Third, the New Left and the “liberal media” misled the civilian population on the benefits, the triumphs, and the accomplishments of the war—sound familiar?—so that by 1968 a majority of the American people opposed continued involvement. This third explanation feeds into and amplifies the second, and vice versa, since the Congress would presumably have been acting on the voters’ wishes, and the media would presumably have been paying attention to public opinion. Fourth, the tattered morale and outright mutiny of American troops on the ground after 1968 finally made the elongation of the war impossible. The “Vietnamization” of the conflict under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—their attempt to turn the war over to local populations—was the political admission of this sad cultural truth. Familiarity ends here.
Another Country in Another Century
Again, there is no firm Left/Right political valence in these extant explanations for the debacle in Vietnam. But the ending of the American Century was announced when two employees of President Gerald R. Ford—he was the jolly, slapstick politician who succeeded the impeached Nixon—seized on the second and third explanations and then, with the help of renegade intellectuals of the conservative kind, redefined the sources and meanings of international power in the 1990s. This story begins in the mid-1970s, when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked for Ford at the White House, where they witnessed, with horror, the decline of the imperial
presidency—the decline dictated by statutes such as the War Powers Act (1974) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978), which forced the executive branch to acknowledge its responsibility to the Congress and the Constitution.
Rumsfeld and Cheney—and their numerous allies, among them Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz—resurfaced in the Reagan years and moved into senior positions under George H. W. Bush in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rumsfeld was then the elder Bush’s emissary to Saddam Hussein, whom the United States supported in his long, bloody, brutal war against Iran. Cheney was secretary of defense during the first Gulf war of 1991, when he fiercely opposed a march up to Baghdad to overthrow Hussein after the international coalition assembled by the president had vanquished the Iraqi army in Kuwait—on the grounds that an invasion of Iraq meant long-term occupation, which would in turn endanger, not secure, U.S. interests in the Middle East by inflaming anti-American (and anti-Israeli) opinion there.
By that time, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and so the urgent antagonisms of the Cold War had stopped making sense. What was America’s mission in a world absent the “evil empire,” as Reagan had called it? What was to be done? Cheney and Wolfowitz had good answers in 1992, and they would eventually change the way America’s mission could be conceived and conducted. When they returned to power with the election of George W. Bush in 2000, they were already looking for a way to depart from the inherited tradition, from the principles of twentieth-century foreign policy. When the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, they were intellectually equipped to incorporate the incident into conclusions they had already reached.
In the spring of 1992, Wolfowitz, Cheney’s deputy at the Pentagon, had circulated a memorandum called “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG), which would deeply inform the thinking and the attitudes of those consigned to outer-Beltway darkness after Bill Clinton’s election in November. Every two years the Pentagon revises the DPG in preparation for congressional scrutiny of the Defense Department budget. This time around, the revision was supervised and completed by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan exile authorized by Wolfowitz to rethink the document.
In doing so, that unelected delegate from a world elsewhere rewrote the principles of U.S. foreign policy by stating that its new purpose was to prevent the emergence of a Great Power rival, by military means if necessary. A lot of people noticed as he did it—the document was leaked to the New York Times—but it didn’t matter very much because there we were, already the indispensable nation, perhaps even the “hyperpower,” bursting with armed force and poised to do nothing except congratulate ourselves. Wolfowitz himself disowned the document because the controversy it generated made him uncomfortable. Cheney praised it, however, saying to Khalilzad, “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.”
The 1992 DPG thereafter became the canonical text, the originary manifesto, of these “Vulcans,” as James Mann calls them, when they were sent into exile by the Clinton presidency. By 1997 they had embraced and even enlarged Khalilzad’s analysis by founding the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), along with William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, and other self-styled conservatives who wanted to “restore” America’s standing in the world—that is, to recover from the malady of the Vietnam Syndrome and, accordingly, to stiffen the moral fiber of the nation as well as the world, as if the projection of American power abroad would reawaken the patriotic spirit of the American people at home.
PNAC was the social and intellectual origin of the second Gulf war, the current war in Iraq, in three related senses. First, its founders and members overpopulated the Bush administrations, even though some of its more outspoken residents, like Rumsfeld and Perle, disappeared in 2006. Second, PNAC’s purposes were “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (the title of a 2000 publication) and defining world power as military might. Many critics of the war in Iraq have excoriated Donald Rumsfeld for treating the military with insufficient respect and for engaging the enemy with insufficient “boots on the ground,” but they miss the point of invading on the cheap—the secretary of defense and his allies in the White House were trying to demonstrate how agile, mobile, and deadly American armed forces could be, all over the place, wherever necessary. In doing so, they hoped to redefine American “prestige” as a function of military power, as Robert Kagan had urged in his best-selling book of 1999, Of Paradise and Power. But in doing so they were also repudiating a founding principle of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy—they were ending the American Century in the name of its revival.
