it .” Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. “But so what?” Kennan asked in 1993. “We are not their keepers. We never will be.” He did not anticipate that before his death, at the age of 101 in 2005, his country would have committed itself to a huge effort to become the world’s “keeper.” He recommended asking only from foreign nations, “governed or misgoverned as habit or tradition will dictate,” that “their governing cliques observe, in their bilateral relations with the United States, and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse.”11

  A policy of nonintervention would rely heavily on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, with particular attention to history, since nearly all serious problems among nations are recurrent or have important recurring elements in them. Current crises concerning Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine-Israel all have origins in the European imperial systems and their dismantlement in the aftermath of the twentieth century’s totalitarian wars. They are the legacy or in a sense the residue of the history of the last century, and their resolution must be sought in terms of that experience, a fact generally ignored in American political and press references to history—which, despite the frequent polemical citation of historical “lessons,” is usually poorly known.

  A noninterventionist American foreign policy requires a White House that will understand its primary responsibility to be the well-being and quality of American life. It would curtail nonessential external commitments and support multilateral methods and forums for dealing with international problems and crises, to the extent that this is useful. It would redefine its national security strategy narrowly so as to make its priorities the protection of the American polity and its constitutional government, and its security against military threat . It would reduce military expenditures to levels commensurate with the actual problems of the contemporary world and not the hypothetical threats of science fiction. It would regard nonstate threats of subversion and terrorism as primarily matters for the criminal police and other civilian agencies of security. It would honor the security guarantees given foreign nations and would make the well-being of states historically close to the United States, and to which it is allied by treaty, its concern, but would cease to make military sales and assistance routine instruments of American diplomacy. It is not in the American interest to supply backward governments with the weapons to fight one another, or to repress their own populations.

  Such a noninterventionist policy would rely primarily on trade and the market, rather than on territorial control or military intimidation, to provide the resources and energy the United States needs. American security deployments abroad would be reexamined with attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the conflicts of clients, or might empower civil war or nationalist irredentism, as in Georgia and East Africa.

  It would undertake the inevitably controversial reduction of America’s global military command structure, recognizing that too often it has been a provocation to nationalist hostility towards to the United States and an inspiration to radical forces and the extremist violence it is intend
ed to prevent—in practice a program that automatically generates its own contradiction.

  It would assume that nations are responsible for their own political affairs so long as these do not directly threaten the larger interests of the international community. It would act on the assumption that American intervention in others’ affairs, even when benevolent, is more likely to turn small problems into big ones. This would seem a position attractive to an American public that traditionally has believed in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets, considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and professes to be governed by pragmatism, compromise, and constitutional order. This was the case in the era of the republic’s beginnings, but it no longer seems to be the national taste, or at least not that of its leadership.

  Had a noninterventionist policy been followed in the 1960s, there would have been no American war in Indochina. The struggle there would have been recognized as nationalist in motivation, unsusceptible to solution by foreigners, and inherently limited in its international consequences, whatever they might be—as proved to be the case. The United States would never have been defeated, its army demoralized, or its students radicalized. There would have been no American invasion of Cambodia and no Khmer Rouge genocide. Laos and its tribal peoples would have been spared their ordeal.

  The United States would not have suffered its catastrophic implication in what was essentially a domestic crisis in Iran in 1979, which still poisons Near and Middle Eastern affairs, since there would never have been the Nixon administration’s huge and provocative investment in the Shah’s regime as America’s “gendarme” in the region, compromising the Shah and contributing to that fundamentalist backlash against his secularizing modernization that provoked the Islamists’ revolution.