American Empire

The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy

Andrew J. Bacevich, Andrew J. Bacevich

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780674013759
  9780674009400
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674252141
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a challenging, provocative book, Andrew Bacevich reconsiders the assumptions and purposes governing the exercise of American global power. Examining the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton--as well as George W. Bush's first year in office--he demolishes the view that the United States has failed to devise a replacement for containment as a basis for foreign policy. He finds instead that successive post-Cold War administrations have adhered to a well-defined "strategy of openness." Motivated by the imperative of economic expansionism, that strategy aims to foster an open and integrated international order, thereby perpetuating the undisputed primacy of the world's sole remaining superpower. Moreover, openness is not a new strategy, but has been an abiding preoccupation of policymakers as far back as Woodrow Wilson.

Although based on expectations that eliminating barriers to the movement of trade, capital, and ideas nurtures not only affluence but also democracy, the aggressive pursuit of openness has met considerable resistance. To overcome that resistance, U.S. policymakers have with increasing frequency resorted to force, and military power has emerged as never before as the preferred instrument of American statecraft, resulting in the progressive militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

Neither indictment nor celebration, American Empire sees the drive for openness for what it is--a breathtakingly ambitious project aimed at erecting a global imperium. Large questions remain about that project's feasibility and about the human, financial, and moral costs that it will entail. By penetrating the illusions obscuring the reality of U.S. policy, this book marks an essential first step toward finding the answers.

CHAPTER 1

THE MYTH OF THE RELUCTANT SUPERPOWER

Of course, our whole national history has been one of expansion.

Theodore Roosevelt, December 1899

“SOME NATIONS ACHIEVE GREATNESS,” observed the historian Ernest May; “the United States had greatness thrust upon it.”¹ Rendered forty years ago at the very acme of the Cold War, May’s judgment referred specifically to the events culminating in the great outward thrust of 1898 and America’s dramatic emergence on the world stage. Yet it also encapsulates the story of America’s rise to power the way Americans themselves prefer to tell it.

Above all, May’s pithy remark directs attention not to purpose but to posture: greatness was not sought; it just happened. In this view, American policy is a response to external factors. The United States does not act in accordance with some predetermined logic; it reacts to circumstances. Although the events of 1898 accelerated its ascent to world power, the United States—unlike other nations—achieved preeminence not by consciously seeking it but simply as an unintended consequence of actions taken either in self-defense or on behalf of others.

Thus, in 1898 Americans chose war only when the continuing depredations of Spain’s General Valeriano (“Butcher”) Weyler in Cuba had become intolerable. When in 1914 the “Great War” began, the United States remained neutral, intervening only in response to Germany’s violation of U.S. neutral rights. Even then, in contrast to every other belligerent, the United States fought for altruistic purposes, seeking to end war itself and to make the world safe for democracy. Similarly, when a new European war began in 1939, Americans again stayed on the sidelines until provoked by Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor to enter the conflict and to embark on another crusade for democracy.

This pattern of evil spurring the United States into action persisted into the postwar era. Hence American engagement in the Cold War marked, in Arthur Schlesinger’s classic formulation, “the brave and essential response of free men to Communist aggression.”² Even after the Cold War, distant events continued to compel the United States to exert—and perforce to expand—its power. In 1990, Iraqi aggression threatening the West’s access to Persian Gulf oil obliged the United States once again to respond. As the century drew to a close, events came full circle: Americans found themselves going to war on behalf of a tiny province in Serbia, the brutality of Slobodan Milošević in Kosovo having become as intolerable as that of General Weyler in Cuba a century before.

Few scholars specializing in American diplomatic history today accept such an outline of twentieth century U.S. foreign policy. But in practice, the myth of the “reluctant superpower”—Americans asserting themselves only under duress and then always for the noblest purposes—reigns today as the master narrative explaining (and justifying) the nation’s exercise of global power.

The myth survives in the post–Cold War era less because it is true than because it is useful. Its utility stems in large part from the fact that it comes complete with its own cast of stock characters. Its heroes are “internationalists,” wise, responsible, and broad-minded in outlook. Opposing the internationalist project is a motley crew of narrow-minded, provincial, and frequently bigoted cranks, known collectively as “isolationists.” For leading politicians and members of the foreign policy establishment, endlessly recounting the internationalist struggle offers the preferred method of inoculating successive generations of citizens ostensibly susceptible to the isolationist virus.

