Excerpt of "Twilight of the American Century"

TWILIGHT OF THE

AMERICAN CENTURY

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2018 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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C on t ents

Introduction. Straying from the Well-Trod Path

1

Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets 1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth

Anniversary of the Iraq War (2013)

15

2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the

Redeemer (2017)

23

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Decline of Liberalism (2017) 31 4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014)

39

5. Tom Clancy: Military Man (2014)

48

6. Robert Kagan: The Duplicity of the Ideologues (2014)

53

7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012)

60

8. Henry Luce: The Elusive American Century (2012)

67

9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011)

73

10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011) 80 11. Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld’s Pentagon (2008) 105

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12. Tommy Franks: A Modern Major General (2004)

117

13. Selling Our Souls: Of Idolatry and iPhone (2011)

132

14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010)

138

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15. Randolph Bourne: The Man in the Black Cape (2009)

148

16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009)

153

17. Reinhold Niebuhr: Illusions of Managing History (2007)

166

Part 2. History and Myth 18. Saving “America First” (2017)

183

19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017)

194

20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017)

201

21. American Imperium (2016)

213

22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015)

233

23. Always and Everywhere (2013)

240

24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013)

250

25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012)

253

26. The End of (Military) History? (2010)

266

27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006)

274

28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006)

288

29. The Folly of Albion (2005)

292

30. World War IV (2005)

298

Part 3. War and Empire 31. Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries (2015)

329

32. A War of Ambition (2014)

335

33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013)

340

34. How We Became Israel (2012)

349

35. Breaking Washington’s Rules (2011)

355

viii Contents

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36. Why Read Clausewitz When Shock and Awe Can Make a

Clean Sweep of Things? (2006)

365

37. Living Room War (2005)

375

38. Bush’s Grand Strategy (2002)

381

39. New Rome, New Jerusalem (2002)

386

40. Permanent War for Permanent Peace (November 2001)

395

Part 4. Politics and Culture 41. Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago (2017)

405

42. Not the “Age of Trump” (2017)

415

43. The Failure of American Liberalism (2016)

420

44. An Ode to Ike and Adlai (2016)

424

45. War and Culture, American Style (2016)

434

46. Under God (2015)

440

47. Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend (2014)

444

48. One Percent Republic (2013)

447

49. Counterculture Conservatism (2013)

454

50. Ballpark Liturgy (2011)

460

51. The Great Divide (2008)

465

Acknowledgments

470

Index 474

Contents ix

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Introduction Straying from the Well-Trod Path

Everyone makes mistakes. Among mine was choosing at age seventeen to attend the United States Military Academy, an ill-advised decision made with little appreciation for any longer-term implications that might ensue. My excuse? I was young and foolish.

Yet however ill-advised, the decision was all but foreordained. At least so it appears to me in retrospect. Family background, upbringing, early schooling: All of these, along with the time and place of my birth, predisposed me to choose West Point in preference to the civilian schools to which I had applied. Joining the Corps of Cadets in the summer of 1965 was a logical culmination of my life’s trajectory to that point.

West Point exists for one reason only: to produce soldiers. Not all graduates become career military officers, of course. Many opt out after a few years of service and retool themselves as lawyers, bankers, business executives, stockbrokers, doctors, dentists, diplomats, and the like. But the nation doesn’t need federally-funded service academies to fill the ranks of these occupations. For such purposes, America’s multitude of colleges and universities, public and private, more than suffice.

My alma mater is—or at least was—a different sort of place. At the West Point I attended, education per se took a backseat to ­socialization.

1

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As cadets we studied the arts and sciences, thereby absorbing knowledge much like our peers at Ohio State or Yale. Yet mere learning was not the object of the exercise. West Point’s true purpose was to inculcate a set of values and a worldview, nominally expressed in the academy’s motto Duty, Honor, Country.

Virtually all institutional mottos—Google’s now-defunct “Don’t be evil” offers a good example—contain layers of meaning. Apparent simplicity conceals underlying ambiguity, which only the fully initiated possess the capacity to decipher.

Embedded in West Point’s motto are two mutually reinforcing propositions that we aspiring professional soldiers were expected to absorb. According to the first, the wellbeing of the United States as a whole is inextricably bound up with the wellbeing of the United States Army. Much as Jesuits believe that the Society of Jesus not only defends but also embodies the Faith, so too does West Point inculcate into its graduates the conviction that the army not only defends but also embodies the nation. To promote the army’s interests is therefore to promote the national interest and, by extension, all that America itself signifies.

According to the second proposition, individual standing within the military profession is a function not of what you are doing but of who you give evidence of becoming. Upward trajectory testifies to your potential for advancing the army’s interests. In this regard, ­“promotability”—prospects for ascending the hierarchy of rank and position—becomes the ultimate measure of professional status. Thus does the code of professional values incorporate and indeed foster personal ambition and careerism.

I was, to put it mildly, slow to grasp the tension between the values that West Point professed and those that it actually imparted. Appreciating the contradictions would have required critical faculties that in my passage from adolescence to adulthood I did not possess. After all, I was not given to questioning institutional authority. Indeed, my instinct was to defer to institutions and to take at face value the word handed down from podium, pulpit, or teacher’s desk, whatever that word might be. Spending four years at West Point powerfully reinforced that tendency.

