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THE NEW AMERICAN
MILITARISM
New boys in
town
By Andrew J Bacevich
Previous excerpt: The normalization of war
In our own time - and especially since the
ascendancy of George W Bush to the presidency -
"neo-conservative" has become a term of
opprobrium, frequently accompanied by ad hominem
attacks and charges of arrogance and hubris. But
the heat generated by the term also stands as a
backhanded tribute, an acknowledgment that the
neo-conservative impact has been substantial. It
is today too soon to offer a comprehensive
assessment of that impact. The discussion of
neo-conservatism offered here has a more modest
objective, namely, to suggest that one aspect of
the neo-conservative legacy has been to foster the
intellectual climate necessary for the emergence
of the new American militarism.
As a
practical matter, the task of reinventing
neo-conservatism for a post-communist world - and
of spelling out an "imperial self-definition" of
American purpose - fell to a new generation. To
promote that effort, leading members of that new
generation created their own institutions.
The passing of the baton occurred in 1995.
That year, Norman Podhoretz stepped down as editor
of Commentary. That same year, William Kristol
founded a new journal, the Weekly Standard, which
in short order established itself as the flagship
publication of second-generation
neo-conservatives. Although keeping faith with
neo-conservative principles that Commentary had
staked out over the previous two decades - and for
a time even employing Norman's son John Podhoretz
in a senior editorial position - the Standard was
from the outset an altogether different
publication. From its founding, Commentary had
been published by the American Jewish Committee,
an august and distinctly non-partisan entity. The
Weekly Standard relied for its existence on the
largess of Rupert Murdoch, the notorious media
mogul. Unlike Commentary, which had
self-consciously catered to an intellectual elite,
the Standard - printed on glossy paper, replete
with cartoons, caricatures, and political gossip -
had a palpably less lofty look and feel. It was by
design smart rather than stuffy. Whereas
Commentary had evolved into a self-consciously
right-wing version of the self-consciously
progressive Dissent, the Standard came into
existence as a neo-conservative counterpart to the
neo-liberal New Republic. Throughout Norman
Podhoretz's long editorial reign, Commentary had
remained an urbane and sophisticated journal of
ideas, aspiring to shape the terms of political
debate even as it remained above the muck and mire
of politics as such. Beginning with Volume 1, No
1, the editors of the Standard did not disguise
the fact that they sought to have a direct and
immediate impact on policy; not ideas as such but
political agitation defined the purpose of this
new enterprise.
Better than anything else,
location told the tale. Commentary's editorial
offices were on Manhattan's East Side; for
first-generation neo-conservatives, the East River
on one side and the Hudson on the other defined
the universe. In contrast, the Standard set up
shop just a few blocks from the White House; for
William Kristol and his compatriots, the perimeter
of the Washington Beltway delineated the world
that mattered.
The power of positive
thinking
What emerged as the hallmarks of
this post-Cold War variant of neo-conservatism?
Unlike their elders, second-generation
neo-conservatives did not define themselves in
opposition - to communism, to the New Left, or to
the '60s. Theirs was no longer an "ideology of
anti-ideology". Rather, they were themselves
advocates of a positive ideological agenda, a
theology that brought fully into view the radical
implications - in John Judis's formulation, the
"inverted Trotskyism" - embedded within the
neo-conservative insurgency from the outset.
Fearing the implications certain to flow
from an America that was weak or tormented by
self-doubt, the elder statesmen of the
neo-conservative movement had labored to restore
to the idea of American power the legitimacy that
it had possessed prior to the '60s. With American
power now fully refurbished - and seemingly
vindicated by the outcome of the Cold War - the
second generation went a step further,
promulgating the notion that the moment was now
ripe for the United States to use that power -
especially military power - to achieve the final
triumph of American ideals. In this sense, the
neo-conservatives who gravitated to the Weekly
Standard showed themselves to be the most
perceptive of all of Woodrow Wilson's disciples.
For the real Wilson (in contrast to either the
idealized or the demonized Wilson) had also seen
military power as an instrument for transforming
the international system and cementing American
primacy.
Efforts to promote "a
neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy
and moral confidence" found expression in five
convictions that together form the foundation of
second-generation neo-conservative thinking about
American statecraft.
