Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Some view this as an intoxicating prospect. Others see it as the basis for a domestic culture war. In either case, pursuant to their present-day understanding of what freedom entails, Americans have embarked on an effort to reengineer the human person, reorder basic human relationships, and reconstruct human institutions that have existed for millennia.

  To render a summary judgment on this project is not yet possible. But surely it is possible to appreciate that some in the world liken it to stepping off a moral precipice, and they view the New Jerusalem with trepidation. Their fears, and the resistance to which fear gives birth, all but guarantee that the legions of the New Rome will have their hands full for some time to come.

  40

  Permanent War for Permanent Peace

  (2001)

  In his widely praised appearance before a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, George W. Bush put to rest any lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his presidency. After months during which it had constituted a battle cry of sorts, “Florida” reverted to being merely a state.

  Speaking with confidence, conviction, and surprising eloquence, Bush reassured Americans that their commander-in-chief was up to the task at hand: they could count on him to see the nation through the crisis that had arrived nine days earlier with such awful and terrifying suddenness. To the extent that leadership contains elements of performance art, this particular performance was nothing short of masterful, delighting the president’s supporters and silencing, at least for a time, his critics. The moment had seemingly found the man.

  Yet however much the atmospherics surrounding such an occasion matter—and they matter a great deal—the historian’s attention is necessarily drawn elsewhere. Long after passions have cooled and anxieties have eased, the words remain, retaining the potential to affect subsequent events in ways large or small.

  What did the president actually say? What principles did he enunciate? From which sources did he (or his speechwriters) draw the phrases that he spoke and the aspirations or sentiments that they signified? What unstated assumptions lurked behind? Looking beyond the crisis of the moment, what does this particular rendering of America’s relationship to the world beyond its borders portend for the future?

  In this case, more than most others, those questions may well matter. Not since the Cold War ended over a decade ago has an American statesman offered an explanation of foreign policy principles and priorities that enjoyed a half-life longer than a couple of news cycles. Bush’s father during his single term in office and Bill Clinton over the course of eight years issued countless pronouncements touching on this or that aspect of US diplomacy or security policy. None achieved anything even remotely approaching immortality. (George H. W. Bush’s “This will not stand”—uttered in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990—might have come close. But given the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Persian Gulf War and its frustrating aftermath—with Bush’s nemesis evincing a Castro-like knack for diddling successive administrations—the rhetorical flourish that a decade ago sounded brave reads in retrospect like warmed-over Churchill).

  George W. Bush’s speech outlining his war on terror may prove to be the exception. It qualifies as the first foreign policy statement of the post–Cold War era with a chance of taking its place alongside Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary, and Wilson’s Fourteen Points among the sacred texts of American statecraft. Or perhaps a more apt comparison might be to another momentous speech before a joint session of Congress, delivered by Harry Truman on March 12, 1947.

  A looming crisis in a part of the world that had only infrequently commanded US attention prompted President Truman to appear before Congress. A faltering British Empire had just announced that it could no longer afford to support Greece, wracked by civil war and deemed acutely vulnerable to communist takeover. Britain’s withdrawal would leave a power vacuum in southeastern Europe and the Near East, with potentially disastrous strategic consequences. Filling that vacuum, in Truman’s judgment, required immediate and decisive American action.

  In short, Truman came to the Capitol not to promulgate some grand manifesto but simply to persuade Congress that the United States should shoulder the burden that Britain had laid down by providing aid to shore up the beleaguered governments of Greece and of neighboring Turkey. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a recent convert from isolationism (and thus presumed to possess special insights into the isolationist psyche) had cautioned Truman that enlisting the support of skeptical and tightfisted legislators would require that the president first “scare hell out of the American people.” Truman took Vandenberg’s counsel to heart.

  Thus, the president described the challenges of the moment as nothing short of pivotal. History, he told the Congress and the nation, had reached a turning point, one in which “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” Alas, in too many cases, the choice was not one that they were at liberty to make on their own. Militant minorities, “exploiting human want and misery” and abetted by “aggressive movements” from abroad, were attempting to foist upon such nations the yoke of totalitarianism. Left unchecked, externally supported subversion would lead to the proliferation of regimes relying upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”—the very antithesis of all that America itself stood for. According to Truman, the United States alone could stem this tide. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, he declared that henceforth “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

  Truman did not spell out detailed guidelines on where this general statement of intent might or might not apply. In the matter at hand, Congress responded positively to the president’s appeal, appropriating $400 million of economic and military assistance for Greece and Turkey. But things did not end there. Truman’s open-ended commitment to protect governments threatened by subversion continued to reverberate. His successors treated it as a mandate to intervene whenever and wherever they deemed particular US interests to be at risk. America’s putative obligation to defend free peoples everywhere (some of them not very free) provided political and moral cover for actions overt and covert, wise and foolish, successful and unsuccessful, in virtually every quarter of the globe. Over the next four decades, in ways that Truman himself could never have anticipated, his eponymous doctrine remained the cornerstone of US foreign policy.