Third, PNAC’s 2000 publication titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” proposed, in exact accordance with the 1992 DPG, that the premise and purpose of U.S. foreign policy should be “precluding the rise of a great power rival.” This locution is quite novel in the annals of U.S. diplomacy—it is another abrupt break from the past—because the new (anticolonial) American imperialism invented and refined in the twentieth century was an attempted escape from the Great Power politics that had led so many times to so many wars after 1600.
The question for John Hay, Charles Conant, Frank Vanderlip, and their fellow architects of the international future was, How do we make the passage of the seat of empire peaceful? In the past, they knew, wars were the means by which one empire succeeded another. This succession was inevitable, they assumed—in fact, it was already happening in the passage of the seat of empire from the Thames to the Potomac, as Hay explained in his eulogy for McKinley in 1901. But was there a way to avoid these ugly intervals of warfare, especially now that they could become global? Hay and the others thought so, but their twofold assumption was that the passage of the seat of empire would continue—it would keep moving east to west, toward Asia—and that multilateral institutions would permit and enforce a peaceful passage.
PNAC’s answers to these difficult questions were very different. A new American Century was, by definition, a way of precluding the passage of the seat of empire. By implication, it was going to be unilateral, and it was going to be the result of warfare, that is, of the superior military force residing in the United States. The war in Iraq cannot be attributed solely to PNAC—
although, again, everywhere you look in the Bush administrations you will find a founder—but the National Security Strategy (NSS) document issued by the White House in September 2002, which became the official rationale for “preemptive” war, replicates key terms, categories, and arguments of PNAC alumni.
Go back to the DPG of 1992: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our over
all objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.” Then fast forward to “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” PNAC’s manifesto of 2000, where “precluding the rise of a great power rival” is a major premise and a major purpose. And then read the NSS of 2002: “The U.S., has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security.”
Whose Ending?
These texts are cut from the same cloth because the same people are doing the stitching. The conclusion you must draw from this intellectual continuity is startling, and it makes you wonder how far these Vulcans were willing to go—it makes you ask, how determined were they to nullify the principles of twentieth-century American foreign policy? For the place you arrive after reading these documents is another country; at any rate it is neither the new world imagined by John Hay nor the new epoch charted by Henry Luce.
Now a century ago the founders of a new imperialism had to move beyond a colonial past they thought outmoded—so we should know that there is nothing wrong with the creative destruction of intellectual innovation. But we should also ask if the principles of American foreign policy in the twentieth century are just relics of the past, to be discarded in the name of a new global reality; we should ask if the Bush administration was too quick to dispense with the inherited tradition. The best way to answer is to ask what the Iraq war was about, without indulging fond dreams of executive competence and bureaucratic rectitude.
If we are to believe the utterances of the policymakers themselves, and there is no reason not to, this war had four broad purposes, all of them linked by a conception of government that is unnerving if not alarming—and all of them unrelated to the stated purposes of the invasion of Iraq (except in the fundamental sense that the removal of Saddam Hussein was the condition of every other purpose). To begin with, the world must be reminded of the fact that American military power is not only mightier than any other Great Power rival, but it is technologically and logistically equipped to fight on many fronts, with as few or as many forces as it takes to shock and awe the local population. Translation: We can destroy any enemy, anywhere, anytime, so do not pretend to be the heir to the empire that is the American Century.
Also, that military power will be deployed by a “unitary executive,” an unapologetically extreme branch of government that has finally retrieved the commander in chief’s rightful powers from the hapless, haphazard Congress and reasserted the prerogatives of the imperial presidency once claimed by Richard Nixon. Congress must be consulted by the president, according to this novel line of thinking, but in a time of war he acquires all the constitutional powers he needs to revoke the right of habeas corpus for “enemy combatants” and to prolong their detention and interrogation indefinitely. In a time of war, he also acquires all the constitutional powers he needs to violate the right to privacy enunciated by the Supreme Court in 1967. Translation: The Constitution legally and historically mandates the separation of powers, but in the entirely new circumstances determined by the end of the Cold War—determined, that is, by America’s unique status as the last superpower standing—that separation is moot. We will keep the secrets.
In addition, the multilateral institutions that the United States has hitherto created and supported in shaping the world’s future are no more useful—and no less objectionable—than the U.S. Congress when it comes to making foreign policy and deploying the military in the name of the new national interests and the new international threats which appeared in the aftermath of the Cold War. The United Nations is a fine idea, and the neighborhood is still desirable, but the multilateral commitments that once kept the peace have become excuses for inaction in the face of new threats to national security. Translation: Why should we keep listening to the nations we disarmed in the 1940s or entertaining the ideas of a less dangerous, more innocent age? If our deadly enemies are multiplying in the absence of the Soviet Union, why should we hesitate before attacking them with conventional forces?
And finally, perhaps most importantly, the impending movement, the probable passage, of the seat of empire is now unacceptable. The notion that America would ever relinquish its superiority is an anachronism produced by “Wilsonian idealism” back in the early twentieth century. Thus, China is not to be the new seat of empire in the mid-twenty-first century, even though it will be the largest, most productive economy in the world by 2030. It cannot be, because it is still a vaguely communist, strongly statist challenge to globalization as promoted and practiced by the United States. But how to stop this economic juggernaut in East Asia? How to slow or stop the passage in the seat of empire predicted and expected by the architects of an anticolonial imperialism in the early twentieth century? Translation: How do we slow China down, how do we make sure the American Century lasts for another hundred years? What if we turn the international spigot by controlling the third largest oil reserves in the Middle East—not by relying on the Saudis but by owning or developing those reserves in Iraq?
These are not the paranoid ravings of a vast, left-wing conspiracy chanting, “No Blood for Oil!” Here is how Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve and a renowned conservative, characterized our situation a year before crude oil hit $100 per barrel in 2008: “The intense attention of the developed world to Middle Eastern political affairs has always been tied to oil security. . . . And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ [please note the scare quotes, which in this context are expressions of sarcasm or contempt], American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war was largely about oil.”
The Bush Doctrine, as enunciated in the NSS document of September 2002, was both the forecast of war in Iraq and the realization of the ideas residing in the program of the Project for a New American Century—and these ideas were, in turn, the distant echoes of the 1992 DPG. Its central claim, as we have already seen, is that “the option of preemptive actions” is an American tradition; it can be justified on historical grounds because the United States has been conquering territory and fighting “splendid little wars” since the eighteenth century. As Max Boot and Robert Kagan, two supporters of the Bush Doctrine, have explained, this nation has always been dangerous, prone to spasms of gun-toting military idiocy in the name of freedom. Andrew Bacevich, a brilliant historian of U.S. diplomacy, a fierce critic of the Bush Doctrine, and a former Army officer, agrees with them—he has suggested that the militarization of foreign policy in the late twentieth century was an inevitable result of the Cold War and then was somehow magnified in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The difficulty of proving these arguments for continuity lies in the simple fact that the original architects of an Open Door World renounced territorial acquisition and colonial occupation as the proper objects of modern imperialism—they knew that the practices of the past were not sufficient to the requirements of the future, and they knew that a military rendition of world power would lead to world war.
Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, correctly cited three examples of “preemptive actions” before Iraq in trying to defend the NSS document of 2002: the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, the Spanish-American War of 1898 to 1903, and the Vietnam War. The trouble here is that Americans are now generally agreed that the first two were imperialist wars of conquest and that the third was, at best, a disaster (even at the time, Congressman Abraham Lincoln insisted that the Mexican War was based on the “sheerest deception”). Preemptive military actions are everywhere you look in the record of human civilization, from Thermopylae to Baghdad. The question is not whether they happened; the question is whether our actions can be justified according to the moral criteria we have acquired since Nuremberg and Vietnam—and probably even earli
er, in the aftermath of World War I.
As we have seen, the Open Door world as conceived by its original architects was a place in which military solutions to international disagreements were sometimes necessary but always a last resort; in which armed force did not exhaust the meanings of world power; in which unilateral “preemptive actions” had become obsolete, even destructive; in which multilateral institutions constrained such actions and enabled the sovereignty of all nations, in which economic growth and development were the necessary conditions of world peace; in which exclusive spheres of influence were the crucial constraint on such growth and development; and in which the colonial culture of racism—the “white man’s burden”—could not thrive because it severed the continuum of civilization.
In addressing and shaping the second stage of globalization—when the whole world was first knit together by the new fiber of direct investment as well as trade, when the whole world could see the new horizon of modernity—
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