Twilight of the American Century

Andrew J. Bacevich

Description

Andrew Bacevich is a leading American public intellectual, writing in the fields of culture and politics with particular attention to war and America’s role in the world. Twilight of the American Century is a collection of his selected essays written since 9/11. In these essays, Bacevich critically examines the U.S. response to the events of September 2001, as they have played out in the years since, radically affecting the way Americans see themselves and their nation’s place in the world.

Bacevich is the author of nearly a dozen books and contributes to a wide variety of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Commonweal, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers. Prior to becoming an academic, he was a professional soldier. His experience as an Army officer informs his abiding concern regarding the misuse of American military power and the shortcomings of the U.S. military system. As a historian, he has tried to see the past differently, thereby making it usable to the present.

Bacevich combines the perspective of a scholar with the background of a practitioner. His views defy neat categorization as either liberal or conservative. He belongs to no “school.” His voice and his views are distinctive, provocative, and refreshing. Those with a focus on political and cultural developments and who have a critical interest in America's role in the world will be keenly interested in this book.

As long as the Cold War persisted and, with it, the perceived imperative of confronting international communism, America First remained an emblem of American irresponsibility, a reminder of a narrowly averted catastrophe. When the fall of the Soviet Union triggered a brief flurry of speculation that the United States might claim a “peace dividend” and tend to its own garden, elite opinion wasted no time in denouncing that prospect. With history’s future trajectory now readily apparent—the collapse of communism having cleared up any remaining confusion in that regard—it was incumbent on the United States to implement that future. U.S. leadership was therefore more important than ever, a line of thought giving rise to what the writer R. R. Reno has aptly termed “utopian globalism.”

Three large expectations informed this post–Cold war paradigm. According to the first, corporate capitalism of the type pioneered in the United States, exploiting advanced technology and implemented globally, held the potential of creating wealth on a once unimaginable scale. According to the second, the possession of vast military might—displayed for all to see in the 1990–91 Gulf War—endowed the United States with an unprecedented ability to establish (and enforce) the terms of world order. And according to the third, the White House, no longer merely the official residence of the country’s chief executive, was now to serve as a de facto global command post, the commander in chief’s mandate extending to the far corners of the earth.

In policy circles, it was taken as a given that American power—wielded by the president and informed by the collective wisdom of the political, military, and corporate elite—was sufficient for the task ahead. Although a few outsiders questioned that assumption, such concerns never gained traction. The careful weighing of means and ends suggested timidity. It also risked indulging popular inclinations toward isolationism, kept under tight rein ever since the America First campaign met its demise at the hands of the imperial Japanese navy and Adolf Hitler.

Again and again during the 1990s, U.S. officials warned against the dangers of backsliding. The United States was “the indispensable nation,” they declared, a quasi-theological claim pressed into service as a basis for statecraft. After 9/11, policymakers saw the attacks not as a warning about the consequences of overreach but as a rationale for redoubling U.S. efforts to fulfill the imperatives of utopian globalism. Thus, in 2005, in the midst of stalemated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush summoned the spirit of Wilson and assured his fellow citizens that “the expansion of freedom in all the world” had become “the calling of our time.”

A decade later, with both of those wars still simmering and other emergencies erupting regularly, despite vast expenditures of blood and treasure, Trump denounced the entire post–Cold War project as a fraud. During his presidential campaign, he vowed to “make America great again” and recover the jobs lost to globalization. He pledged to avoid needless armed conflicts and to win promptly any that could not be avoided.

Yet although he rejected the first two components of utopian globalism, he affirmed the third. As president, he and he alone would set things right. Once in office, he pledged to use his authority to the fullest, protecting ordinary Americans from further assault by the forces of globalization and ending the misuse of military power. Instead of embracing globalism, Trump promised to put “America first.”