First was the
certainty that American global dominion is, in
fact, benign and that other nations necessarily
see it as such. Thus, according to Charles
Krauthammer, a frequent contributor to the Weekly
Standard, "we are not just any hegemon. We run a
uniquely benign imperium. This is not mere
self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in the
way others welcome our power."
However
much they might grumble, the baby-boomer neo-cons
believed, other nations actually yearned for the
United States to lead and, indeed, to sustain its
position as sole superpower, seeing American
dominance as both compatible with their own
interests and preferable to any remotely plausible
alternative. Despite "all bleating about hegemony,
no nation really wants genuine multipolarity",
Robert Kagan observed in this regard. "Not only do
countries such as France and Russia shy away from
the expense of creating and preserving a
multipolar world; they rightly fear the
geopolitical consequences of destroying American
hegemony." According to Kagan, the cold hard
reality of US supremacy was sure to have "a
calming effect on the international environment,
inducing other powers to focus their energies and
resources elsewhere". Joshua Muravchik concurred;
rather than eliciting resistance, American
dominance could be counted on to "have a soothing
effect on the rest of the world". With the passing
of the Cold War, wrote Charles Krauthammer, "an
ideologically pacified North seeks security and
order by aligning its foreign policy behind that
of the United States ... [This] is the shape of
things to come."
Failure on the part of
the United States to sustain its imperium would
inevitably result in global disorder, bloody,
bitter, and protracted: this emerged as the second
conviction animating neo-conservatives after the
Cold War. As a result, proposals for organizing
the world around anything other than American
power elicited derision for being wooly-headed and
fatuous. Nothing, therefore, could be allowed to
inhibit the United States in the use of that
power.
On this point no one was more
emphatic than Krauthammer. "Collective security is
a mirage," he wrote. For its part, "the
international community is a fiction". "'The
allies' is a smaller version of 'the international
community' - and equally fictional." "The United
Nations is guarantor of nothing. Except in a
formal sense, it can hardly be said to exist." As
a result, "when serious threats arise to American
national interests ... unilateralism is the only
alternative to retreat".
Or more extreme
still, "The alternative to unipolarity is chaos."
For Krauthammer the incontrovertible fact of
unipolarity demanded that the United States face
up to its obligations, "unashamedly laying down
the rules of world order and being prepared to
enforce them". The point was one to which younger
neo-conservatives returned time and again. For
Kristol and Robert Kagan, the choice facing
Americans was clear-cut. On the one hand loomed
the prospect of "a decline in US power, a rise in
world chaos, and a dangerous 21st century"; on the
other hand was the promise of safety, achieved
through "a Reaganite reassertion of American power
and moral leadership". There existed "no middle
ground".
A military transformation of
the international order
The third
conviction animating second-generation
neo-conservatives related to military power and
its uses. In a nutshell, they concluded that
nothing works like force. Europeans, wrote Robert
Kagan, might imagine themselves "entering a
post-historical paradise of peace and relative
prosperity, the realization of [Immanuel] Kant's
'Perpetual Peace'". Americans of a
neo-conservative bent knew better. In their
judgment, the United States remained "mired in
history, exercising power in the anarchic
Hobbesian world where international laws are
unreliable and where true security and the defense
and promotion of a liberal order still depend on
the possession and use of military might".
Employing that military might with sufficient
wisdom and determination could bring within reach
peace, prosperity, democracy, respect for human
rights, and American global primacy extending to
the end of time.
The operative principle
was not to husband power but to put it to work -
to take a proactive approach. "Military strength
alone will not avail," cautioned Kagan, "if we do
not use it actively to maintain a world order
which both supports and rests upon American
hegemony." For neo-conservatives like Kagan, the
purpose of the Defense Department was no longer to
defend the United States or to deter would-be
aggressors but to transform the international
order by transforming its constituent parts.
Norman Podhoretz had opposed US intervention in
Vietnam "as a piece of arrogant stupidity" and had
criticized in particular the liberal architects of
the war for being "only too willing to tell other
countries exactly how to organize their political
and economic institutions". For the younger
generation of neo-conservatives, instructing
others as to how to organize their countries -
employing coercion if need be - was not evidence
of arrogant stupidity; it was America's job.
By implication, neo-conservatives were no
longer inclined to employ force only after having
exhausted all other alternatives. In the 1970s and
1980s, the proximate threat posed by the Soviet
Union had obliged the United States to exercise a
certain self-restraint. Now, with the absence of
any counterweight to American power, the need for
self-restraint fell away. Indeed, far from being a
scourge for humankind, war itself - even, or
perhaps especially, preventive war - became in
neo-conservative eyes an efficacious means to
serve idealistic ends. The problem with Bill
Clinton in the 1990s was not that he was reluctant
to use force but that he was insufficiently
bloody-minded. "In Haiti, in Somalia, and
elsewhere" where the United States intervened,
lamented Robert Kagan, "Clinton and his advisers
had the stomach only to be halfway imperialists.
When the heat was on, they tended to look for the
exits." Such halfheartedness suggested a defective
appreciation of what power could accomplish.
Neo-conservatives knew better. "Military
conquest," enthused Muravchik, "has often proved
to be an effective means of implanting democracy."
Michael Ledeen went even further, declaring that
"the best democracy program ever invented is the
US Army". "Peace in this world," Ledeen added,
"only follows victory in war."
By their
own lights, the neo-conservatives of the 1990s did
not qualify as warmongers, but once having gotten
a whiff of gunpowder during the Persian Gulf War
of 1990-91, they developed a hankering to repeat
the experience. The neo-conservative complaint
about Operation Desert Storm was that president
George H W Bush and his commanders had failed to
press the attack. In their eyes, the war
demonstrated that the US military was a superb
instrument wielded by excessively timid officers,
of whom General Colin Powell was the ultimate
embodiment. "One of the [Gulf] war's important
lessons," wrote one neo-conservative, "is that
America's military leadership is far too cautious
... Now the success of that campaign has had the
effect of enhancing the prestige of our military
leadership while doing little or nothing to change
its underlying attitude to fighting. Thus today
and tomorrow it may feel even less inhibited in
opposing the use of force than it did before the
Gulf War." Indeed, promoting the assertive use of
American military power became central to the
imperial self-definition devised by
second-generation neo-conservatives.
Using
force to advance the prospects of peace and
democracy implied that the United States ought to
possess military power to spare. The fourth
conviction animating second-generation
neo-conservatives was a commitment to sustaining
and even enhancing American military supremacy.
Recall that throughout the 1990s, even before
Osama bin Laden declared his jihad against
America, US defense spending remained at Cold War
levels despite the absence of the Cold War. Even
so, neo-conservatives assessed the Pentagon's
budget as completely inadequate and pressed for
more. Highly respected historians of a
neo-conservative persuasion even charged that the
United States was repeating the folly of Great
Britain in the period between the world wars:
engaging in de facto unilateral disarmament. With
the Cold War now history, it seemed, the world was
becoming even more dangerous, and the United
States therefore needed more military power than
ever before. Whether or not a proximate threat
existed, it was incumbent upon the Pentagon to
maintain the capability "to intervene decisively
in every critical region" of the world.
To
alarmists, the prospect of conflict without end
beckoned. Surveying the world, Frederick W Kagan,
brother of Robert, concluded in 1999 that "America
must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and
also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and
elsewhere without compromising its ability to
fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be
able to contemplate war with China or Russia some
considerable (but not infinite) time from now."
The peace that followed victory was to be a long
time coming.
Dealing with the
'professional pessimists'
The fifth and
final conviction that imparted a distinctive twist
to the views of second-generation
neo-conservatives was their hostility toward
realism, whether manifesting itself as a deficit
of ideals (as in the case of Henry Kissinger) or
an excess of caution (as in the case of Colin
Powell). As long as the Cold War had persisted,
neo-conservatives and realists had maintained an
uneasy alliance, based on their common antipathy
for the Soviet Union. But once the Cold War ended,
so too did any basis for cooperation between the
two groups. From the neo-conservative perspective,
realism constituted a problem. Realism was about
defending national interests, not transforming the
global order. Realists had a marked aversion to
crusades and a marked respect for limits. In the
neo-conservative lexicon, the very notion of
"limits" was anathema. To the extent that realists
after the Cold War retained influence in foreign
policy circles, they were likely to obstruct
neo-conservative ambitions. So second-generation
neo-cons trained their gunsights on realism and
shot to kill.
The problem with realists,
complained Robert Kagan, was that they were
"professional pessimists". In that regard there
had always been "something about realism that runs
directly counter to the fundamental principles of
American society". The essential issue, according
to Kagan, was this: "If the United States is
founded on universal principles, how can Americans
practice amoral indifference when those principles
are under siege around the world? And if they do
profess indifference, how can they manage to avoid
the implication that their principles are not, in
fact, universal?" To Kagan and other
neo-conservatives the answer was self-evident:
indifference to the violation of American ideals
abroad was not simply wrong; it was un-American.
Worse, such indifference pointed inevitably down a
slippery slope leading back toward the 1960s or
even the 1930s. An authentically American foreign
policy would reject amorality and pessimism; it
would refuse altogether to accept the notion of
limits or constraints.
As the 1990s
unfolded, neo-conservatives pressed their case for
"a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral
clarity", emphasizing the use of armed force to
promulgate American values and perpetuate American
primacy. Most persistently, even obsessively,
neo-conservatives throughout the Clinton years
lobbied for decisive US action to rid the world of
Saddam Hussein. From a neo-conservative
perspective, the Iraqi dictator's survival after
Desert Storm exposed as nothing else the cynicism
and shortsightedness of the realists who had
dominated the administration of George H W Bush
and who had prevented the American army from
completing its proper mission - pursuing the
defeated Iraqi army all the way to Baghdad.
Topping the agenda of the second-generation
neo-conservatives was a determination to correct
that error, preferably by mobilizing America's
armed might to destroy the Ba'athist regime.
"Bombing Iraq isn't enough", declared the title of
one representative op-ed published by William
Kristol and Robert Kagan in January 1998. It was
time for the gloves to come off, they argued, "and
that means using air power and ground forces, and
finishing the job left undone in 1991".
Neo-cons yearned to liberate Iraq, as an
end in itself but also as a means to an eminently
larger end. "A successful intervention in Iraq,"
wrote Kagan in February 1998, "would revolutionize
the strategic situation in the Middle East, in
ways both tangible and intangible, and all to the
benefit of American interests." A march on Baghdad
was certain to have a huge demonstration effect.
It would put dictators around the world on notice
either to mend their ways or share Saddam's fate.
It would silence doubters who questioned America's
ability to export its values. It would discredit
skeptics who claimed to see lurking behind
neo-conservative schemes the temptations of
empire, the dangers of militarism, and the
prospect of exhaustion and overstretch.
Above all, forcibly overthrowing Saddam
Hussein would affirm the irresistibility of
American military might. As such, the armed
liberation of Iraq would transform US foreign
policy; not preserving the status quo but
promoting revolutionary change would thereafter
define the main purpose of American statecraft.
After all, wrote Michael Ledeen well before
[September 11, 2001], stability was for "tired old
Europeans and nervous Asians". The United States
was "the most revolutionary force on Earth", its
"inescapable mission to fight for the spread of
democracy". The operative word was "fight".
According to Ledeen, Mao [Zedong] was precisely
correct: revolution sprang "from the barrel of a
gun". The successful ouster of Saddam Hussein
could open up whole new vistas of revolutionary
opportunity.
The neo-conservatives
become the establishment
What did all of
this expenditure of intellectual energy actually
yield? During the decade between the end of the
Cold War and the onset of the global war on
terror, the achievements of second-generation
neo-conservatives compare favorably with those of
the anti-communist liberals who in the immediate
aftermath of World War II created the ideological
foundation for what became a durable postwar
foreign-policy consensus. Through argument,
organization, and agitation, leading liberal
intellectuals of the 1940s such as the historian
Arthur Schlesinger and the theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr imbued the muscular, implacably
anti-Stalinist internationalism that they favored
with the appearance of offering the only
acceptable basis for US foreign policy. To diverge
from this "vital center" of American politics,
which they themselves defined and occupied, as
senator Robert Taft on the right and former vice
president Henry Wallace on the left proposed to
do, became almost by definition perverse.
