Making the Forever War

Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

Mary L. Dudziak, Mark Philip Bradley, Mary L. Dudziak, Mark Philip Bradley

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781625345684, 9781625345691
• eBook ISBN: 9781613768235
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

PART I

Making American Wars

1

The Age of Global Power

The interesting task of this volume is to develop a way of thinking about and writing the history of the United States that avoids the customary practice of American historians, especially in the post–World War II period, of transforming the commonsense notion of different national histories into a conviction that the United States is unique. “Of the controlling themes in contemporary United States history writing,” Daniel Rogers observes in a recent essay, “none were pressed more urgently upon professional historians by the surrounding culture than a desire not merely for difference but for a particularity beyond all other nations’ particularities: a yearning for proof of its own uniqueness so deep that it tied every other nation’s history in fetters.”1 Other nations might be enchained by universal laws of history, but the United States was the Ptolemaic center of the world, around which they all revolved. Oddly, this conviction was accompanied by another, equally firm one: that the U.S. effort to “create some order out of the chaos of the world,” as Dean Acheson put it, was simply a response to the “Soviet menace.”2 The United States was thus at once powerful and passive. The flurry of postwar plans, doctrines, interventions, alliances, and wars was a reaction to external aggression (flexibly understood to include “internal subversion”).

The combination of the three—America as exceptional, powerful, and passive—has yielded policies and interpretations that are intellectually tautological and politically solipsistic. The United States has not been an aggressor, because, by definition, it does not commit aggression. The hostility of others to the United States cannot, again by definition, be a response to American actions, because the United States does not invite hostility but only reacts to it. What the United States claims it intends, rather than what it does, should persuade any fair-minded observer of the righteousness of its policies.

There is a double Archimedean dilemma involved in the effort to think about U.S. history outside of its own terms. Where can the historian stand in order to lever the history of the United States off its assumed centrality? Policy makers and, in large measure, the American public live deeply inside an exceptionalist ideology that has retroactively shaped the material world the historians interpret. Most analyses begin with the injunction that it is necessary to understand and convey to readers the worldview of the policy makers before engaging in an analysis of the choices they have made. “You must remember what it was like in the 1940s [or 1950s, or 1960s],” historians of U.S. foreign policy chide those among them who seem to be treating the United States too critically. The result is often a rendering of U.S. history that reproduces U.S. ideology. But the second part of the dilemma may be the more difficult. It arises from the fact that for the past fifty years, the United States has been the most powerful country in the world. Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa might serve as reasonable ground on which to rest one’s lever, were it not that, since at least 1945, each of these continents, one way and another, has had little choice but to engage the centrality of American power.

Obviously, I do not mean that the United States totally dominated all aspects of the daily lives of the world’s population, nor that it always and everywhere imposed its will. People around the world have found reasons enough of their own to engage in civil and other wars, with the result that the United States has sometimes had to conclude that domination over half a country was better than none. But in its impact on global culture, economics, military hardware, and international diplomacy, no other power or coalition of powers comes close to the United States. This is especially the case since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I would argue it has been true for much longer. To write the history of the United States in the world from outside its claims to a limitless horizon means to take the country as simply one nation among others. This is true and also not true. So the problem is not only how to think about the United States without reinstating its own centered sense of itself but how to do this without ignoring the success it has had in achieving, in Melvyn Leffler’s words, a “preponderance of power,” a centralizing power, in the world.

Another way to describe the problem is in terms of the inability of many Americans to envision other countries as countries in their own right. Thus the United States is able to operate without awareness of the way in which even minor exercises of U.S. power affect the lives of others, sometimes without even remembering that anything happened at all. Fundamentally, other countries simply do not have much purchase on the American imagination. Here is an example: the result of an American-engineered overthrow of the government of Cheddi Jagan in Guyana in 1963 reduced that country to a state of unprecedented poverty and corruption. America’s man in Guyana, Forbes Burnham, ruled the country through “force and fraud,” accumulating over $2 billion in foreign debt, the equivalent of five times its GDP; interest payments consumed 80 percent of Guyana’s revenue and 50 percent of its foreign earnings. Thirty years later, in 1992, after the country’s first free elections in the three decades, Cheddi Jagan was returned to office, and shortly thereafter President Clinton nominated one of the architects of the Kennedy administration’s plot to overthrow Jagan as ambassador to Georgetown. The nomination was withdrawn when the Guyanese protested, and, in a move toward damage control that only drew more attention, U.S. government records of Kennedy’s policy toward Guyana, which were scheduled to be released, instead were sealed. Apparently, neither Clinton nor any of his senior advisers remembered the plot; if they did, the nomination was a deliberate insult, but this seems less likely than that they simply forgot. “Maybe President Clinton doesn’t know our history,” Cheddi Jagan remarked, “but the people who advise him should at least know their own history.”3 John Lewis Gaddis, the preeminent historian of American foreign relations, does know U.S. history and includes the incident in his recent book on the Cold War, but he is no more interested than Clinton in the history of Guyana. “Bill Clinton,” he writes, “had been a precocious teenager . . . and could not have been expected to know. But the fact that none of his senior advisers remembered the crisis . . . suggests how much has changed since the days when Americans saw dominoes lined up, ready for toppling, all over the ‘third world.’” Guyana makes its appearance in Gaddis’s book solely as an example of the shift in Washington’s perceptions since the United States won the Cold War.4 For the historian, as for Washington, Guyana does not really exist.

