Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Act Two began in 1939 or 1938 or 1936 or 1933—the date dependent on the “lesson” to which you’re calling attention—but ended definitively in 1945. As an episode in the HTM, World War II offered Americans a “second chance” to get it right and redeem themselves. Largely remembered today as a Great Crusade to defeat Nazi Germany, the war pitted good against evil, freedom against slavery, civilization against barbarism, and democracy against dictatorship.

  Not merely in myth but also in fact, World War II was all of these things. But it was much more as well. It was a winner-take-all contest between rival claimants to Pacific dominion, between competing conceptions of how to govern peoples deemed inferior, and between two decidedly different but overlapping brands of totalitarianism, one of them aligned with the United States. One thing World War II was emphatically not: it was not a war to avert genocide. At the time, the fate of European Jews facing extermination at the hands of Nazi Germany figured as an afterthought. By contrast, exterminating the inhabitants of large German and Japanese cities through strategic bombing claimed considerable attention.

  Per Rumsfeld, we might categorize these several realities as discomfiting knowns. Americans intent on imparting moral clarity to the History That Matters generally prefer to ignore them. Crediting Europe’s liberation to the Anglo-American alliance—forged by Franklin and Winston singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” onboard HMS Prince of Wales off Argentina in August 1941—makes for a suitably uplifting story. Acknowledging the Red Army’s far larger contribution to defeating the Nazi menace—with Eastern Europeans paying a steep price for their “liberation” at Soviet hands—only serves to complicate things. The HTM has a decided aversion to complications.

  Lasting considerably longer than the first two acts combined along with the interval between them, the third segment in this drama ran from roughly 1947 to 1989.

  Act Three consisted of many scenes, some of which resisted easy incorporation into the HTM. Despite having ostensibly absorbed all of the wisdom offered by Acts One and Two, the warlords in Washington seemed at times to take leave of their senses. Nuclear arsenals containing tens of thousands of weapons; partnerships with various unsavory despots; coups and assassination plots by the bushel; not to mention Korea, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and Vietnam; all capped off with the astonishing course change that found the Leader of the Free World exchanging pleasantries in Beijing with Red China’s murderous Great Helmsman: each of these made it difficult to cast Act Three as a virtuous sequel to Act Two.

  Historians took note. A new generation of revisionists challenged the official line depicting the Cold War as another round of good against evil, freedom against slavery, civilization against barbarism, and democracy against dictatorship. Among HTM proponents, now aligned with the warlords, these revisionists provoked outrage. At least briefly, the History That Matters seemed up for grabs. For a time—the last time—a debate among American historians actually drew the attention of the general public.

  The end of the Cold War deflected this challenge, with the HTM now emerging in mature form. To wide applause, a political scientist announced that history itself had ended. That ending validated the mythic knowns that had underpinned the HTM from the outset. History’s trajectory and purpose now appeared self-evident, as did America’s extraordinary singularity.

  In 1992, an unproven presidential candidate keen to distance himself from the controversies that had roiled Act Three reduced the History That Matters to a homely parable. “I am literally a child of the Cold War,” Bill Clinton began.

  My parents’ generation wanted little more than to return from a world war and resume the blessedly ordinary joys of home and family and work. Yet . . . history would not let them rest. Overnight, an expansionist Soviet Union summoned them into a new struggle. Fortunately, America had farsighted and courageous leaders [who] roused our battle-weary nation to the challenge. Under their leadership, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, organized a great military coalition of free nations, and defended our democratic principles against yet another totalitarian threat.

  In declaring his fealty to the HTM, Clinton hoped thereby to establish his credibility as a would-be statesman. Yet implicit in his succinct and sanitized account was a handy template for dealing with challenges to come.

  When those challenges duly appeared and with the History That Matters now sacrosanct, Clinton’s successor reflexively reverted to that very same template. “We have seen their kind before,” George W. Bush reassured his badly shaken countrymen after 9/11.

  They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

  For President Bush, the History That Matters mandated a large-scale military enterprise comparable to those that had made the twentieth century an American Century. The Global War on Terror, in effect, constituted an addendum to the HTM—a fourth act in history’s onward march. To emphasize the continuities, some observers even proposed styling the US response to 9/11 World War IV, with the Cold War retroactively designated World War III.

  Alas, by whatever name World War IV has proven a bust. Fifteen years after it began, victory is nowhere in sight. Indeed, it seems fair to say that no plausible conception of how exactly the United States might achieve victory exists, either in Washington or anywhere else. Muddling through has become the order of the day. In that regard, the ongoing military campaign against the Islamic State offers Exhibit A. For Exhibit B, see Washington’s flaccid support for the “moderate rebels” in Syria’s civil war.

  Meanwhile, when it comes to devising an alternative to muddling, the ostensibly usable past has become a straitjacket. Finding solace and reassurance in its familiarity, Americans remain firmly moored to the HTM, although Acts One and Three have taken a backseat to Act Two. So the debate over the Iran nuclear deal during the summer of 2015, for example, inspired innumerable references to Iran as Nazi Germany and Barack Obama as Neville Chamberlain, while warning of Israelis being marched off to death camps.

