Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  President Bush came to believe—and there is little reason to question the sincerity of his belief—that providence had charged the United States with ensuring that the “untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Translated into specific geographic terms, the world’s darkest corners coincided with the furthest reaches of the Islamic world, which not coincidentally contained the world’s most significant reserves of fossil fuels.

  Oil, Williams wrote with considerable prescience in 1980, “is not the primary cause of empire. It is not even the principal definition of contemporary empire. But it is the slickest way we now lie to ourselves about the nature of empire.” In our own day, the lie finds expression in the global war on terror, justified as a defensive response to an unprovoked attack launched on September 11, 2001, by jihadists hell-bent on imposing sharia law on all humankind.

  In fact, the conflict did not erupt without warning on 9/11, as Williams would surely have been among the first to point out. Historians will long argue about when to date the beginning of this war. The toppling of the Ottomans during World War I, allowing Great Britain and France to carve up the Middle East, certainly qualifies as one candidate. Franklin Roosevelt’s deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud in 1945—security guarantees for the royal family in exchange for privileged access to oil—might also vie for the honor, along with the creation of Israel in 1948. But to pretend that the conflict began with the attack on the World Trade Center is to indulge in pointless self-deception.

  After several decades of jockeying, which at different times saw Washington alternately at odds with and cozying up to most of the region’s significant players—Libya and Egypt, Jordan and Israel, Iran and Iraq—the United States had long since forfeited any claim to innocence. Although to cite any single moment when America forfeited its virtue would be to oversimplify, Williams might have pointed to the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and the restoration of the Shah to the Peacock Throne, engineered by the CIA in 1953, as illustrative.

  Finally, to pretend that the aims of the United States in prosecuting its Long War are defensive is simply silly. As Williams certainly appreciated, the concept of defensive war is alien to the American military tradition. The conflict in which the United States finds itself currently embroiled—which since 2001 alone has seen US forces invade Afghanistan and Iraq, while also conducting operations in places as far afield as Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and the Philippines—by no means qualifies as an exception. The United States is engaging in its Long War not to avert the rise of a new caliphate—an exceedingly unlikely prospect—but for the same reason that it has gone to war so many times in the past: to assert dominion over a region that American political leaders view as strategically critical.

  In short, the reasoning that once sent US troops into Texas and California, Cuba and the Philippines, or Western Europe and East Asia now makes it imperative for them to deploy to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia: we’ve persuaded ourselves that American prosperity (and therefore American freedom) demands that the United States must determine the fate of these energy-rich precincts.

  There is an important distinction, however. As originally conceived, the Open Door strategy established rules of a contest that Americans were confident they could win. Given the economic preponderance (and self-sufficiency) enjoyed by the United States through the first half of the twentieth century, Americans welcomed the chance to engage in a global competition for markets: the game was rigged in our favor. This is no longer the case. Today Americans buy more than they sell and borrow to cover the difference. Today too, strategic self-sufficiency has given way to strategic dependence, notably so with regard to oil. To the extent that the economic game is rigged, the rules now favor others, ironically given the provenance of the Open Door, the Chinese above all.

  Yet if economic competition is no longer America’s strong suit, there remains one arena in which the United States still retains a distinct advantage: the global projection of armed force. In the manufacture of cars and televisions the United States may have lost its competitive edge, but when it comes to delivering precision-guided munitions or deploying combat-ready brigades, it remains the world leader.

  As a consequence, the revised and updated strategy of the Open Door deemphasizes commerce in favor of coercion. The United States once sought to “change the way that they live”—where “they” were the inhabitants of Latin America, Asia, and Europe—by selling them the products of factories back in Detroit and Chicago. Today the United States is engaged in an effort to “change the way that they live”—where “they” are the inhabitants of the Islamic world—by relying on the United States Army and Marine Corps to do the job. A century ago, Americans professed disdain for military power—it was the sort of thing that excited the Germans and Japanese. Today Americans embrace military power—it is, after all, what we do best.

  Now, setting moral issues aside—and moral considerations never figure more than marginally in the formulation of policy—little of this would matter if the refurbished and militarized strategy of the Open Door, now directed toward the Greater Middle East, produced the results promised by Rumsfeld and others. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

  The originally conceived Open Door worked brilliantly, enhancing American power and abundance. The revised Open Door is squandering American power while exacerbating American problems with debt and dependence. Regardless of its final outcome, the Iraq War does not provide a model for how to “transform” the Greater Middle East. Inspired by a determination to avoid at all costs modifying our own way of life, the Long War is a fool’s errand. However impressive, US military power turns out to be an inadequate substitute for America’s lost economic preponderance. The longer Americans persist in their illusions that salvation lies in “supporting the troops,” the more difficult it will be for them to put their economic house back in order.

