America Embattled

9/11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order

Richard Crockatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415283427
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134456017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What causes Anti- Americanism and where are its historical roots? What is the impact of 9/11 on America's sense of itself and its role in the world? Is America paradoxically a victim of its own political and economic power? This book seeks to understand the terrible attacks of September 11th within a broader historical, political and ideological context. Rather than drawing on simple 'clash of civilisation' oppositions, the author argues that it is important to have an awareness of the complex historical processes which influence: America's sense of itself and its changing view of the world How the world, especially the Muslim world, views America The changing nature of international politics and the global system since the end of the cold war. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary and historical sources Richard Crockatt has written a balanced, subtle and highly readable book which provides genuine insight into American foreign policy, anti-Americanism and Islamic fundamentalism. It will be important reading for all those seeking to understand the background to the 'war on terror'.

1 How America sees the world

Historical perspectives

No insularity in the West, not even the English, has been so acute as the American: no international involvement, again not even the English, has been so deep.

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America¹

America and the world: the perceptual gap

It takes little imagination to see that the events of September 11 delivered a profound shock to America’s sense of its relationship with the outside world. Commentators inside and outside the United States strove to find words to express their sense of the enormity of the attacks. The attacks were a “wakeup call for Americans.” They constituted the “end of American innocence,” a final blow to America’s privileged position of detachment from the messy and violent conflicts that blighted less favored countries. America had now once and for all entered the “real world” of international politics, its “illusion of invulnerability” finally shattered. An important assumption behind these reactions was that America’s stance toward the outside world could and must change as a result of these events. American isolationism (in so far as it still existed), its tendency to act unilaterally, indeed its famed “exceptionalism” itself must inevitably give way to an acknowledgment that the United States was just like any other power. What precise policy implications might flow from such a recognition were as yet unclear; it was enough that the events of September 11 constituted a turning point in American foreign relations. The world, it was said repeatedly, would never be the same again, and neither would America.²

It is not surprising that a shock of this scale and immediacy should incline people to reach for the most charged language. It seems intuitively right that there must be some correlation between the human cost of the tragedy and the wider historical and political significance of the event. It is surely too early to come to final conclusions about these larger issues, but American reactions to September 11 exposed, if nothing else, certain deeply held assumptions about America’s role in the world. Besides the obvious sense of horror at the scale of the human tragedy, which was shared by many non-Americans, most poignant of all was the sense of shock and bafflement expressed by Americans at the intense hatred of the United States that these attacks displayed. The sources of such hatred are the subject of future chapters. Here, we are concerned with the shock and bafflement and what they reveal about how America sees the world beyond its shores.

Let us be clear at the outset that the claim is not that Americans should have expected or anticipated the attacks of September 11, far less that they should have shrugged them off as the price to be paid for world leadership.³The point is rather the gap that these events exposed between America’s actual role in the world and America’s habitual perception of that role. Even those in other countries favorably disposed to the United States—and there were and are many—tended to comprehend the terrorist attacks within a framework in which American power was perceived to be a dominant—perhaps the dominant—force in world politics. By and large (and this is a generalization to be developed and refined in the course of this chapter), American reactions to September 11 betrayed a world view in which American global power, though a fact of life, was incidental to America’s foreign relations. Americans rarely see American power at work, with the consequence that foreign relations are perceived to be something that happens to America as a result of the actions of others rather than arising from the actions of the United States on others. To the extent that America is a world unto itself, by virtue of its size, geographical location, social diversity, and economic dynamism, it is often insulated from the reactions that its activity in the world arouses. From this point of view, September 11 was undoubtedly a profound shock to America at all levels but, to the extent that the attacks were perceived to have come “out of the blue,” arguably they reinforced rather than displaced the perceptual gap described earlier regarding America’s relations with the outside world. Where did these assumptions come from and how did they grow? They are evidently rooted in America’s past, and it is to history that we must turn to comprehend both the American reactions to September 11 and the significance of the attacks for American foreign relations.

One preliminary point must be made. For much of this chapter, no distinction is made between the people of the United States and their government, as the concern here in the first instance is with broad attitudes. However, it is clearly wrong to assume a simple identity between the two when it comes to particular policies and decisions. How policy is made, what role public opinion and its political representatives have in the formation of policy, whether policymakers lead or are led by public opinion are all critical issues that are discussed later in the chapter.