When deciding how to respond to growing
communist influence in Western Europe or to the
invasion of South Korea, president Harry S Truman
did not necessarily pause to consult the latest
scribblings of Schlesinger or Niebuhr. The
influence of intellectuals on policy is seldom
that straightforward. Indirectly, however, these
Cold War liberals helped to lend respectability to
certain propositions that in the 1930s might have
seemed outlandish - for example, the decision to
permanently station US troops in Europe and to
create the apparatus of the national security
state. In short, they fostered a climate congenial
to Truman's pursuit of certain hardline
anti-communist policies and increased the
political risks faced by those inclined to
question such policies.
During the 1990s,
the intellectual offspring of Irving Kristol and
Norman Podhoretz repeated this trick. By the end
of that decade, neo-conservatives were no longer
insurgents; they had transformed themselves into
establishment figures. Their views entered the
mainstream of public discourse and became less
controversial. Through house organs like the
Standard, in essays published by influential
magazines such as Foreign Affairs, through regular
appearances on TV talk shows and at conferences
sponsored by the fellow-traveling American
Enterprise Institute, and via the agitprop of the
Project for the New American Century, they warned
of the ever-present dangers of isolationism and
appeasement, called for ever more munificent
levels of defense spending, and advocated stern
measures to isolate, punish, or overthrow
ne'er-do-wells around the world.
As a mark
of the growing respectability of such views, each
of the three leading general-interest daily
newspapers in the United States had at least one
neo-con offering regular foreign policy commentary
- Max Boot writing for the Los Angeles Times,
David Brooks for the New York Times, and both
Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan for the
Washington Post. Neo-conservative views also
dominated the op-ed pages of the Wall Street
Journal. As a direct consequence of this
determined rabble-rousing, neo-con views about the
efficacy of American military power and the
legitimacy of its use gained wide currency. On
issues ranging from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to
the "rise" of China to the proper response to
terror, neo-conservatives recast the public policy
debate about the obligations imposed upon and
prerogatives to be claimed by the sole superpower.
They kept the focus on the issues that they
believed mattered most: an America that was
strong, engaged, and even pugnacious.
Ideas that even a decade earlier might
have seemed reckless or preposterous now came to
seem perfectly reasonable. A good example was the
issue of regime change in Iraq. On January 26,
1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with
more than a dozen other neo-conservative
luminaries, sent a public letter to president Bill
Clinton denouncing the policy of containing Iraq
as a failure and calling for the United States to
overthrow Saddam Hussein. To persist in the
existing "course of weakness and drift", the
signatories warned ominously, was to "put our
interests and our future at risk". Nine months
later, Clinton duly signed into law the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998, passed by large majorities
in both houses of Congress. That legislation
declared that it had now become the policy of the
United States government to "remove the regime
headed by Saddam Hussein", with legislators
authorizing the expenditure of US$99 million for
that purpose. Clinton showed little enthusiasm for
actually implementing the measure, and most of the
money remained unspent. But neo-conservative
efforts had done much to create a climate in which
it had become impolitic to suggest aloud that
publicly declaring the intent to overthrow regimes
not to the liking of the United States might be
ill-advised. At the end of the 1940s, thanks to
the Cold War liberals, no politician with the
slightest interest in self-preservation was going
to risk even the appearance of being soft on the
Soviet Union. At the end of the 1990s, thanks to
the neo-conservatives, no politician was going to
take the chance of being tagged with being soft on
Saddam.
In fact, the grand vision
entertained by second-generation neo-conservatives
demanded that the United States shatter the status
quo. New conditions, they argued, absolved
Americans from any further requirement to adhere
to the norms that had defined the postwar
international order. Osama bin Laden and the
events of September 11 provided the tailor-made
opportunity to break free of the fetters
restricting the exercise of American power.
Andrew J Bacevich is professor
of international relations and director of the
Center for International Relations at Boston
University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam
veteran, he has a doctorate in history from
Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American
Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several
books, including the just published The New American Militarism: How
Americans Are Seduced by War, of which this
article is an excerpt. Used by permission of
Tomdispatch, the author,
and Oxford University Press Inc.
(Copyright 2005 Andrew J Bacevich.) |
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