  The United States today faces a crisis at least as challenging as that which inspired Williams to write Tragedy in the first place. Were he alive today, Williams would surely counsel against blaming our predicament on George W. Bush and his lieutenants, on the neoconservatives, on Big Oil, or on the military-industrial complex. To search for scapegoats is to evade the larger truth. The actual imperative remains what it was in the 1960s: Americans need to “confront and change” themselves.

  Unhappily, they wouldn’t then and we won’t now. We will instead cling to the Weltanschauung that has for so long kept us in its thrall. As a consequence, the tragedy of American diplomacy promises to continue, with the people of the United States even now oblivious to the fate that awaits them.

  17

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Illusions of Managing History

  (2007)

  As pastor, teacher, activist, moral theologian, and prolific author, Reinhold Niebuhr was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s. He was, at various points in his career, a Christian Socialist, a pacifist, an advocate of US intervention in World War II, a staunch anti-Communist, an architect of Cold War liberalism, and a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.

  For contemporary Americans, inclined to believe that history began anew on September 11, 2001, the controversies that engaged Niebuhr’s attention during his long career appear not only distant but also permanently settled and therefore largely irrelevant to the present day. At least among members of the general public, Niebuhr himself is today a forgotten figure.

  Among elites, however, evidence suggests that interest in Niebuhr has begun to revive. When historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who knew Niebuhr well and admired him greatly, published an essay in 2005 lamenting that his friend had vanished from public consciousness, the first indications of this resurgent interest had already begun to appear. Today politicians like John McCain and Barack Obama cite Niebuhr as a major influence. Pundits like neoconservative David Brooks and neoliberal Peter Beinart embellish their writings with references to Niebu
hr. A new edition of Niebuhr’s classic 1952 meditation on US foreign policy, The Irony of American History, long out of print, is in the works. The political theorist William Galston has recently gone so far as to describe Niebuhr as “the man of the hour.”

  Many of those who are reincorporating Niebuhr into American public discourse are doing so at Niebuhr’s expense. Cribbing from Niebuhr’s works to bolster their own preconceived convictions, they mangle his meaning and distort his intentions. In his book The Good Fight, Peter Beinart transforms Niebuhr into a dues-paying neoliberal and enlists him in the cause of “making America great again.” For Beinart, Niebuhr’s “core insight” is that “America should not fall in love with the supposed purity of its intentions.” Niebuhr “knew that it was not just other countries that should fear the corruption of American power; we ourselves should fear it most of all.” Yet once aware of its imperfections, the United States becomes an unstoppable force. In Beinart’s words, “only when America recognizes that it is not inherently good can it become great.” By running Niebuhr through his own literary blender, Beinart contrives a rationale for American Exceptionalism and a justification for the global war on terrorism.

  In The Mighty and the Almighty, Madeleine Albright throws in the occasional dollop of Niebuhr to lend weight to an otherwise insipid work. Sagely quoting Niebuhr with regard to the persistence of conflict in human history, the former secretary of state briskly skirts around the implications of that insight. For Albright, Niebuhr simply teaches that “the pursuit of peace will always be uphill.” In no time at all, she is back to reciting clichés about “what the right kind of leadership” can do “to prevent wars, rebuild devastated societies, expand freedom, and assist the poor.” The Albright who cheerfully glimpses the emergence of “a globe on which might and right are close companions and where dignity and freedom are shared by all” nods respectfully in Niebuhr’s direction, but embodies the very antithesis of Niebuhr’s own perspective.

  John McCain also holds Niebuhr in high regard. In Hard Call, his latest best seller, McCain expounds at length on Niebuhr’s writings, which, he says, teach that “there are worse things than war, and human beings have a moral responsibility to oppose those worse things.” Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that McCain is less interested in learning from Niebuhr than in appropriating him to support his own views. Thus, McCain broadly hints that were Niebuhr alive today, he would surely share the senator’s own hawkish stance on Iraq.

  Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Paul Elie observes that with his rediscovery, Niebuhr is fast becoming the “man for all reasons,” his posthumous support insistently claimed by various interpreters who resemble one another in one respect only: they all profess to have divined the authentic Niebuhr. Yet pressing Niebuhr into service on behalf of any and all causes will make him irrelevant even as it makes him once again familiar. The predicaments in which the United States finds itself enmeshed today—particularly in the realm of foreign policy—demand that we let Niebuhr speak for himself. We need to let Niebuhr be Niebuhr. In particular, we need to heed his warning that “our dreams of managing history pose a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States.”