Patterns in the past

In the struggle to understand the full dimensions of the blow to America’s sense of security in the wake of September 11, a number of possible historical analogies lie to hand, the most commonly invoked being the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The element of surprise was common to both attacks, and the sudden resolve of the United States in both instances to respond immediately and massively was in part a function of the absence of warning. The sense of America’s having been violated, resentment at the enemy for failing to play “by the rules,” the underhanded nature of the attacks, and the naked exploitation of America’s openness (its “innocence”) unified the country and all but silenced doubts about the need to respond vigorously. However, the differences between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, are all too clear. Though on United States soil, the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was remote from the continental United States and the main centers of population. Furthermore, the attack on Pearl Harbor was unambiguously an act of war by one state against another, the targets at Pearl Harbor were warships, not civilians, and there were fewer casualties than in New York and Washington. Finally, there was no doubt about the identity of the enemy or what needed to be done to defeat him. Having said that, there is one important similarity between the two cases to which I shall return. Both instances encouraged the view that once and for all American isolationism was finished.

The Cuban missile crisis is another possible analogy, in the sense that the missiles in Cuba represented a direct threat to the American mainland and their use would have created the potential for catastrophic war with the Soviet Union.⁴ For thirteen days in October 1962, the world held its breath in horrified anticipation of possible destruction on a scale that would have dwarfed the attacks of September 11, 2001. However, once again, this was a state-to-state standoff, and the tension was generated by potential rather than actual destruction. Moreover, horrific as war would have been in the event of a breakdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, this crisis took place in the framework of the Cold War, which was a familiar and, in a sense, rule-bound conflict, however oppressive and threatening. By contrast, September 11 seemed outside any known parameters.

There have been other attacks on the United States. In 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara on the coast of California, one of the few cases in recent history of a direct attack on the American mainland. But this was a sideshow to the main theaters of war. If it had any direct effect, it was to confirm American opinion about the justification of interning Japanese Americans for the duration of the war. Looking further back into history, some commentators noted that the last (and only) time there had been, on a single day on American soil, casualties comparable to those of September 11 was the Civil War battle of Antietam (1862), in which an estimated four and a half thousand individuals died.⁵ This battle proved decisive in the Civil War, putting an end to the Confederacy’s ambitions of taking Union territory, but it also was a case of American killing American in the course of a long and bloody conflict, not a bolt from the blue from outside. The efforts of one newspaper columnist to draw lessons from Antietam about how the United States (the Union) might defeat terrorism (the Confederacy) strains credulity and illustrates the limits rather than the usefulness of supposed historical parallels.⁶ In some ways, a more apt reference point might be the razing of Washington, DC, by the British in the war of 1812, if only because it involved the destruction of American property by an outside force. But once again, this action took place during an already declared war, and besides which Washington at the time was an overgrown village rather than a major city, the government had already departed, and the action was not decisive militarily.

The search for direct parallels, in short, appeared to lead to the conclusion that there were no meaningful precedents for September 11. It was apparently outside the framework of America’s historical experience. However, this is to look at the issue too narrowly. To say that there are no clear historical parallels is merely to confirm the familiar truth that history never repeats itself exactly. Patterns, however, do exist and it is these that we must examine.

If a sense of vulnerability was the most damaging repercussion of September 11, then it must be pointed out that expressions of vulnerability to outside influence, whether in the form of ideas or physical attack, are discernible from the beginnings of American nationhood. America was born in war, and its first president was a general. America’s early diplomatic history, including the treaty with France in 1778, which was formed in order to achieve independence, and the treaty with Britain in 1794, formed in order to sustain independence, evidenced America’s relative weakness and vulnerability to the superior power of the “Great Powers.” America won the war and the peace in part by taking sober cognizance of its real and potential weaknesses. The Constitution of 1787, which replaced the original instrument of American government (the Articles of Confederation), was devised in part to remedy the frailty of American statehood and its consequent vulnerability to external pressures in a world of scheming nations.⁷ Moreover, a sense of vulnerability remained pervasive in American history, with peaks of intensity at moments of international crisis, suggesting that there has been no great transition as a result of September 11 from a secure America to an insecure and vulnerable America. Out of many possible examples, we can take the repercussions of the French Revolution, which caused political turmoil in America during the 1790s and led to the passage of Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798; a foretaste of similar efforts to insulate America from foreign radicalism in the Red Scare of 1919–20; and the anticommunist drive in the 1940s and 1950s. Anxieties about the spread of “alien” religious beliefs, not least Roman Catholicism in this predominantly Protestant country, colored American history throughout the nineteenth century. Vestiges of these fears were visible in questions posed to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960 about where his loyalty would lie in a case where his allegiances to America and Rome were in conflict with each other.

In the field of foreign economic policy, efforts to stay neutral in global wars and to maintain America’s flow of overseas trade consistently failed, leading to more or less drastic measures to try to cut the United States off from the sources of conflict. During the Napoleonic Wars, American trading vessels fell prey to the depredations of Britain and France as each tried to deny goods to the other. However, American neutrality proved unsustainable, and the result was war with Britain in 1812, in this case a foretaste of comparable American efforts to remain neutral in 1914–17 and 1939–41.

