When Foreign Policy Took a Wrong Turn
I have long been an admirer of Andrew Bacevich. He brings a refreshing combination of scholarship, passion and wit to the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. All three qualities are on display in The Limits of Power.
I find myself agreeing with most of Bacevich's conclusions, while arriving there by a different road. Every theory critical of recent U.S. foreign policy includes an overt or implicit theory of when things went wrong. If you think that U.S. foreign policy took a wrong turn with the election of George W. Bush, then you are likely to focus on the theories and motives of the neoconservatives and other contemporary elites, and to be moderately optimistic about the chances that a different team with different ideas will change course. If, on the other hand, you agree with Gore Vidal and William Appleman Williams that the U.S. took a wrong turn after the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Federal Constitution of 1787 and the Whiskey Rebellion, then you are likely to see Bush as simply one more in a string of tyrants waging unnecessary wars like the Civil War--Lincoln's unnecessary folly, according to many libertarians--or World War I, Wilson's folly--or World War II--Roosevelt's folly, according to Charles Beard and Patrick Buchanan.
Although he is far from that extreme, Bacevich, who tries to explain recent foreign policy in terms of American messianism and expansionism dating back to the nineteenth century, is still too close to the Vidal/Williams/Beard pole for my taste--but then, my vantage point is near the other end of the spectrum. I think that U.S. foreign policy took a wrong turn following the Cold War during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, when Democrats as well as Republicans were entranced by the "sole superpower" myth and the goal of turning America's temporary hegemony over Europe and Japan into permanent global hegemony.
From my perspective (which Vidal and Chomsky if not Bacevich would consider that of a complacent member of the imperial establishment!) there is no need to seek the roots of post-1989 or post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy mistakes and failures in two hundred years of conceited American exceptionalism. The origins of Bush's foreign policy are much more recent and lie in neoconservative ideology, between the 1970s and 2000s.
Neoconservatism--I say this as the former executive editor of Irving Kristol's The National Interest--is not deeply rooted in American foreign policy traditions, Wilsonian or otherwise. The idea of a "global democratic revolution" pushed by former leftists like Michael Novak and Joshua Muravchik has nothing to do with Wilsonian/Gladstonian liberal internationalism, which promoted international law and self-determination. Neoconservative "democratism" essentially is an offshoot of anti-Stalinist Marxism in which "democratic socialism" is replaced by "democratic capitalism." This idea along with their jobs and their undeserved public prominence was inherited by the mediocre non-leftist children of the ex-leftist neocon dynasts (the Kristols, the Kagans, the Podhoretzes). Add to the "global democratic revolution" a preference for Churchill over FDR, a quite un-American nostalgia for the British empire in the Third World (Max Boot) and an attitude toward Arabs picked up from British and Canadian Tories and Israeli right-wingers, and you pretty much have the whole idiosyncratic Commentary/Weekly Standard worldview. Indeed, critics like Bacevich who blame neoconservatism in part on age-old American democratic and liberal traditions inadvertently lend credibility to neocons like Robert Kagan, who is engaged in the Orwellian project of rewriting American history to prove that Washington, Lincoln, Wilson and FDR were all proto-neocons. This is junk history, whether it's promoted by neocons themselves or by their critics.
But while I differ from Bacevich in having a different and more favorable view of the history of U.S. foreign policy until recently, there is very little in his discussion of the present and the future with which I would disagree. In his final chapter, he calls for the U.S. to adopt a more modest attitude; to battle Islamist terrorism without waging war on Islam; and to cooperate in a spirit of enlightened self-interest with other nations on common goals, like phasing out nuclear weapons and dealing with climate change. While I disagree with Bacevich about when and why U.S. foreign policy went wrong, I hope that a new leadership in Washington follows his prescriptions for setting it right.
(Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of The American Way of Strategy).
I'm inclined to agree with Bacevich that the turning point was the so-called Carter malaise speech. We had a chance then to take a path away from dependence on foreign oil. Instead, Carter was mocked and we chose militarism under Ronald Reagan, including the disastrous deciion to finance and train mujahedeen, creating a terrorist network in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is now the source of so much woe. The situation is much, much worse than it was when President Carter warned us of our folly. It will be much more difficult and expense to change course now. I have not seen one centimeter of movement in a different direction under the new administration (at least nothing that calls for sacrifice).