  George W. Bush’s speech of September 20 bears similar earmarks and may well give birth to a comparable legacy. This is not because Bush, any more than Truman, consciously set out to create such a legacy. But in making his case for a war on terror, Bush articulated something that has eluded policymakers since the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the United States of a readily identifiable enemy: a coherent rationale for the wide-ranging use of American power on a global scale. Truman had placed the problems besetting Greece and Turkey in a broad strategic context. The threat to those two distant nations implied a threat to US security and to the security of the world at large. On September 20, Bush advanced a similar argument. The events of September 11 may have targeted the United States, but they posed a common danger. The fight was not just America’s. “This is the world’s fight,” Bush said. “This is civilization’s fight.”

  Truman had depicted a planet in the process of dividing into two opposing camps—the free world against totalitarianism. Bush portrayed an analogous division—with “the civilized world” now pitted against a terrorist network intent on “remaking the world—and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.” Echoing Truman, Bush insisted that history had reached a turning point. Once again, as at the beginning of the Cold War, circumstances obliged nations to choose sides. “Either you are with us,” he warned, “or you are with the terrorists.” Neutrality was not an option.

  As in 1947 so too
in 2001, the stakes were of the highest order. In the course of enunciating the doctrine that would bear his name, President Truman had alluded to freedom—free peoples, free institutions, liberty, and the like—eighteen separate times. President Bush’s presentation of September 2001 contained fourteen such allusions. According to Bush, the events of September 11 showed that “freedom itself is under attack.”

  Casting the US response to that attack not simply in terms of justifiable self-defense or retaliation for an act of mass murder but as necessary to preserve freedom itself imbued Bush’s speech with added salience. Although its meaning is both continually shifting and fiercely contested, freedom by common consent is the ultimate American value. In political rhetoric, it is the ultimate code word.

  Defining the war on terror as a war on behalf of freedom served the administration’s purposes in two important ways, both of them likely to have longer-term implications. First, it enabled President Bush to affirm the nation’s continuing innocence—not only in the sense that it is blameless for the events of September 11 but more broadly in the sense that its role in the world cannot be understood except as benign. “Why do they hate us?” the president asked rhetorically. “They hate our freedoms,” he replied, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In offering this litany of estimable values as the only conceivable explanation for “why they hate us,” Bush relieved himself (and his fellow citizens) of any obligation to reassess the global impact of US power—political, economic, or cultural. That others—to include even our friends—view America’s actual influence abroad as varied, occasionally problematic, and at times simply wrongheaded is incontrovertible. The president’s insistence on describing the United States simply as a beacon of liberty revalidated a well-established national preference for discounting the perceptions of others.

  Second, sounding the theme of freedom enabled Bush to situate this first war of the twenty-first century in relation to the great crusades of the century just concluded. Alluding to the perpetrators of the September 11 attack, the president declared, “We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. . . . [T]hey follow the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

  The president did not need to remind his listeners that the dangers posed by those murderous ideologies had legitimized the rise of the United States to great-power status in the first place. It was the mobilization of American might against the likes of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union that had hastened the demise of the ideologies they represented. A new war on behalf of freedom and against evil provides renewed legitimacy to the exercise of American power both today and until the final elimination of evil is complete.

  Furthermore, engagement in such a war removes the fetters that have hobbled the United States in its use of power since the last ideological competitor fell into its grave. The most important of those constraints relates to the use of force. Since the end of the Cold War, military power has emerged as never before as the preferred instrument of American statecraft. Military preeminence forms an integral component of US grand strategy—an effort to create an open and integrated international order, conducive to the values of democratic capitalism, with the United States enjoying a position of undisputed primacy. But absent an adversary on a par with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, policymakers during the 1990s found themselves unable to explain to the American people generally exactly why the United States needed to exert itself to remain the world’s only superpower—why the need to spend more on defense than the next eight or ten strongest military powers combined? With US security seemingly more assured than at any time in recent memory, they found themselves similarly hard-pressed to translate military preeminence into useful policy outcomes in places far from the American homeland—why the need to intervene in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and elsewhere?