As the technology of war developed, so did the possible range of threats. Militarily, the advent of the airplane and later the intercontinental ballistic missile canceled America’s apparently supreme advantage of distance from potential enemies. American reaction to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 was only the most visible evidence of a more general anxiety during the Cold War about the Soviet threat. Sputnik quickened the pace of civil defense measures, including a crash program to build fallout shelters, and deeply affected other areas of American life, such as education, as the Federal government pumped new funds into the teaching of mathematics and science. In short, the sense of vulnerability, if anything, intensified with the growth of American power; indeed, it became a staple feature of foreign policy debates and was not confined to a few high-profile cases of obvious threat. Furthermore, the problem of vulnerability typically provoked a quest for invulnerability, not least in the burgeoning defense budgets of the Cold War years. More specifically, this impulse drove the argument for a missile defense shield, from Reagan’s “Star Wars” scheme to the more recent proposals for NMD (National Missile Defense).⁸

On their own, these historical instances are not decisive. Historians make a habit of piling up historical precedents with the aim of proving that there is nothing new under the sun. What makes these instances significant is that they coexisted from an early stage in America’s history with an equally powerful sense of national confidence, or what one historian has called a “quest for national greatness.”⁹ Indeed, the coexistence of these two powerful and contradictory motions constitutes one of the chief paradoxes of American history. Both impulses coalesced in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which was both a piece of supreme bravado (given that the United States lacked the means to enforce it on their own) and an expression of concern about the threat of a reassertion of European power in the Western hemisphere. Seeking to preempt a possible attempt by Spain, with the help of France, to crush the newly established independent states of Latin America and also to challenge Russian power on the northwest coast of the continent, President Monroe declared that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition that they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.”¹⁰ As suggested above, the paradox deepened in the twentieth century when, despite the fact that American economic and military power began to dwarf that of rival powers, a sense of vulnerability persisted.

Over the two hundred years and more of America’s national history, the interaction of these contrary impulses has manifested itself in the repetition of a particular—indeed, peculiarly American—response to external events: namely, the sense that each major venture in foreign policy, and particularly participation in war, represents a radically new step for America; that, however necessary such interventions might be for pragmatic reasons, they constitute deviations from America’s true destiny, which is to perfect its own society; and that, other things being equal (i.e., if the requisite international conditions exist), the correct path for America, once the crisis is over, is to resume its preferred position of detachment. The exposure to vulnerability invited a response to deal with the conditions that produced the threat, to be followed by a restoration of what an all-but-forgotten president in the wake of the great crusade of the First World War called normalcy.¹¹

It is as if with each new foreign policy crisis, the United States starts from a clean slate. America has thus “lost its innocence” on numerous occasions, not least in the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War, each case seemingly a renewed loss.¹² A sense of vulnerability is regularly re-experienced as something radically new, particularly as the United States assumed a world role in the twentieth century. Above all, isolationism has been buried several times, most notably in the First and Second World Wars but most obviously in the Cold War, from which it appeared for several decades there could be no “return to normalcy.” Hence, despite past experience, America’s innocence is still there to be lost, and despite repeated experiences of vulnerability and measures taken to protect against it, the wound of vulnerability remains open. By the same token, isolationism is still there to be countered or promoted, depending on one’s political point of view. This old debate, which many had thought was long over, revived after the end of the Cold War and informed discussion about possible American interventions during the 1990s. It is still a factor in the responses to September 11 in ways that will become clear later.

In short, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 were in crucial respects unprecedented, but they struck at old fears in American society and triggered responses that go to the heart of America’s sense of its role in the world. The search for the roots of a “gap” between America and the world leads logically to the question of isolationism. Is this the key to understanding America’s relationship with the world?

The question of isolationism

There are huge difficulties with the term isolationism, not least because it was employed initially as a politically loaded term of abuse and it still retains some of its political freight.¹³ Few Americans, even if they held ideas that others would call isolationist, have been happy to accept the label; it smacks too much of a mindless ostrich-like attitude to the outside world. America’s isolationists of the 1930s, for example, preferred to march under the banner of “America First.” Historians have found it no easier to give a stable meaning to the term, though most accept that in common parlance, in the words of the leading historian of isolationism, it “coupled a determination to stay out of foreign wars with an unwavering refusal to enter into alliances.”¹⁴

If that can be taken as a working definition, considerable clarification is required if it is to be applicable to the realities of American foreign relations. The policy if not the term is said to have originated in George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796) in which he stated that “the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign relations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”¹⁵ This was followed up five years later by Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address, when he urged “equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”¹⁶

Certain qualifications...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• September 11, 2001
• 1. How America sees the world: Historical perspectives
• 2. How the world sees America: The causes and consequences of anti-Americanism
• 3. The roots of terror: Islam, the Middle East, and the United States
• 4. The limits of governance: Globalization, terrorism, and the transformation of international politics since 1989
• 5. Responding to terror: George W. Bush and American foreign policy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index