Trump’s appropriation of that loaded phrase, which formed a central theme of his campaign and his inaugural address, was an affront to political correctness. Yet it was much more. At least implicitly, Trump was suggesting that the anti-interventionists who opposed Roosevelt had been right after all. By extension, he was declaring obsolete the lessons of World War II and the tradition of American statecraft derived from them.

The policy implications seemed clear. In a single stroke, the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, Trump’s inaugural “radically redefined the American national interest as understood since World War II.” Instead of exercising global leadership, the United States was now opting for “insularity and smallness.” Another columnist, William Kristol, lamented that hearing “an American president proclaim ‘America First’” was “profoundly depressing and vulgar.”

That Trump himself is not only vulgar but also narcissistic and dishonest is no doubt the case. Yet fears that his embrace of “America first” will lead the United States to turn its back on the world have already proved groundless. Ordering punitive air strikes against a regime that murders its own citizens while posing no threat to the United States, as Trump did in Syria, is not isolationism. Nor is sending more U.S. troops to fight the campaign in Afghanistan, the very epitome of the endless wars that Trump once disparaged. And whatever one makes of Trump’s backing of the Sunnis in their regional struggle with the Shiites, his vow to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, his threats against North Korea, and his evolving views on trade and the viability of NATO, they do not suggest disengagement.

What they do suggest is something much worse: an ill-informed, impulsive, and capricious approach to foreign policy. In fact, if “policy” implies a predictable pattern of behavior, U.S. foreign policy ceased to exist when Trump took office. The United States now acts or refrains from action according to presidential whim. Trump’s critics have misread their man. Those who worry about the ghost of Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and America First backer, taking up residence in the Oval Office can rest easy. The real problem is that Trump is making his own decisions, and he thinks he has things under control.

Yet more important, unlike Trump himself, Trump’s critics have misread the moment. However oblivious he was to the finer points of diplomacy, candidate Trump correctly intuited that establishment views about the United States’ proper role in the world had not worked. In the eyes of ordinary citizens, policies conceived under the direction of George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice or Susan Rice no longer command automatic assent. America über alles has proved to be a bust—hence, the appeal of “America first” as an alternative. That the phrase itself causes conniptions among elites in both political parties only adds to its allure in the eyes of the Trump supporters whom the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton dismissed during the campaign as “deplorable.”

Whatever the consequences of Trump’s own fumbling, that allure is likely to persist. So, too, will the opportunity awaiting any would-be political leader with the gumption to articulate a foreign policy that promises to achieve the aim of the original America First movement: to ensure the safety and well-being of the United States without engaging in needless wars. The challenge is to do what Trump himself is almost certainly incapable of doing, converting “America first” from a slogan burdened with an ugly history—including the taint of anti-Semitism—into a concrete program of enlightened action. To put it another way, the challenge is to save “America first” from Trump.

(excerpted from chapter 18)

Introduction

Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets

1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz (2013)

2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer (2017)

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: The Decline of Liberalism (2017)

4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014)

5. Tom Clancy, Military Man (2014)

6. Robert Kagan: The Duplicity of the Ideologues (2014)

7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012)

8. Henry Luce: The Elusive American Century (2012)

9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011)

10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011)

11. Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez: Fault Lines (2008)

12. Tommy Franks: A Modern Major General (2004)

13. Henry Adams: Selling Our Souls (2011)

14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010)

15. Randolph Bourne: The Man in the Black Cape (2009)

16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009)

17. Reinhold Niebuhr: Illusions of Managing History (2007)

Part 2. History and Myth

18. Saving ‘America First’ (2017)

19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017)

20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017)

21. American Imperium (2016)

22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015)

23. Always and Everywhere (2013)

24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013)

25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012)

26. The End of (Military) History? (2010)

27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006)

28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006)

29. The Folly of Albion (2005)

30. World War IV (2005)

Part 3. War and Empire

31. Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries (2015)

32. A War of Ambition (2014)

33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013)

34. How We Became Israel (2012)

35. Breaking Washington’s Rules (2011)

36. Why read Clausewitz …. (2006)

37. Living Room War (2005)

38. Bush’s Grand Strategy (2002)

39. New Rome, New Jerusalem (Summer 2002)

40. Permanent War for Permanent Peace (November 2001)

Part 4. Politics and Culture

41. Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago (2017)

42. Not the ‘Age of Trump’ (2017)

43. The Failure of American Liberalism (2016)

44. An Ode to Ike and Adlai (2016)

45. War and Culture, American Style (2016)

46. Under God (2015)

47. Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend (2014)

48. One Percent Republic (2013)

49. Counterculture Conservatism (2013)

50. Ballpark Liturgy (2011)

51. The Great Divide (2008)

Acknowledgments

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• HISTORY
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• American politics
• History of the United States
• World War II
• United States Armed Forces
• September 11
• Foreign policy of the United States
• Commentary
• 21st Century
• Opinion
• United States
• 11
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268104887
• Langue: English

Extrait

Twilight of the American Century
TWILIGHT OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2018 by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bacevich, Andrew J., author.
Title: Twilight of the American century / Andrew J. Bacevich.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] |
Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021921 (print) | LCCN 2018040612 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104870 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104887 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104856 | ISBN 9780268104856 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104859 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268104863 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104867 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government—21st century.
Classification: LCC E902 (ebook) | LCC E902.B33 2018 (print) | DDC 320.973/0905—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021921
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To Steve Brown, Tom Engelhardt, and John Wright
—
Irrepressible New Yorkers,
Irreplaceable Friends
Jerusalem has sinned grievously; therefore, she has become an object of scorn.
All who honored her now despise her, for they have seen her nakedness.
—Lamentations, chapter 1, verse 8
Contents
Introduction. Straying from the Well-Trod Path
Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets
1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War (2013)
2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer (2017)
3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Decline of American Liberalism (2017)
4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014)
5. Tom Clancy: Military Man (2014)
6. Robert Kagan: The Duplicity of the Ideologues (2014)
7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012)
8. Henry Luce: The Elusive American Century (2012)
9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011)
10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011)
11. Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld’s Pentagon (2008)
12. Tommy Franks: A Modern Major General (2004)
13. Selling Our Souls: Of Idolatry and iPhones (2011)
14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010)

15. Randolph Bourne: The Man in the Black Cape (2009)
16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009)
17. Reinhold Niebuhr: Illusions of Managing History (2007)
Part 2. History and Myth
18. Saving “America First” (2017)
19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017)
20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017)
21. American Imperium (2016)
22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015)
23. Always and Everywhere (2013)
24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013)
25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012)
26. The End of (Military) History? (2010)
27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006)
28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006)
29. The Folly of Albion (2005)
30. The Real World War IV (2005)
Part 3. War and Empire
31. Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries (2015)
32. A War of Ambition (2014)
33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013)
34. How We Became Israel (2012)
35. Breaking Washington’s Rules (2011)

