Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Such commonplace convictions of the era, along with her vanguard role in pressing for the empowerment of women, imparted to her run an air of inevitability. That she deserved to win appeared self-evident. It was, after all, her turn. Largely overlooked were signs that the abiding themes of the Age of Great Expectations no longer commanded automatic allegiance.

  Gasping for Air

  Senator Bernie Sanders offered one of those signs. That a past-his-prime, self-professed socialist from Vermont with a negligible record of legislative achievement and tenuous links to the Democratic Party might mount a serious challenge to Clinton seemed, on the face of it, absurd. Yet by zeroing in on unfairness and inequality as inevitable byproducts of globalization, Sanders struck a chord.

  Knocked briefly off balance, Clinton responded by modifying certain of her longstanding positions. By backing away from free trade, the ne plus ultra of globalization, she managed, though not without difficulty, to defeat the Sanders insurgency. Even so, he, in effect, served as the canary in the establishment coal mine, signaling that the Age of Great Expectations might be running out of oxygen.

  A parallel and far stranger insurgency was simultaneously wreaking havoc in the Republican Party. That a narcissistic political neophyte stood the slightest chance of capturing the GOP nomination seemed even more improbable than Sanders taking a nomination that appeared Clinton’s by right.

  Coarse, vulgar, unprincipled, uninformed, erratic, and with little regard for truth, Trump was sui generis among presidential candidates. Yet he possessed a singular gift: a knack for riling up those who nurse gripes and are keen to pin the blame on someone or something. In post–Cold War America, among the millions that Hillary Clinton was famously dismissing as “deplorables,” gripes had been ripening like cheese in a hothouse.

  Through whatever combination of intuition and malice aforethought, Trump demonstrated a genius for motivating those deplorables. He pushed their buttons. They responded by turning out in droves to attend his rallies. There they listened to a message that they found compelling.

  In Trump’s pledge to “make America great again” his followers heard a promise to restore everything they believed had been taken from them in the Age of Great Expectations. Globalization was neither beneficial nor inevitable, the candidate insisted, and he vowed, once elected, to curb its effects along with the excesses of corporate capitalism, thereby bringing back millions of lost jobs from overseas. He would, he swore, fund a massive infrastructure program, cut taxes, keep a lid on the national debt, and generally champion the cause of working stiffs. The many complications and contradictions inherent in these various prescriptions would, he assured his fans, give way to his business savvy.

  In considering America’s role in the post–Cold War world, Trump exhibited a similar impatience with the status quo. Rather than allowing armed conflicts to drag on forever, he promised to win them (putting to work his mastery of military affairs) or, if not, to quit and get out, pausing just long enough to claim as a sort of consolation prize whatever spoils might be lying loose on the battlefield. At the very least, he would prevent so-called allies from treating the United States like some patsy. Henceforth, nations benefitting from American protection were going to foot their share of the bill. What all of this added up to may not have been clear, but it did suggest a sharp departure from the usual post-1989 formula for exercising global leadership.

  No less important than Trump’s semi-coherent critique of globalization and American globalism, however, was his success in channeling the discontent of all those who nursed an inchoate sense that post–Cold War freedoms might be working for some, but not for them.

  Not that Trump had anything to say about whether freedom confers obligations, or whether conspicuous consumption might not actually hold the key to human happiness, or any of the various controversies related to gender, sexuality, and family. He was indifferent to all such matters. He was, however, distinctly able to offer his followers a grimly persuasive explanation for how America had gone off course and how the blessings of liberties to which they were entitled had been stolen. He did that by fingering as scapegoats Muslims, Mexicans, and others “not-like-me.”

  Trump’s political strategy reduced to this: as president, he would overturn the conventions that had governed right thinking since the end of the Cold War. To the amazement of an establishment grown smug and lazy, his approach worked. Even while disregarding all received wisdom when it came to organizing and conducting a presidential campaign in the Age of Great Expectations, Trump won. He did so by enchanting the disenchanted, all those who had lost faith in the promises that sprang from the bosom of the elites who had been taken by surprise with the end of the Cold War.

  Adrift Without a Compass

  Within hours of Trump’s election, among progressives, expressing fear and trepidation at the prospect of what he might actually do on assuming office became de rigueur. Yet those who had actually voted for Trump were also left wondering what to expect. Both camps assign him the status of a transformative historical figure. However, premonitions of incipient fascism and hopes that he will engineer a new American Golden Age are likely to prove similarly misplaced. To focus on the man himself rather than on the circumstances that produced him is to miss the significance of what has occurred.

  Note, for example, that his mandate is almost entirely negative. It centers on rejection—of globalization, of counterproductive military meddling, and of the post–Cold War cultural project. Yet neither Trump nor any of his surrogates has offered a coherent alternative to the triad of themes providing the through line for the last quarter-century of American history. Apart from a lingering conviction that forceful—in The Donald’s case, blustering—presidential leadership can somehow turn things around, “Trumpism” is a dog’s breakfast.