  For their part, members of the historical profession tend to view the HTM as a caricature or cartoon. Yet their very disdain provides one explanation for why it persists. In effect, the myths sustaining this fatuous narrative go unchallenged.

  The prevailing version of the usable past is worse than unusable. In the United States, it obstructs serious debate over the use and misuse of power. So no less than was the case in the 1920s/30s and 1960s/70s, the times call for revisionism. The task this time is to reframe the entire twentieth century, seeing it for the unmitigated disaster that it was and recognizing its profound moral ambiguity without, however, succumbing to moral equivalence.

  To cling to the History That Matters is to make real learning impossible. Yet critically engaging the HTM with vigor sufficient to affect public understanding of the past implies a revival of fields that have become decidedly unhip. The present-day historical profession does not prioritize political, diplomatic, and military themes. Whether for good or for ill, race, class, gender, and sexuality claim pride of place.

  So among Americans at least, count on the HTM to endure—history that lets us feel good, even as it makes us stupid.

  ____________

  1. Woodrow Wilson, “War Message to Congress” (April 2, 1917). U.S. 65th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Document 5.

  23

  Always and Everywhere

  (2013)

  The abiding defect of US foreign policy? It’s isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get away with murder. Isolationists prevent the United States from accomplishing its providentially assigned global mission. Wean the American people from
their persistent inclination to look inward and who knows what wonders our leaders will accomplish.

  The United States has been at war for well over a decade now, with US attacks and excursions in distant lands having become as commonplace as floods and forest fires. Yet during the recent debate over Syria, the absence of popular enthusiasm for opening up another active front evoked expressions of concern in Washington that Americans were once more turning their backs on the world.

  As he was proclaiming the imperative of punishing the government of Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry also chided skeptical members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “this is not the time for armchair isolationism.” Commentators keen to have a go at the Syrian autocrat wasted little time in expanding on Kerry’s theme.

  Reflecting on “where isolationism leads,” Jennifer Rubin, the reliably bellicose Washington Post columnist, was quick to chime in, denouncing those hesitant to initiate another war as “infantile.” American isolationists, she insisted, were giving a green light to aggression. Any nation that counted on the United States for protection had now become a “sitting duck,” with “Eastern Europe [and] neighbors of Venezuela and Israel” among those left exposed and vulnerable. News reports of Venezuelan troop movements threatening Brazil, Colombia, or Guyana were notably absent from the Post or any other media outlet, but no matter—you get the idea.

  Military analyst Frederick Kagan was equally troubled. Also writing in the Post, he worried that “the isolationist narrative is rapidly becoming dominant.” His preferred narrative emphasized the need for ever greater military exertions, with Syria just the place to launch a new campaign. For Bret Stephens, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, the problem was the Republican Party. Where had the hawks gone? The Syria debate, he lamented, was “exposing the isolationist worm eating its way through the GOP apple.”

  The Journal’s op-ed page also gave the redoubtable Norman Podhoretz, not only still alive but vigorously kicking, a chance to vent. Unmasking President Obama as “a left-wing radical” intent on “reduc[ing] the country’s power and influence,” the unrepentant neoconservative accused the president of exploiting the “war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment . . . on the left and right” to bring about “a greater diminution of American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical dreams.”

  Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, “got” Osama bin Laden, toppled one Arab dictator in Libya, and bashed and bombed targets in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Even so, it turns out he is actually part of the isolationist conspiracy to destroy America!

  Over at the New York Times, similar concerns, even if less hysterically expressed, prevailed. According to Times columnist Roger Cohen, President Obama’s reluctance to pull the trigger showed that he had “deferred to a growing isolationism.” Bill Keller concurred. “America is again in a deep isolationist mood.” In a column entitled “Our New Isolationism,” he decried “the fears and defeatist slogans of knee-jerk isolationism” that were impeding military action. (For Keller, the proper antidote to isolationism is amnesia. As he put it, “Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”)

  For his part, Times staff writer Sam Tanenhaus contributed a bizarre two-minute exercise in video agitprop—complete with faked scenes of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor—that slapped the isolationist label on anyone opposing entry into any war whatsoever, or tiring of a war gone awry, or proposing that America go it alone.

  When the “New Isolationism” Was New

  Most of this, of course, qualifies as overheated malarkey. As a characterization of US policy at any time in memory, isolationism is a fiction. Never really a tendency, it qualifies at most as a moment, referring to that period in the 1930s when large numbers of Americans balked at the prospect of entering another European war, the previous one having fallen well short of its “War To End All Wars” advance billing.