  Since the end of the Cold War, the management of history has emerged as the all but explicitly stated purpose of American statecraft. In Washington, politicians speak knowingly about history’s clearly discerned purpose and about the responsibility of the United States, at the zenith of its power, to guide history to its intended destination.

  None have advanced this proposition with greater fervor and, on occasion, with greater eloquence than George W. Bush. Here is the president in January 2005 at his second inaugural, alluding to the challenges posed by Iraq while defending his decision to invade that country.

  [B]ecause we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well—a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

  The temptation to dismiss such remarks, especially coming from this president, as so much hot air is strong. Yet better to view the passage as authentically American, President Bush expressing sentiments that could just as well have come from the lips of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. In remarkably few words, the president affirms a narrative to which the majority of our fellow citizens subscribe, while also staking out for the United States claims that most of them endorse.

  This narrative renders the past in ways that purport to reveal the future. Its defining features are simplicity, clarity, and conviction. The story it tells unfolds along predetermined lines, leaving no doubt or ambiguity. History, the president goes on to explain, “has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.” Furthermore, at least by implication, the “Author of Liberty” has specifically anointed the United States as the Agent of Liberty. Thus assured, and proclaiming that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” the president declares, “We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.”

  President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. The great liberating tradition to which he refers is, to a considerable extent, poppycock. The president celebrates freedom without defining it, and he dodges any serious engagement with the social, cultural, and moral incongruities arising from the pursuit of actually existing freedom. A believer for whom God remains dauntingly inscrutable might view the president’s confident explication of the Creator’s purpose to be at the very least presumptuous, if not altogether blasphemous.

  Still, one must acknowledge that in his second inaugural address, as in other presentations he has made, President Bush succeeds quite masterfully in capturing something essential about the way Americans see themselves and their country. Here is a case where myths and delusions combine to yield perverse yet important truths.

  Reinhold Niebuhr helps us appreciate the large hazards embedded in those myths and delusions. Four of those truths merit particular attention at present: the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism, the indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple solutions, and, finally, the imperative of appreciating the limits of power.

  The first persistent theme of Niebuhr’s writings on foreign policy concerns the difficulty that Americans have in seeing themselves as they really are. “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation,” he declared in 1932, “is its hypocrisy.” Niebuhr did not exempt his own nation from that judgment. The chief distinguishing feature of American hypocrisy lies in the conviction that America’s very founding was a providential act, both an expression of divine favor and a summons to serve as God’s chosen instrument. The Anglo-American colonists settling these shores, writes Niebuhr, saw it as America’s purpose “to make a new beginning in a corrupt world.” They believed “that we had been called out by God to create a new humanity.” They believed further—as it seems likely that George W. Bush believes today—that this covenant with God marked America as a new Israel.

  As a chosen people possessing what Niebuhr refers to as a “Messianic consciousness,” Americans came to see themselves as set apart, their motives irreproachable, their actions not to be judged by standards applied to others. “Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride,” Niebuhr observes in The Irony of American History. “Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.” Even after World War II, he writes, the United States remained “an adolescent nation, with illusions of childlike innocency.” Indeed, the outcome of World War II, vaulting the United States to the apex of world power, seemed to affirm that the nation enjoyed God’s favor and was doing God’s work.

  Such illusions
have proven remarkably durable. We see them in the way that President Bush, certain of the purity of US intentions in Iraq, shrugs off responsibility for the calamitous consequences ensuing from his decision to invade that country. We see them also in the way that the administration insists that Abu Ghraib or the policy of secret rendition that delivers suspected terrorists into the hands of torturers in no way compromises US claims of support for human rights and the rule of law.

  It follows that only cynics or scoundrels would dare suggest that more sordid considerations might have influenced the American choice for war or that incidents like Abu Ghraib signify something other than simply misconduct by a handful of aberrant soldiers. As Niebuhr writes, when we swathe ourselves in self-regard, it’s but a short step to concluding that “only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions”—an insight that goes far to explain the outrage expressed by senior US officials back in 2003 when “Old Europe” declined to endorse the war.

  In Niebuhr’s view, America’s rise to power derived less from divine favor than from good fortune combined with a fierce determination to convert that good fortune into wealth and power. The good fortune—Niebuhr refers to it as “America, rocking in the cradle of its continental security”—came in the form of a vast landscape, rich in resources, ripe for exploitation, and insulated from the bloody cockpit of power politics. The determination found expression in a strategy of commercial and territorial expansionism that proved staggeringly successful, evidence not of superior virtue but of shrewdness punctuated with a considerable capacity for ruthlessness.