February 5, 2009 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Im not so sure Gore Vidal, despite his intense republican views, is an opponent of the Civil War. If he were in better health, Im sure he could answer you better than I and would probably bludgeon you to death with his biting prose.
Dont cast stones so haphazardly.
February 5, 2009 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
U.S. took a wrong turn after the replacement of the Articles of Confederation
That is way late.
The wrong turn occurred in 1630.
It was only a short step from there to believe that Yahweh was going into the smiting business on our behalf in a big way.
February 5, 2009 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you have it right in terms of the birth of the notion of USA exceptionalism. However, it was, as someone suggested, Washington's mission to forces the distillers to pay an unfair tax, and the USA military's first foray beyond our borders to go after the Barbary Pirates, which established the principle that the primary purpose of USA military force and diplomacy is to protect the wealth of the power elite of the nation.
February 6, 2009 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
This notion that we took a wrong turn at some point in time is simply wrong. There has been a tension in the US between aggressive and pointless war and actions that serve America's real interest carried in a civilized manner.
I would list the civil war, WWII, the Koreaan war and the initial invasion of Afghanistan as military actions that were unavoidable and in America's interest. The Spanish American War, WWI, Vietnam, the current fiascos and numerous small wars (Somailia, Lebanon, 1983, Contras, etc) were and are not needed. Comparing these lists it seems that good wars are in the clear minority. We have a tendency, going back two centuries, towards unneeded aggression and war. Bacevic, it seems to me, is asking us to take a step back and try to come up with a better attitude towards trying to fix problems facing the world.
February 5, 2009 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is a pretty good summary. I guess as we get out of Iraq and try to get Obama to focus on what he thinks he is going to accomplish in Afghanistan, it is important to avoid future disasters. Vietnam certainly taught me that just because our government says a war is necessary doesn't make it so. I would add Mexican War to the bad war list.
February 5, 2009 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
You and one A. Lincoln.
February 5, 2009 9:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Along with Henry David Thoreau.
February 6, 2009 5:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Between this thread and Mr. Bacevich's there must be half a dozen different labels used for what Team Aggression USA™ has been up to in the world: "global leadership," "hegemony," "expansionism," "messianism" (huh?), plus of course vanilla or default "imperialism" and "colonialism."
None of these is exactly right; they have all been borrowed from the annals of other nations’ libido dominandi artists. Without being the least bit "exceptional" -- much less "indispensable"! -- our Uncle Sam really is at least a little different/peculiar/funny/weird.
One of the peanuts in the peanut gallery captures about half of Emperor Sam's weirdness by suggesting that everything went wrong in 1630, taking "city on the hill" to be the start of our relentless national wallow in SELF-ESTEEM. My own favorite prooftext is Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans from a couple of centuries later, 1832, but probably we have never been less than pluperfect self-narcissists all along.
Our constant demand to be flattered by the lesser breeds without would not matter to most foreigners if we stayed home and did not attempt to help the lesser breeds govern themselves. In that connection, Sam's most prominent feature, surely, is his LAZINESS. The idea that the current crop of weekly standardisers and commentalitarians want to "rule the world" is ludicrous, that would entail vastly too much work for our señorito classes to endure. All they want, really, is a veto over whatever the lesser breeds may misguidedly decide to do.
The idea of the Baní Kagan and the Bnê Podhóretz rulin' the world in the sense of actual hands-on administration of native and local affairs is a bad joke, but they do, of course, want to be able to JUST SAY NO to this or that potential blunder by those less wunnerful and flatterworthy than themselves. Their now slightly obsolescent, one must hope, factional slogan of "régime change" has turned out to illustrate the point nicely: obviously it means they just-said-no to the Tálebán and the Ba‘th -- Big Sam sure vetoed those proposals, didn't he? -- but on the positive or constructive side, there has been nothing much for Team Aggression to show except Dr. Gen. Petræus of Princeton demonstrating how martial law still works if you can do it right. The demonstration is all very well, no doubt, and it is a pleasure to learn that we really do know what we always thought we knew, but still, the remedial class would not have been necessary without several years of stumblebumism from the militant extremist GOP.