36. Why Read Clausewitz When Shock and Awe Can Make a Clean Sweep of Things? (2006)
37. Living Room War (2005)
38. Bush’s Grand Strategy (2002)
39. New Rome, New Jerusalem (2002)
40. Permanent War for Permanent Peace (2001)
Part 4. Politics and Culture
41. Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago (2017)
42. Not the “Age of Trump” (2017)
43. The Failure of American Liberalism (2016)
44. An Ode to Ike and Adlai (2016)
45. War and Culture, American Style (2016)
46. Under God (2015)
47. Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend (2014)
48. One Percent Republic (2013)
49. Counterculture Conservatism (2013)
50. Ballpark Liturgy (2011)
51. The Great Divide (2008)
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
Straying from the Well-Trod Path
Everyone makes mistakes. Among mine was choosing at age seventeen to attend the United States Military Academy, an ill-advised decision made with little appreciation for any longer-term implications that might ensue. My excuse? I was young and foolish.
Yet however ill-advised, the decision was all but foreordained. At least so it appears to me in retrospect. Family background, upbringing, early schooling: all of these, along with the time and place of my birth, predisposed me to choose West Point in preference to the civilian schools to which I had applied. Joining the Corps of Cadets in the summer of 1965 was a logical culmination of my life’s trajectory to that point.
West Point exists for one reason only: to produce soldiers. Not all graduates become career military officers, of course. Many opt out after a few years of service and retool themselves as lawyers, bankers, business executives, stockbrokers, doctors, dentists, diplomats, and the like. But the nation doesn’t need federally funded service academies to fill the ranks of these occupations. For such purposes, America’s multitude of colleges and universities, public and private, more than suffice.
My alma mater is—or at least was—a different sort of place. At the West Point I attended, education per se took a backseat to socialization. As cadets we studied the arts and sciences, thereby absorbing knowledge much like our peers at Ohio State or Yale. Yet mere learning was not the object of the exercise. West Point’s true purpose was to inculcate a set of values and a worldview, nominally expressed in the academy’s motto Duty, Honor, Country.
Virtually all institutional mottos—Google’s now-defunct “Don’t be evil” offers a good example—contain layers of meaning. Apparent simplicity conceals underlying ambiguity, which only the fully initiated possess the capacity to decipher.
Embedded in West Point’s motto are two mutually reinforcing propositions that we aspiring professional soldiers were expected to absorb. According to the first, the well-being of the United States as a whole is inextricably bound up with the well-being of the United States Army. Much as Jesuits believe that the Society of Jesus not only defends but also embodies the Faith, so too does West Point inculcate into its graduates the conviction that the army not only defends but also embodies the nation. To promote the army’s interests is therefore to promote the national interest and, by extension, all that America itself signifies.
According to the second proposition, individual standing within the military profession is a function not of what you are doing but of who you give evidence of becoming. Upward trajectory testifies to your potential for advancing the army’s interests. In this regard, “promotability”—prospects for ascending the hierarchy of rank and position—becomes the ultimate measure of professional status. Thus does the code of professional values incorporate and indeed foster personal ambition and careerism.
I was, to put it mildly, slow to grasp the tension between the values that West Point professed and those that it actually imparted. Appreciating the contradictions would have required critical faculties that in my passage from adolescence to adulthood I did not possess. After all, I was not given to questioning institutional authority. Indeed, my instinct was to defer to institutions and to take at face value the word handed down from podium, pulpit, or teacher’s desk, whatever that word might be. Spending four years at West Point powerfully reinforced that tendency.

Born during the summer of 1947 in Normal, Illinois, of all places, I was, as it were, marked from the outset with the sign of orthodoxy. From an early age, as if by instinct, I deferred to convention, as I was brought up to do.
My roots are in Chicagoland, the great swathe of the Midwest defined by the circulation area of Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune , which in those days proclaimed itself the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” My father, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, had grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a small, charmless city known chiefly as the home of the now-defunct Inland Steel. My mother came from an undistinguished farm town situated alongside the Illinois River, a hundred miles from the Windy City. Both of my parents were born in the early 1920s, both were cradle Catholics, and both were veterans of World War II. Within a year of returning from overseas once the war ended, they had met, fallen in love, and married. Theirs was a perfect match. Eleven months later, with my father now enrolled in college courtesy of the G.I. Bill, I arrived on the scene.
Ours was an upwardly mobile family at a moment when opportunities for upward mobility were plentiful, especially for white Americans willing to work hard. And ours was a traditional family—my Dad as breadwinner, my Mom as “housewife”—at a time when such arrangements seemed proper, natural, and destined to continue in perpetuity.
After my father graduated from college and then from medical school—years during which my parents struggled financially—we returned to East Chicago and began our ascent into a comfortable middle-class existence: a small home, then