Then, of course, there was “the war.” Vietnam, that is. It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as “an American tragedy,” never a Vietnamese one. The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come, that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of Communist North Vietnam, “I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.” The very idea of defeat—hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present—was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s “victory culture.” Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that “meat grinder” of a war in which millions of them and tens of thousands of American soldiers would die, doubt oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.
Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side—and you can thank the draft for that. The United States then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army. It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the “people’s armies” that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse. For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft—the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia—ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most people’s lives.
With rare exceptions, we live today unconnected to the wars our government has been fighting for the past decade. As a result, most of us also live in a state of denial about the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands. That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now known far less for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments. Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from our lives, though we will, in the end, pay a price for it.
Can’t-Do America
Who can deny that our world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest? That we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?
If, however, we are caught in a system, so are our leaders. In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In most obvious ways—style, thinking, personality, sensibility, impulses—they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems. One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political “pragmatist” in our world. Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places—whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other policies that matter in our lives.
This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans. If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.
Compared to the long-gone world I graduated into, the world of today’s graduates seems to me little short of dystopian, even if, on the surface, it still has something of the look of American abundance. If nothing changes in this equation, our collective experience, as far as I can tell, will be of less available, less decent jobs and of less wealth less well distributed, as well as of a federal government that has everything to do with giant corporations, their lobbyists and publicists, and the military-industrial complex—and little to do with the needs of most people.
Our lives are also encased in what I would call a grid of exterminationism. It was in my youth, of course, that the world became exterminable, thanks to nuclear weapons. Today—with other threats, especially global warming and resource scarcity, joining those doomsday weapons in what feels like a fatal brew—how could the young not feel despair, whether fully recognized or not? How could they not have the urge to avoid looking toward the horizon, toward a future too grim to think about? If you can’t imagine a future, however, you probably can’t form a movement to change anything.
In short, it seems we are living in our nation’s fifty-first state, a state of American denial, in a land that is being hollowed out. As we now know, America’s aging infrastructure is quite literally hollowing out, as well as springing leaks, and not just a mile under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico either. The hollowing out, however, goes deeper—right down to the feeling that, with disaster in the air, little can be done and nothing reversed. The can-do nation of my youth has given way to a can’t-do nation with a busted government.
When the first deep-water oil spill happened in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, Americans were shocked and there were actual protests. In the streets. Shock, that is, was followed by the urge to act. But more recently, as parts of the Gulf of Mexico were being turned into a dead sea, there may have been shock and even complaint, but there was next to no protest. One Associated Press headline from May 29, 2010, captured the moment perfectly: “A Nation Mesmerized: Can BP Plug the Gulf Gusher?” Mesmerized is a good word for it. The whole world is watching—and nothing more.
One and a Half Cheers for American Decline
Here’s a simple reality: the United States is an imperial power in decline—and not just the sort of decline that is going to affect your children or grandchildren someday. We’re talking about massive unemployment that’s going nowhere and an economy that shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a significant scale, even if “good times” do come back sooner or later. We’re talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure—with its collapsing bridges and exploding gas pipelines—that a little cosmetic surgery isn’t going to help.
The problem in all this isn’t the American people. They already know the score. The problem is all those sober official types, military and civilian, who pass for “realists,” and are now managing “America’s global military presence,” its vast garrisons, its wars and alarums. All of them are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Ordinary Americans aren’t. They know what’s going down, and to judge by the polls, they have a perfectly realistic assessment of what needs to be done. Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported on the release of a major biennial survey, “Constrained Internationalism: Adapting to New Realities,” by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). Here’s the heart of it, as Lobe describes it:
The survey’s main message . . . [is] that the U.S. public is looking increasingly toward reducing Washington’s role in world affairs, especially in conflicts that do not directly concern it. While two-thirds of citizens believe Washington should take an “active part in world affairs,” 49 percent—by far the highest percentage since the CCGA first started asking the question in the mid-1970s—agreed with the proposition that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”
Moreover, 91 percent of respondents agreed that it was “more important at this time for the [U.S.] to fix problems at home” than to address challenges to the (U.S.) abroad—up from 82 percent who responded to that question in CCGA’s last survey in 2008.