  The Clinton administration justified its penchant for military intervention by insisting that it acted to succor the afflicted, restore democracy, and prevent genocide. Yet in virtually every case the facts belied such claims. Moreover, even if the purest altruism were motivating Bill Clinton periodically to launch a few cruise missiles or send in the Marines, Americans weren’t buying it. Ordinary citizens evinced precious little willingness to support foreign-policy-as-social-work if such efforts entailed even a remote risk to US troops. The hope of salvaging a multi-ethnic Bosnia might stir the hearts of journalists and intellectuals, but the cause was not one that the average American viewed as worth dying for. As a result, during the 1990s, the greatest military power in history found itself hamstrung by its own self-imposed shackles, above all, an obsession with casualty avoidance. The United States could actually employ its military only with advanced assurance that no American lives would be lost. The Kosovo conflict of 1999 epitomized the result: a so-called humanitarian war where US pilots bombed Belgrade from 15,000 feet while Serb forces, largely unmolested, pursued their campaign of ethnic cleansing on the ground.

  The fact that these various experiments in peacemaking and peacekeeping almost inevitably resulted in semi-permanent deployments of questionable efficacy, trampling on expectations that armed intervention should produce prompt and clear-cut results, only accentuated popular discontent. Bald-faced lies by senior US officials—remember the fraudulent promises that the troops would be out of Bosnia within a year?—didn’t help much.

  Now President Bush’s declaration of a war on terror offers a way out of that predicament, making it possible for policymakers to reclaim the freedom of action that the Truman Doctrine had provided in earlier decades. Under the terms of the Bush Doctrine, the constraints that hampered the United States in the 1990s need not apply. The calculations governing tolerable risk change considerably. The gloves can come off—not just in the campaign against Osama bin Laden, but against any other group or regime that this administration or any of its successors can plausibly tag with supporting terrorist activity. The Republican Party that had once codified the lessons of the Vietnam War in the Weinberger Doctrine has now chucked that doctrine overboard, telling Americans that they must expect war to be a protracted and ambiguous affair, a long twilight struggle with even the definition of victory uncertain.

  Furthermore, defining our adversary as “terrorism” itself makes it all the easier to avert our eyes from the accumulating evidence suggesting that it is the quasi-imperial role that the United States has asserted that incites resistance—and that it will continue to do so. In fact, as Daniel Pipes has correctly noted, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. But by insisting that our present quarrel is with terrorism—rather than, for example, with radical Islam—the United States obscures the irreconcilable political differences underlying this conflict. We willfully ignore the fact that bin Laden’s actions (however contemptible) represent an expression of strongly held convictions (however warped): a determination by whatever means necessary to overturn the existing American imperium in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Thus do we sustain the pretense that America is not an empire.

  In the weeks immediately following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a rift about how best to proceed appeared at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Should the United States embark upon what the president, in an unscripted moment, referred to as an all-out “crusade” against global terror? Or should it limit itself to identifying and eliminating the network that had actually perpetrated the September 11 attack? In the near term, the advocates of the narrow approach seemingly prevailed. When Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, the United States singled out bin Laden’s apparatus and the Taliban for destruction. Yet US officials also hinted that the just-launched offensive constituted only the first phase of a multi-part campaign—carefully refraining from specifying what phase two or phase three might entail
. It turned out that the president had not rejected the idea of a crusade; he had merely deferred it while keeping all options open.

  Assuming that the first phase of Operation Enduring Freedom succeeds, the doctrine that President Bush enunciated on September 20 will provide a powerful argument for those eager to move onto the next phase. Finding a suitable candidate to play the roles of al-Qaeda and the Taliban will present few difficulties: the State Department roster of terrorist organizations is a lengthy one; regimes suspected of supporting terror include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, the Palestinian Authority, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea, and perhaps even our new-found ally Pakistan, just for starters.

  To put it another way: Operation Enduring Freedom may be the first instance of the United States waging a “war on terror.” But it is unlikely to be the last. The quest for “enduring freedom” points where the pursuit of absolutes always has in international relations: toward permanent war waged on behalf of permanent peace. The Bush Doctrine, like the Truman Doctrine that it supersedes, offers policymakers a veritable blank check to fight those wars.

  PART 4

  Politics and Culture

  41

  Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago

  (2017)

  Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us.

  It was not always so. Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president (1850–53), presided over but did not personify the American republic. He was merely the federal chief executive. Contemporary observers did not refer to his term in office as the Age of Fillmore. With occasional exceptions, Abraham Lincoln in particular, much the same could be said of Fillmore’s successors. They brought to office low expectations, which they rarely exceeded. So when Chester A. Arthur (1881–85) or William Howard Taft (1909–13) left the White House, there was no rush to immortalize them by erecting gaudy shrines—now known as “presidential libraries”—to the glory of their presidencies. In those distant days, ex-presidents went back home or somewhere else where they could find work.