The myth of the reluctant superpower serves other purposes as well. Aspirants to the inner circle of national politics testify to the narrative as a means of signaling their trustworthiness and reliability. Here, for example, is a thumbnail sketch of postwar history offered by presidential hopeful Bill Clinton in December 1991:

I was born nearly a half century ago, at the dawn of the Cold War, a time of great change, enormous opportunity, and uncertain peril. At a time when Americans wanted nothing more than to come home and resume their lives of peace and quiet, our country had to summon the will for a new kind of war—containing an expansionist and hostile Soviet Union which vowed to bury us. We had to find ways to rebuild the economies of Europe and Asia, encourage a worldwide movement toward independence, and vindicate our nation’s principles in the world against yet another totalitarian challenge to liberal democracy. Thanks to the unstinting courage and sacrifice of the American people, we were able to win that Cold War.³

In such a rendering of the tale, “we” acted as one; doubts, divisions, disappointments disappear. By reciting this sanitized version of the postwar era, Clinton not only affirmed its essential truth but also situated himself among those who fought the good fight against totalitarianism on behalf of democracy.

The myth of the reluctant superpower also curbs any inclination to consider anew the purposes served by America’s now unquestioned global dominance. In a post–Cold War world, does the paradigm of America having “greatness thrust upon it” retain its explanatory power? If so, with the United States now clearly on the top of the heap, who or what is doing the thrusting? These questions go unasked. Foreign policy “debate,” such as it is, confines itself to matters of tactics: Are the sanctions working? Will bombing alone suffice? How could we have been surprised? As if by default, the hallowed precepts of liberal internationalism perdure.

That those precepts imply a conception for marrying instruments of national power to broad policy objectives serving concrete American interests goes unmentioned and all but unnoticed. Instead politicians, abetted by the media, offer political theater: Republicans berate a Democratic president for failing to articulate a foreign policy “vision”; given the chance, Democrats return the favor. Lost amidst the posturing is the extent to which both parties and virtually the entire foreign policy elite tacitly share a common vision and conform in practice to a strategic consensus of long standing.

On two occasions during the century of America’s rise to global preeminence, critics mounted a vigorous challenge to that consensus. First during the decade leading up to World War II and subsequently during the protracted crisis centered on the Vietnam War, dissenters subjected the myth of the reluctant superpower to sustained assault. They began by rejecting the premise that America’s foreign policies were a function of developments beyond its borders. They argued instead that those policies—commercial relationships, decisions for war and peace, the designation of others as “friends” or “enemies”—derived from influences closer to home. Underlying those specific decisions and actions and endowing them with an overall unity was a particular worldview rooted in calculations of political and economic self-interest.

These dissenters viewed those policies as wrongheaded, undemocratic, unnecessary, even dangerous. They formulated their own alternative to the myth of the reluctant superpower and campaigned energetically to convert the American people to that alternative.

In each instance, events discredited that alternative, an outcome for which Americans should be grateful. For the critique mounted in the 1930s discounted the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. Had it prevailed, Nazi Germany might well have escaped destruction. For their part, the dissenters who appeared during the Cold War, while acutely sensitive to America’s flaws, were seemingly oblivious to the defects of communism and to the danger posed by Soviet power. Had they succeeded, the Cold War might have had a different and less satisfactory outcome.

The failing to which these critics were prone was astigmatism.⁴ They were blind to inconvenient facts (usually pertaining to American adversaries) to which others attributed paramount importance. Meanwhile, they assigned great significance to matters (typically pertaining to America’s own behavior) that others viewed as inconsequential or benign. Obsessed with unearthing the inner logic of U.S. policy, they called attention to a different set of inconvenient facts that the defenders of liberal internationalism preferred to overlook. In short, their efforts yielded hitherto undiscovered insights into the origins, motives, and actual conduct of U.S. foreign policy, insights that discomfited those dedicated to preserving the mythic rendition of America’s ascent to global power.