The toxic brew of sloth and self-love and veto does not amount to a definite foreign policy, naturally, but it is consistent with various things that do merit the name and are characteristially Yank, most notably (on my own little list) the Monroe Doctrine as implemented from about the time of the Spanish war of 1898.
William Appleman Williams is mentioned in connection with the Whisky Rebellion, which makes no sense to me, but his concentration on the "Open Door" gizmo was plausible, and it is consistent with the laziness-narcissism-veto hypothesis, and it dates to about the time when the Monroe Doctrine turned into a monstrosity. Consider as a form of veto-mongering, OpenDoorism was alive and well as of yesterday morning and living at the Wall Street Jingo [*], among other places.
Something else pertinent happened between 1890 and 1910: of those unsatisfactory labels with which I began, "expansionism" really was applicable down to then, but has been inoperative since. Nowadays Sam craves to invigilate over Ruritania and Patagonia and everybody else, but neo-Sam has no wish at all to move to the boondocks of the world and club the aborigines over the head and inherit the land as if it were Texas or Utah or California. A few years ago Neocomrade P. J. Buchanan proposed to annex Anglophone Canada and Greenland too -- which was merely quaint and dotty of him. So I infer that there was definitely a paradigm change something like 120 years ago.
As to twenty years ago, probably nothing much happened. If one analyzes like this --
"Neoconservative 'democratism' essentially is an offshoot of anti-Stalinist Marxism in which 'democratic socialism' is replaced by 'democratic capitalism' "
-- is one not trying to establish a continuity rather than a rupture?
But not to quibble. At bottom the real trouble with that sort of thing is that I cannot work up any serious belief in a Dread Neo-Con Cabal that supposedly dictated the incompetences of Rancho Crawford. The cowpokers were perfectly capable of bein’ as dumb as they were without any assistance from the Project for a New American Century. Or from the Fourth International Alumni Society either. They did have a little assistance from those quarters in fact, but none that crucially mattered.
Happy days.
___
[*] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123380102867150621.html
February 6, 2009 12:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
But then what you're saying is that we currently have a two-headed hydra: Cheney/Bush "open door-ism" that fosters global economic expansion *and* neo-conservative cum liberal interventionism, in a more political vein.
It ain't pretty.
February 6, 2009 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are many historical factors that conspired to create the foreign policy crisis of the past decade, too many, I suspect, to cite just one key event. But certainly the two shocks of the collapse of global Communism - a kind of positive trauma - followed not long after by the negative trauma of 9/11, played a very important role in giving full expression to ideological factors that had been germinating for some time.
Some of the ideological components go back to events like the red scares, the McCarthy era, and people like William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers. These people preached that the struggle with the Soviet Union was primarily an ideological struggle pitting the forces of God against the depraved, soulless materialism of Godless modernity. This intellectual trend was a revived expression of an old, conservative form of populism that saw Eastern elites - first seen as financial elites, then as crypto-communist elites, then as immoral "liberal" elites - as the subversive destroyers of the natural, pious virtues of the American republic.
The people forces promoting that moral and ideological attitude toward Communism and the Soviet Union co-existed with the more Kennen-inspired and realist promoters of the containment doctrine. But since both groups were in effect allies in the same Cold War, the differences were submerged. Sometimes you had the realist, Nixonian trend dominating; and later the ideological Reaganite trend. But I don't know if even Reaganism was enough to get you what we saw in the last decade. By the end of the nineties, Reagan was reverting to realism, and was followed by a more conventional Nixonian realist president.
Then Communism collapsed, and the churning waters of the pent up ideological deluge were set free by the destruction of the previously powerful restraining levees of undeniable geopolitical reality. A mighty military machine that was previously seen as essential just to maintain balance suddenly assumed the shape of an unchallengeable colossus. The ideological dimension was now accompanied by a frank call for perpetual US global hegemony. This was new, I think. Never before in the history of the United States could any serious thinkers have presumed to propose that the United States should, for all intents and purposes, rule the world. Such a suggestion would have seemed too outlandish given the obvious the constraints and limitations the US faced.
Then we had 9/11, and the self-assured, but somewhat complacent feeling of confidence in unchallengeable and all-consuming power combined with the threatened and vengeful urge to assert all-consuming power. This emotional spasm of violence and unilateral aggression, and the fantastic bipartisan calls for a global American revolution, were actually short-lived, but they lasted long enough for Bush to get us into a jam we couldn't easily get out of.