That striking 49 percent figure is no isolated outlier. As Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz point out in an article in the journal International Security, a December 2009 Pew poll got the same 49 percent response to the same “mind its own business” question. It was, they comment, “the highest response ever recorded, far surpassing the 32 percent expressing that attitude in 1972,
during the height of opposition to the Vietnam War.”
Along the same lines, the CCGA survey found significant majorities expressing an urge for their government to cooperate with China, but not actively work to limit the growth of its power, and not to support Israel if it were to attack Iran. Similarly, they opted for a “lighter military footprint” and a lessening of the U.S. role as “world policeman.” When it comes to the Afghan War specifically, a number of polls indicate that skepticism about it continues to rise. All of this adds up not to traditional “isolationism,” but to a realistic foreign policy, one appropriate to a nation not garrisoning the planet or dreaming of global hegemony.
This may simply reflect a visceral sense of imperial decline under the pressure of two unpopular wars. Explain it as you will, it’s exactly what Washington is incapable of facing. A CCGA survey of elite, inside-the-Beltway opinion would undoubtedly find much of America’s leadership class still trapped inside an older global paradigm and so willing to continue pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan and elsewhere rather than consider altering the American posture on the planet.
Imperial Denial Won’t Stop Decline
Despite much planning during and after World War II for a future role as the planet’s preeminent power, Washington used to act as if its “responsibilities” as the “leader of the Free World” had been thrust upon it. That, of course, was before the Soviet Union collapsed. After 1991, it became commonplace for pundits and officials alike to refer to the United States as the only “sheriff” in town, the “global policeman,” or the planet’s “sole superpower.”
Whatever the American people might then have thought a post–Cold War “peace dividend” would mean, elites in Washington already knew, and acted accordingly. As in any casino when you’re on a roll, they doubled down their bets, investing the fruits of victory in more of the same—especially in the garrisoning and control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. And when the good fortune only seemed to continue and the sole enemies left in military terms proved to be a few regional “rogue states” of no great importance and small non-state groups, it went to their heads in a big way.
In the wake of 9/11, the new crew in Washington and the pundits and think-tankers surrounding them saw a planet ripe for the taking. They were convinced that a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East was within their grasp if only they acted boldly, and they didn’t doubt for a moment that they could roll back Russia—they were, after all, former Cold Warriors—and put China in its place at the same time. Their language was memorable. They spoke of “cakewalks” and “shock and awe” aerial blitzes and missions accomplished.
And they meant it. They were ready to walk the walk—or so they thought. This was the remarkably brief period when the idea of “empire” or “empire lite” was proudly embraced and friendly pundits started comparing the United States to the Roman or British Empires. It’s hard to believe how recently that was and how relatively silent the present group in Washington has fallen when it comes to the glories of American power. Now they just hope to get by, in itself a sign of decline. That’s why we’ve entered a period when, except for inanely repetitious, overblown references to the threat of al-Qaeda, no one in Washington cares to offer Americans an explanation—any explanation—of why we’re fighting globally. They prefer to manage the pain while holding the line.
It’s not that they don’t see decline at all, but that they prefer to think of it as a mild, decades-long process, the sort of thing that might lead to a diminution of American power by 2025. At the edges, however, you can feel other assessments creeping up—in, for instance, former Bush-era National Security Council deputy Robert Blackwill’s call for the United States to pull back its troops to northern Afghanistan, ceding the Pashtun south to the Taliban.
Sooner or later—and I doubt it will take as long as many imagine—you’ll hear far more voices, ever closer to the heartlands of American power, rising in anxiety or even fear. Don’t think nine or ten years either. This won’t be a matter of choice. Our leadership may be delusional, but there will be nothing more to double down with, and so “America’s global military presence” will begin to crumble. And whether they want it or not, whether there’s even an antiwar movement or not, those troops will start coming home, not to a happy nation or to an upbeat situation, but home in any case.