Neither the course of World War II nor the outcome of the Cold War has invalidated those insights. Indeed, as a point of departure for examining U.S. policy in the post–Cold War era—notable for the absence of any adversary remotely comparable to Hitler’s Reich or Stalin’s Soviet Union—views deriving from the premise that external factors have never adequately explained American behavior deserve respectful consideration.

The chief proponents of these heresies—rejected in their own day, relevant to our own—were the American historians Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) was by common agreement the most influential historian in America.⁵ Widely ranging in his interests, boldly original in interpretation, politically progressive, personally courageous, and astonishingly prolific, Beard could wield his pen as “either shillelagh or stiletto” and was equally adept at writing for academics, policy professionals, or the general public.⁶ From the publication of his controversial Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States before World War I until his death, he remained a towering figure in American intellectual life, frequently the source and subject of controversy and seldom outside of the public eye.

Raised in Knightstown, Indiana, in middle-class comfort, Beard attended a Quaker school and then DePauw University, graduating in 1898. Over the next four years he studied at Oxford, where he was instrumental in the founding of Ruskin College, a school to provide educational opportunities for members of the British working class. In 1902 Beard returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University, earning his doctorate two years later. He immediately accepted an offer to join Columbia’s history department, then among the country’s most distinguished.

Beard taught at Columbia until 1917, resigning in protest against the firing of a colleague who opposed U.S. entry into the European war. Retreating to his dairy farm in Connecticut, he remained thereafter an independent scholar and commentator on events of the day.⁷ Over the course of his career, Beard published forty-two volumes of history and political science and coauthored another thirty-five. His masterful overview of U.S. history, The Rise of American Civilization, written with his wife, Mary R. Beard, became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His histories alone sold 11.3 million copies during his lifetime.⁸ Beard’s articles and reviews—numbering in the hundreds—appeared in virtually all the leading scholarly and general-circulation journals of his day.

Yet by the time of his death Beard’s reputation stood, in the words of another prominent scholar, as “an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography.” His views on foreign policy—the subject that preoccupied Beard beginning in the 1930s—amounted to a “tattered shambles,” of interest only to crackpots and conspiracy theorists.⁹ Long an outspoken advocate of reform, Beard found himself in the last decade of his life denounced as an apologist for fascism, in the words of Lewis Mumford “a passive—no, active—abettor of tyranny, sadism, and human defilement.”¹⁰

If by the end of Beard’s life his reputation lay in ruins, it was because Beard himself put a torch to the edifice. In an extraordinary act of professional self-immolation, he closed out his career by denouncing as fraudulent the text most crucial to sustaining the myth of the reluctant superpower: the orthodox account of U.S. entry into World War II.

In two scathing volumes—American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948)—Beard accused Franklin Roosevelt of outright deception in his conduct of foreign affairs. Running in 1940 for an unprecedented third term, FDR had famously declared, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” In doing so, Roosevelt, in Beard’s view, had made a solemn covenant with the American people.¹¹ Without missing a beat, the president then proceeded to violate that covenant. Indeed, according to Beard, even as he was promising to keep the country out of the war, Roosevelt was conniving to maneuver the United States into it.

Historians today admit to a modicum of truth in Beard’s charge.¹² Roosevelt’s lack of candor, notably in misrepresenting U.S. naval involvement in Great Britain’s battle against the U-boat threat, is well documented. But in the war’s immediate aftermath—and with internationalists rousing Americans to support another great crusade, this time against communism—Beard’s attack was not just impolitic; it was impermissible. By indicting the recently deceased Roosevelt, he forfeited whatever authority and credibility he had accrued over several decades of research and writing. Refusing to recant the isolationist creed, Beard consigned himself to the status of miscreant, guilty not only of scholarly malpractice but of having committed an unforgivable act of civic blasphemy.

Beginning his career in the camp of left-leaning heter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Myth of the Reluctant Superpower
• 2 Globalization and Its Conceits
• 3 Policy by Default
• 4 Strategy of Openness
• 5 Full Spectrum Dominance
• 6 Gunboats and Gurkhas
• 7 Rise of the Proconsuls
• 8 Different Drummers, Same Drum
• 9 War for the Imperium
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index