H. W. Brands’s history of the Cold War, The Devil We Knew, begins by locating America in an international context. The United States is neither a city on a hill nor, as in some versions of revisionist history, an evil empire; rather, the Cold War was “simply the management of national interests in a world of competing powers.” Yet as a metaphor that launched military Keynesianism, erased domestic divisions of class and race in the service of a homogeneous anticommunist cause, and turned complex issues into simple choices, the Cold War had the power to create a hermetic virtual reality of Manichean divisions and savage “limited” wars. Brands understands the self-intoxicating nature of Cold War ideology: “Americans recognized the utter peril that arming the world on an unprecedented scale was placing them in. They felt the economic burden of maintaining the most powerful and expensive military establishment in human history. Recognizing the peril and feeling the burden, they naturally came to believe that it was all necessary.” Although Brands seems to want to normalize U.S. history, he cannot concede that, apart from its power, it was a nation like any other. Americans, he writes, “have from the beginning of their national existence demonstrated an incurable desire to make the world a better place.”

Had he written that Americans “have from the beginning of their national existence believed themselves to have demonstrated, or were told they had demonstrated, an incurable desire to make the world a better place,” the reader might have looked forward to an analysis of this curious phenomenon. But Brands says something different: “In 1945, nearly all Americans and probably a majority of interested foreigners had looked on the United States as a beacon shining the way to a better future for humanity, one in which ideals mattered more than tanks. During the next forty years, American leaders succeeded in convincing many Americans and all but a few foreigners that the United States could be counted on to act pretty much as great powers always have.” This “incurable desire to make the world a better place” also defines the United States for Loren Baritz: America, he writes, “must be for freedom, for dignity, for genuine democracy, or it is not America.” Baritz concludes that “it was not America in Vietnam.” Who was it then?5 The problem may be that the United States was itself in Vietnam and that the belief in America as a shining beacon was the spark that lit and kept burning the fire of the Cold War.

Diplomatic historians are aware of the irony of writing about U.S. engagement with other nations as if it were a monologue. We are instructed to learn other languages, to use foreign archives, to write not just bilaterally but multilaterally. But to do this without at the same time addressing the consistency with which other countries have remained insubstantial to U.S. policy makers and their public distorts the record beyond the redress of polyglottal achievement. As the United States made war against Korea, for example, Dean Acheson insisted that the war wasn’t a “Korean war on either side” but rather “the global strategy of global purpose on both sides.”6 Countries were counters in a zero-sum game, reversing Kant’s categorical imperative. Not only were these countries not taken as ends, they mattered only insofar as they figured in America’s calculation of its own economic or political interest. When China was “lost,” Korea became important for entirely extrinsic reasons. It was not, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge pointed out, “much good, but it’s ours.”7 Or, for an example closer to the present, we can contemplate Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s acknowledgment to an interviewer asking about the deaths of an estimated half a million Iraqi children due to American-imposed sanctions that it was a “hard choice,” but “we think the price is worth it.”8

American power is thus compounded by a conviction that the world at large is isomorphic with its own needs and ambitions, or should be. In November 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara warned President Johnson that the Chinese were attempting to construct a coalition in Asia. If they succeeded, McNamara was certain the president would agree, this would constitute a “straightforward security threat.” But there was another more important thought that the secretary wished to share with Johnson: “namely, that we have our view of the way the U.S. should be moving and of the need for the majority of the rest of the world to be moving in the same direction if we are to achieve our national objectives.” “Our ends cannot be achieved,” McNamara went on, “and our leadership role cannot be played if some powerful and virulent nation—whether Germany, Japan, Russia or China—is allowed to organize thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1Making American Wars
• Part 2Unlimited War, Limited Memory
• Afterword
• Selected Additional works of Marilyn B. Young
• Acknowledgments
• Index