  In all likelihood, his presidency will prove less transformative than transitional. As a result, concerns about what he may do, however worrisome, matter less than the larger question of where we go from here. The principles that enjoyed favor following the Cold War have been found wanting. What should replace them?

  Efforts to identify those principles should begin with an honest accounting of the age we are now leaving behind, the history that happened after “the end of history.” That accounting should, in turn, allow room for regret, repentance, and making amends—the very critical appraisal that ought to have occurred at the end of the Cold War but was preempted when American elites succumbed to their bout of victory disease.

  Don’t expect Donald Trump to undertake any such appraisal. Nor will the establishment that candidate Trump so roundly denounced, but which President-elect Trump, at least in his senior national security appointments, now shows signs of accommodating. Those expecting Trump’s election to inject courage into members of the political class or imagination into inside-the-Beltway “thought leaders” are in for a disappointment. So the principles we need—an approach to political economy providing sustainable and equitable prosperity; a foreign policy that discards militarism in favor of prudence and pragmatism; and an enriched, inclusive concept of freedom—will have to come from somewhere else.

  “Where there is no vision,” the Book of Proverbs tells us, “the people perish.” In the present day, there is no vision to which Americans collectively adhere. For proof, we need look no further than the election of Donald Trump.

  The Age of Great Expectations has ended, leaving behind an ominous void. Yet Trump’s own inability to explain what should fill that great void provides neither excuse for inaction nor cause for despair. Instead, Trump himself makes manifest the need to reflect on the nation’s recent past and to think deeply about its future.

  A decade before the Cold War ended, writing in democracy, a short-lived journal devoted to “political renewal and radical change,” the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch sketched out a set of principles that might lead us out of our current crisis. Lasch called for a politics based on “the nurture o
f the soil against the exploitation of resources, the family against the factory, the romantic vision of the individual against the technological vision, [and] localism over democratic centralism.” Nearly a half-century later, as a place to begin, his prescription remains apt.

  21

  American Imperium

  (2016)

  Republicans and Democrats disagree today on many issues, but they are united in their resolve that the United States must remain the world’s greatest military power. This bipartisan commitment to maintaining American supremacy has become a political signature of our times. In its most benign form, the consensus finds expression in extravagant and unremitting displays of affection for those who wear the uniform. Considerably less benign is a pronounced enthusiasm for putting our soldiers to work “keeping America safe.” This tendency finds the United States more or less permanently engaged in hostilities abroad, even as presidents from both parties take turns reiterating the nation’s enduring commitment to peace.

  To be sure, this penchant for military activism attracts its share of critics. Yet dissent does not imply influence. The trivializing din of what passes for news drowns out the antiwar critique. One consequence of remaining perpetually at war is that the political landscape in America does not include a peace party. Nor, during presidential-election cycles, does that landscape accommodate a peace candidate of consequence. The campaign now in progress has proved no exception. Candidates calculate that tough talk wins votes. They are no more likely to question the fundamentals of US military policy than to express skepticism about the existence of a deity. Principled opposition to war ranks as a disqualifying condition, akin to having once belonged to the Communist Party or the KKK. The American political scene allows no room for the intellectual progeny of Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, Dorothy Day, or Martin Luther King Jr.

  So, this November, voters will choose between rival species of hawks. Each of the finalists will insist that freedom’s survival hinges on having in the Oval Office a president ready and willing to employ force, even as each will dodge any substantive assessment of what acting on that impulse has produced of late. In this sense, the outcome of the general election has already been decided. As regards so-called national security, victory is assured. The status quo will prevail, largely unexamined and almost entirely intact.

  Citizens convinced that US national security policies are generally working well can therefore rest easy. Those not sharing that view, meanwhile, might wonder how it is that military policies that are manifestly defective—the ongoing accumulation of unwon wars providing but one measure—avoid serious scrutiny, with critics of those policies consigned to the political margins.

  History provides at least a partial answer to this puzzle. The constructed image of the past to which most Americans habitually subscribe prevents them from seeing other possibilities, a condition for which historians themselves bear some responsibility. Far from encouraging Americans to think otherwise, these historians have effectively collaborated with those interests that are intent on suppressing any popular inclination toward critical reflection. This tunnel vision affirms certain propositions that are dear to American hearts, preeminently the conviction that history itself has summoned the United States to create a global order based on its own self-image. The resulting metanarrative unfolds as a drama in four acts: in the first, Americans respond to but then back away from history’s charge; in the second, they indulge in an interval of adolescent folly, with dire consequences; in the third, they reach maturity and shoulder their providentially assigned responsibilities; in the fourth, after briefly straying off course, they stage an extraordinary recovery. When the final curtain in this drama falls, somewhere around 1989, the United States is the last superpower standing.