It may be a mistake to look to philosophical or intellectual trends as the main causal factors in bad turns in foreign policy. Events are central. Human beings are always tempted by the frustrated urge to dominate and control their entire world and surroundings. If nothing stands in their way, that urge will rise to the surface and dominate their outlook. There is probably just a natural phase in the history of powerful, ever-expanding states and empires when power crests, and the world-dominating urge is just bound to come out. At some point, world conquest and a global Pax under the benevolent leviathan starts to look like an attractive idea.
February 6, 2009 12:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
The United States had a pragmatic foreign policy up until the nineties. Even Reagan talked with the Soviets. But as Will Bunch points out in his book "Tear Down This Myth," the Reagan myth of being tough and that the United States should promote its values around the world took hold among Democrats and Republicans and that ended the pragmatic tradition of American foreign policy. Another factor that added to the expansionist foreign policy of the nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century was the easy victory over Iraq in 1991 and then Serbia in 1999. These military actions ended the Vietnam syndrome and made politicians such as Hillary Clinton vote for the second Iraq War because they believed that the war would painless and without personal political cost.
P.S. If anyone is interested in Bunch's book, they should read my book review of it on Amazon.com.
February 6, 2009 2:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I take my values from the real world of life, that is, evolution. There are no ideologies, only what works.
Power to the pragmatists!
February 6, 2009 4:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Foreign policy took the wrong turn on April 6, 1917 when America declared war on the German Empire.
Result: America got in bed with perfidious Albion and spiteful, revanchist France. It gave up its role as honest-broker and became the handmaiden of mercantilists and colonialists.
Counterfactual: America spends the '20s and '30s helping to rebuild central European economies and inducing dying colonial powers to choose the benefits of free trade over captured markets.
February 6, 2009 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
At the end of World War II, the United States had become the hegemonic power. Therefore, its military achievements prior to that time are less relevant to predicting its future than are the histories of previous hegemons.
The closest parallel is Disraeli's term 1874-80. Economically, this was at the beginning of the Long Depression 1873-96, when English agriculture was decimated by cheap grain from the US and cheap meat from Argentina and Australia. English manufacturers found it difficult to compete with imports from the US and Germany. Militarily, Britain engaged in the Second Anglo-Afghan war with modest success, and acheived victory in the Anglo-Zulu war after an initial defeat. Britain becomes less free trade oriented and turns inward to its Empire as its power declines relative to others over the period until 1914.
Other periods to look at are the relative decline of the French from the Seven Years War up to the Revolution and the decline of the Hapsburgs from the defeat of the Armada in the west and the Long War against the Turks in the east until the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618.
Hegemons go to seed militarily and economically after several decades of supremacy, and then they stagnate until they are reduced to second rank powers by the next global total war.
The US will continue to spend fortunes on very expensive military adventures in an attempt to maintain its hegemony. However, it will be surpassed by an economically unified Europe and an economically unified Northeast Asia. It will decline relative to these powers until about 2030-40, when the next global wars will begin over a scramble for dwindling resources. These wars will last about three decades and probably result in over 2 billion casualties. This would be more than 10 times the number of casualties during 1914-49, and would reflect the increased population, greater global involvement, and new biological weaponry.
How this is all rationalized politically over the next couple decades doesn't matter very much.
February 6, 2009 10:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, well, what does Nostradamus say about that?
February 6, 2009 2:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nostrodamus is difficult to interpret, but I think he said, "read Kondratieff and von Clausewitz".
February 6, 2009 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not to disagree DanK here, or the author, but I'd like to nominate another turning point for the worse: The Carter Doctrine, which I believe was mid-wifed by Zbigniew Brezinski.
"Let our position be absolutely he clear," Carter said in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region [and thereby endanger the flow of oil] will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
I am also a big admirer of Bacevich, and my thoughts go out to his family whenever I think of the loss of his son doing his duty as a soldier in Iraq. Bacevich's 2002 book, American Empire is a relentless attack on the failures of foreign policy under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He argues that they abandoned Jeffersonian skepticism that American military adventures are ever about much except protecting the business interests of American capitalists. That argument from this author is what makes me focus on how the Carter Doctrine doomed the U.S. to 3 bloody wars over oil in that region.
February 6, 2009 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink