Farewell, the American Century By Andrew J Bacevich
In a recent column, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote, "What Henry Luce
called 'the American Century' is over." Cohen is right. All that remains is to
drive a stake through the heart of Luce's pernicious creation, lest it come
back to life. This promises to take some doing.
When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod
his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of
Life, his essay, "The American Century”, hit the newsstands at a moment when
the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone
disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding
in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.
With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce
urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to "accept
wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital
nation in the world ... to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Read today, Luce's essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and
bombast ("We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world"),
does not stand up well. Yet the phrase "American Century" stuck and has enjoyed
a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as
"Victorian Age" does to the 19th century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or
at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha
and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding
spirit and inspiration for all humankind.
In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been
one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the US
military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on
December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the
world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the US not only
preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to
look like.
Thank you, comrades
So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its
celebrants.
The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United
States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters
at odds with the triumphal story-line.
The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their
value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short,
the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of
self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in
which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a
mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has
become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring
the American Century over, the American people - and especially the American
political class - still remain in its thrall.
Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include
much that the American Century leaves out.
For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to
be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary
credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to
defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden,
sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.
By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any
American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be
saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.
For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the
equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered
the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the
winnings. The true "Greatest Generation" is the one that willingly expended
millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.
Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile
allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United
States came out on top.
Yet in determining that outcome, the brilliance of American statesmen was far
less important than the ineptitude of those who presided over the Kremlin.
Ham-handed Soviet leaders so mismanaged their empire that it eventually
imploded, permanently discrediting Marxism-Leninism as a plausible alternative
to liberal democratic capitalism. The Soviet dragon managed to slay itself. So
thank you, Comrades Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and
Gorbachev.
Screwing the pooch
What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is
not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by
the United States - missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the
problems bedeviling us today.
The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label "made-in-Washington"
may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the
appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don't qualify as
small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard
account of the American Century untenable.
Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the
problems we face today are studiously ignored:
Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the
proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that
brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been
an American Century, it begins here, with the US government breaking a solemn
commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a
protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading
eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose,
the Cuban Missile Crisis and even today's Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line
connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many
twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.
The bomb. Nuclear weapons imperil our existence. Used on a large
scale, they could destroy civilization itself. Even now, the prospect of a
lesser power like North Korea or Iran acquiring nukes sends jitters around the
world. American presidents - Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line -
declare the abolition of these weapons to be an imperative. What they are less
inclined to acknowledge is the role the United States played in afflicting
humankind with this scourge.
The United States invented the bomb. The United States - alone
among members of the nuclear club - actually employed it as a weapon of war.
The US led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of
power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great
Britain, France and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the US still maintains
an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself
to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of
some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.
Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited
those who govern the Islamic republic to "unclench their fists”. Yet to a
considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making. For most
Americans, the discovery of Iran dates from the time of the notorious hostage
crisis of 1979-1981 when Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran,
detained several dozen US diplomats and military officers and subjected the
administration of Jimmy Carter to a 444-day lesson in abject humiliation.
For most Iranians, the story of US-Iranian relations begins somewhat earlier.
It starts in 1953, when CIA agents collaborated with their British counterparts
to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and
return the Shah of Iran to his throne. The plot succeeded. The Shah regained
power. The Americans got oil, along with a lucrative market for exporting arms.
The people of Iran pretty much got screwed. Freedom and democracy did not
prosper. The antagonism that expressed itself in November 1979 with the
takeover of the US embassy in Tehran was not entirely without cause.
Afghanistan. President Obama has wasted little time in making the
Afghanistan War his own. Like his predecessor he vows to defeat the Taliban.
Also like his predecessor he has yet to confront the role played by the United
States in creating the Taliban in the first place. Washington once took pride
in the success it enjoyed funneling arms and assistance to fundamentalist
Afghans waging jihad against foreign occupiers. During the administrations of
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, this was considered to represent the very acme
of clever statecraft. US support for the Afghan mujahideen caused the Soviets
fits. Yet it also fed a cancer that, in time, exacted a most grievous toll on
Americans themselves - and has US forces today bogged down in a seemingly
endless war.
Act of contrition
Had the United States acted otherwise, would Cuba have evolved into a stable
and prosperous democracy, a beacon of hope for the rest of Latin America? Would
the world have avoided the blight of nuclear weapons? Would Iran today be an
ally of the United States, a beacon of liberalism in the Islamic world, rather
than a charter member of the "axis of evil”? Would Afghanistan be a quiet,
pastoral land at peace with its neighbors? No one, of course, can say what
might have been. All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington
by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.
What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze,
thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid
that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and
unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into
the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We
blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it
ass-backwards.
Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.
Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin,
nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of
Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of US-Cuban relations for so
long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective
regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past US interventionism has wrought.
The United States should do these things without any expectations of
reciprocity. Regardless of what US officials may say or do, Castro won't fess
up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won't liken Hiroshima
to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran's mullahs and Afghanistan's jihadists
won't be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.
No, we apologize to them, but for our own good - to free ourselves from the
accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United
States participated fully in the barbarism, folly and tragedy that define our
time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.
To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that
requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American
Century.
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