  For Americans, the events that established the twentieth century as their century occurred in the military realm: two misleadingly named “world wars” separated by an “interwar period” during which the United States ostensibly took a timeout, followed by a so-called Cold War that culminated in decisive victory despite being inexplicably marred by Vietnam. To believe in the lessons of this melodrama—which warn above all against the dangers of isolationism and appeasement—is to accept that the American Century should last in perpetuity. Among Washington insiders, this view enjoys a standing comparable to belief in the Second Coming among devout Christians.

  Unfortunately, in the United States these lessons retain little relevance. Whatever the defects of current US policy, isolationism and appeasement do not number among them. With its military active in more than 150 countries, the United States today finds itself, if anything, overextended. Our principal security challenges—the risks to the planet posed by climate change, the turmoil enveloping much of the Islamic world and now spilling into the West, China’s emergence as a potential rival to which Americans have mortgaged their prosperity—will not yield to any solution found in the standard Pentagon repertoire. Yet when it comes to conjuring up alternatives, the militarized history to which Americans look for instruction has little to offer.

  Prospects for thinking otherwise require an altogether different historical frame. Shuffling the deck—reimagining our military past—just might produce lessons that speak more directly to our present predicament.

  Consider an alternative take on the twentieth-century US military experience, with a post-9/11 codicil included for good measure. Like the established narrative, this one also consists of four episodes: a Hundred Years’ War for the Hemisphere, launched in 1898; a War for Pacific Dominion, initiated in 1898, petering out in the 1970s but today showing signs of reviving; a War for the West, already under way when the United States entered it in 1917 and destined to continue for seven more decades; and a War for the Greater Middle East, dating from 1980 and ongoing still with no end in sight.

  In contrast to the more familiar four-part narrative, these several military endeavors bear no more than an incidental relationship to one another. Even so, they resemble one another in this important sense: each found expression as an expansive yet geographically specific military enterprise destined to extend across several decades. Each involved the use (or threatened use) of violence against an identifiable adversary or set of adversaries.

  Yet for historians inclined to think otherwise, the analytically pertinent question is not against whom US forces fought, but why. It’s what the United States was seeking to accomplish that matters most. Here, briefly, is a revised account of the wars defining the (extended) American Century, placing purpose or motive at the forefront.

  The Hundred Years War for the Hemisphere

  In February 1898, the battleship USS Maine, at anchor in Havana Harbor, blew up and sank, killing 266 American sailors. Widely viewed at the time as an act of state-sponsored terrorism, this incident initiated what soon became a War for the Hemisphere.

  Two months later, vowing to deliver Cubans from oppressive colonial rule, the United States Congress declared war on Spain. Within weeks, however, the enterprise evolved into something quite different. After ousting Cuba’s Spanish overseers, the United States disregarded the claims of nationalists calling for independence, subjected the island to several years of military rule, and then converted it into a protectorate that was allowed limited autonomy. Under the banner of anti-imperialism, a project aimed at creating an informal empire had commenced.

  America’s intervention in Cuba triggered a bout of unprecedented expansionism. By the end of 1898, US forces had also seized Puerto Rico, along with various properties in the Pacific. These actions lacked a coherent rationale until Theodore Roosevelt, elevated to the presidency in 1901, took it on himself to fill that void. An American-instigated faux revolution that culminated with a newly founded Republic of Panama signing over to the United States its patrimony—the route for a transisthmian canal—clarified the hierarchy of US interests. Much as concern about Persian Gulf oil later induced the United States to assume responsibility for policing that region, so concer
n for securing the as-yet-unopened canal induced it to police the Caribbean.

  In 1904, Roosevelt’s famous “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming for the United States authority to exercise “international police power” in the face of “flagrant . . . wrongdoing or impotence,” provided a template for further action. Soon thereafter, US forces began to intervene at will throughout the Caribbean and Central America, typically under the guise of protecting American lives and property but in fact to position the United States as regional suzerain. Within a decade, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua joined Cuba and Panama on the roster of American protectorates. Only in Mexico, too large to occupy and too much in the grip of revolutionary upheaval to tame, did US military efforts to impose order come up short.

  “Yankee imperialism” incurred costs, however, not least of all by undermining America’s preferred self-image as benevolent and peace-loving, and therefore unlike any other great power in history. To reduce those costs, beginning in the 1920s successive administrations sought to lower the American military profile in the Caribbean basin. The United States was now content to allow local elites to govern, so long as they respected parameters established in Washington. Here was a workable formula for exercising indirect authority, one that prioritized order over democracy, social justice, and the rule of law.

  By 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated his Good Neighbor policy with the announcement that “the definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention,” the War for the Hemisphere seemed largely won. Yet neighborliness did not mean that US military forces were leaving the scene. As insurance against backsliding, Roosevelt left intact the US bases in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and continued to garrison Panama.