It may sound terrible, and in Afghanistan and elsewhere, terrible things will indeed happen in the interim, while at home the economy will, at best, limp along, the infrastructure will continue to deteriorate, more jobs will march south, and American finances will worsen. If we’re not quite heading for what Arianna Huffington calls “Third World America,” we’re not heading for further fame and fortune either.
But cheer up. The news isn’t all bad. Truly. We’ve just gotten way too used to the idea that the United States must be the planet’s preeminent nation, the global hegemon, the sole superpower, numero uno. We’ve convinced ourselves that neither we nor the world can exist without our special management.
So here’s the good news: it’s actually going to feel better to be just another nation, one more country, even if a large and powerful one, on this overcrowded planet, rather than the nation. It’s going to feel better to only arm ourselves to defend our actual borders, rather than constantly fighting distant wars or skirmishes and endlessly preparing for more of the same. It’s going to feel better not to be constantly engaged in an arms race of one or playing the role of the globe’s major arms dealer. It’s going to feel better to focus on American problems, maybe experiment a little at home, and offer the world some real models for a difficult future, instead of talking incessantly about what a model we are while we bomb and torture and assassinate abroad with impunity.
So take some pleasure in this: our troops are coming home and you’re going to see it happen. And in the not so very distant future it won’t be our job to “police” the world or be the “global sheriff.” And won’t that be a relief? We can form actual coalitions of equals to do things worth doing globally and never have to organize another “coalition of the billing,” twisting arms and bribing others to do our military bidding.
Since by the time we get anywhere near such a world our leaders will have run this country into the ground, it’s hard to offer the traditional three cheers for such a future. But how about at least one-and-a-half prospective cheers for the possible return of perspective to our American world, for a significant lessening, even if not the decisive ending, of an American imperial role and of the massive military “footprint” that goes with it?
Life in the Echo Chamber
The Arab Spring in 2011 represents a global moment unlike any in memory, perhaps in history. Yes, comparisons can be made to the wave of people power that swept Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. For those with longer memories, perhaps 1968 might come to mind, that abortive moment when, in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe, masses of people mysteriously inspired by each other took to the streets of global cities to proclaim that change was on the way. For those searching the history books, perhaps you’ve focused on the year 1848, when, in a time that also mixed economic gloom with novel means of disseminating the news, the winds of freedom seemed briefly to sweep across Europe. And, of course, if enough regimes fall and the turmoil goes deep enough, there’s always 1776, the American Revolution, or 1789, the French one, to consider. Both shook up the world for decades after.
But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit the Arab Spring into any previous paradigm, even as—from Wisconsin to China—it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet. Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous—or possibly quite so helpless, despite being armed to the teeth—in the presence of unarmed humanity. There has to be joy and hope in that alone.
Watching staggering numbers of people, many young
and dissatisfied, take to the streets in Algeria, Djibouti, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, not to mention Bahrain, Egypt, and Tunisia, is inspirational. Watching them face security forces using batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and in all too many cases, real bullets (in Libya, even helicopters, and planes) and somehow grow stronger is little short of unbelievable. Seeing Arabs demanding something we were convinced was the birthright and property of the West, of the United States in particular, has to send a shiver down anyone’s spine.
The nature of this potentially world-shaking phenomenon remains uncertain. Are freedom and democracy about to break out all over? And if so, what will that turn out to mean? If not, what exactly are we seeing? I doubt those who are protesting, and in some cases dying, know themselves. And that’s good news. That the future remains—always—the land of the unknown should offer us hope, not least because that’s the bane of ruling elites who want to, but never can, take possession of it.
Nonetheless, you would expect that a ruling elite, observing such earth-shaking developments, might rethink its situation, as should the rest of us. After all, if humanity can suddenly rouse itself this way in the face of the armed power of state after state, then what’s really possible on this planet of ours?
The United States of Fear Page 21