  In fact, from the day of its founding down to the present, the United States has never turned its back on the world. Isolationism owes its storied history to its value as a rhetorical device, deployed to discredit anyone opposing an action or commitment (usually involving military forces) that others happen to favor. If I, a grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, favor deploying US forces to Lithuania to keep that NATO ally out of Vladimir Putin’s clutches and you oppose that proposition, then you, sir or madam, are an “isolationist.” Presumably, Jennifer Rubin will see things my way and lend her support to shoring up Lithuania’s vulnerable frontiers.

  For this very reason, the term isolationism is not likely to disappear from American political discourse anytime soon. It’s too useful. Indeed, employ this verbal cudgel to castigate your opponents and your chances of gaining entrée to the nation’s most prestigious publications improve appreciably. Warn about the revival of isolationism and your prospects of making the grade as a pundit or candidate for high office suddenly brighten. This is the great thing about using isolationists as punching bags: it makes actual thought unnecessary. All that’s required to posture as a font of wisdom is the brainless recycling of clichés, half-truths, and bromides.

  No publication is more likely to welcome those clichés, half-truths, and bromides than the New York Times. There, isolationism always looms remarkably large and is just around the corner.

  In July 1942, the New York Times Magazine opened its pages to Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who sounded the alarm about the looming threat of what he styled a “new isolationism.” This was in the midst of World War II, mind you.

  After the previous world war, the vice president wrote, the United States had turned inward. As summer follows spring, “the choice led up to this present war.” Repeat the error, Wallace warned, and “the price will be more terrible and will be paid much sooner.” The world was changing and it was long past time for Americans to get with the program. “The airplane, the radio, and modern technology have bound the planet so closely together that what happens anywhere on the planet has a direct effect everywhere else.” In a world that had “suddenly become so small,” he continued, “we cannot afford to resume the role of hermit.”

  The implications for policy were self-evident: “This time, then, we have only one real choice. We must play a responsible part in the world—leading the way in world progress, fostering a healthy world trade, helping to protect the world’s peace.”

  One month later, it was Archibald MacLeish’s turn. On August 16, 1942, the Times magazine published a long essay of his under the title of—wouldn’t you know it—“The New Isolationism.” For readers in need of coaching, Times editors inserted this seal of approval before the text: “There is great pertinence in the following article.”

  A well-known poet, playwright, and literary gadfly, MacLeish was at the time serving as Librarian of Congress. From this bully pulpit, he offered the reassuring news that “isolationism in America is dead.” Unfortunately, like zombies, “old isolationists never really die: they merely dig in their toes in a new position. And the new position, whatever name is given it, is isolation still.”

  Fortunately, the American people were having none of it. They had “recaptured the current of history and they propose to move with it; they don’t mean to be denied.” MacLeish’s fellow citizens knew what he knew: “that there is a stirring in our world . . . , a forward thrusting and overflowing human hope of the human will which must be given a channel or it will dig a channel itself.” In effect, MacLeish was daring the isolationists, in whatever guise, to stand in the way of this forward thrusting and overflowing hopefulness. Presumably, they would either drown or be crushed.

  The end of World War II found the United States donning the mantle of global leadership, much as Wallace, MacLeish, and the Times had counseled. World peace did not ensue. Instead, a host of problems continued to afflict the planet, with isolationists time and again fingered as the culprits impeding their solution.

  The Gift
That Never Stops Giving

  In June 1948, with a notable absence of creativity in drafting headlines, the Times once again found evidence of “the new isolationism.” In an unsigned editorial, the paper charged that an American penchant for hermit-like behavior was “asserting itself again in a manner that is both distressing and baffling.” With the Cold War fully joined and US forces occupying Germany, Japan, and other countries, the Times worried that some Republicans in Congress appeared reluctant to fund the Marshall Plan.

  From their offices in Manhattan, members of the Times editorial board detected in some quarters “a homesickness for the old days.” It was incumbent upon Americans to understand that “the time is past when we could protect ourselves easily behind our barriers behind the seas.” History was summoning the United States to lead the world: “The very success of our democracy has now imposed duties upon us which we must fulfill if that democracy is to survive.” Those entertaining contrary views, the Times huffed, “do not speak for the American people.”

  That very month, Joseph Stalin announced that the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin. The United States responded not by heading for the exits but by initiating a dramatic airlift. Oh, and Congress fully funded the Marshall Plan.

  Barely a year later, in August 1949, with Stalin having just lifted the Berlin Blockade, Times columnist Arthur Krock discerned another urge to disengage. In a piece called “Chickens Usually Come Home,” he cited congressional reservations about the recently promulgated Truman Doctrine as evidence of, yes, a “new isolationism.” As it happened, Congress duly appropriated the money President Truman was requesting to support Greece and Turkey against the threat of communism—as it would support similar requests to throw arms and money at other trouble spots like French Indochina.

  Even so, in November of that year, the Times magazine published yet another warning about “the challenge of a new isolationism.” The author was Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, then positioning himself for a White House run. Like many other would-be candidates before and since, Stevenson took the preliminary step of signaling his opposition to the I-word.