2 Introduction

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Born during the summer of 1947 in Normal, Illinois of all places, I was, as it were, marked from the outset with the sign of orthodoxy.

From an early age, as if by instinct, I deferred to convention, as I was brought up to do.

My roots are in Chicagoland, the great swathe of the Midwest defined by the circulation area of Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, which in those days proclaimed itself the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” My father, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, had grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a small, charmless city known chiefly as the home of the now-defunct Inland Steel. My mother came from an undistinguished farm town situated alongside the Illinois River, a hundred miles from the Windy City. Both of my parents were born in the early 1920s, both were cradle Catholics, and both were veterans of World War II. Within a year of returning from overseas once the war ended, they had met, fallen in love, and married. Theirs was a perfect match. Eleven months later, with my father now enrolled in college courtesy of the G.I. Bill, I arrived on the scene.

Ours was an upwardly mobile family at a moment when opportunities for upward mobility were plentiful, especially for white Americans willing to work hard. And ours was a traditional family— my Dad as breadwinner, my Mom as “housewife”—at a time when such arrangements seemed proper, natural, and destined to continue in perpetuity.

After my father graduated from college and then from medical school—years during which my parents struggled financially—we returned to East Chicago and began our ascent into a comfortable ­middle class existence: a small home, then a bigger one; first one car, then two; black-and-white TV, then color; lakeside summer vacations in Wisconsin; a single sibling, and eventually a houseful. Big families were the order of the day, especially among Catholics. That within the confined spacing defining our existence, things occurred as they were meant to occur was a proposition that I accepted without question. This was, after all, the 1950s.

I attended the local parochial school, staffed by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, and committed to memory the Baltimore Catechism, as required. Upon finishing eighth grade, I was off to an all-boys

Introduction 3

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Benedictine high school situated among the cornfields of Illinois, the very school that my father had attended back in the 1930s. I was a boarding student and here commenced a long journey away from home, even though in some indefinable sense I was to remain a son of the Middle Border.

In the American church, the years following World War II had produced a windfall in vocations and this particular monastic community had reaped its share of that harvest. In my four years as a high school student, I had a single lay teacher—all the rest were priests.

Fifty years later my old school survives, but the abbey community has dwindled to a shadow of its former self. With virtually the entire school faculty now consisting of laypeople, the character of the place has radically changed. Truth to tell, I no longer think of it as “my school.”

The monks who taught and mentored us were an extraordinary lot, varying widely in age, ability, and temperament. Whenever possible, we students gave them grief, as adolescent boys inevitably do in the face of authority. Yet they were, in our eyes, objects of fascination, from whom we learned much. For me at least, real religious formation began here as a direct consequence of daily exposure to imperfect men striving to live a Godly life.

Although not nearly as bright as I imagined myself to be, I was a good student. I tested well, this at a time when performance on standardized exams counted for much. I also read a lot, mostly escapist fiction, albeit with attention to writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and J.D. Salinger—who in some scarcely fathomable way touched on what it meant to be a man. I dabbled in poetry, briefly ­fancying myself heir to Carl Sandburg. All in all, I was a brooding self-­ centered twit, beset by hormone-fueled insecurities.

Yet for whatever reason, that one lay teacher took a particular interest in me. Mr. Burke was not Mr. Chips. He was a Chicagoan through and through: whip smart, sophisticated (at least in my eyes), funny, impatient, and sarcastic to the point of outright cruelty. He taught history, a subject I thought I liked without actually understanding. Mr. Burke cared about books and ideas and thought I should too.

Through him I glimpsed, ever so briefly, the life of the mind, which implied a future altogether different from the one toward which I imagined myself heading. I dimly recall Mr. Burke advising against me 4 Introduction

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choosing a service academy. I ought to have listened to him. As it was, for me at least, the life of the mind was about to go on long-term ­hiatus.

Apart perhaps from those who had attended West Point back when the Civil War erupted, few cadets if any passed through the United States Military Academy at a more disconcerting time than my own class experienced. We joined the Corps of Cadets in July 1965, just as the first increments of US combat troops were deploying to South Vietnam. We received our diplomas and accepted our commissions in June 1969, with fighting still very much underway. Increasingly viewed as misguided and unwinnable, the war had waited for us.

In the interim, the country and certainly the generation to which we belonged had all but split in two. To prepare for entry into the military profession during that interval was to be simultaneously exposed to and insulated from the profound upheaval that was affecting all aspects of American society. Protest, unrest, riots, and the backlash they induced: To all of this, from our fortress-like campus just upriver from New York City, we were perplexed witnesses rather than participants.

Graduation meant release, but also donning harness. After pausing to marry my very young Chicago-born bride, I departed for a yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam. The war was now winding down and the army was falling apart, beset by widespread drug use, acute racial tension, and indiscipline. The implicit mission was to contain these pathologies while preventing the soldiers in your charge from getting killed to no purpose. For a young officer, it did not pay to reflect too deeply about the predicament into which the army and the nation as a whole had gotten itself. The demands of duty were enough; thinking could wait.

I returned home in one piece, even if somewhat unsettled by my experiences. After a stint of Stateside soldiering, with my service obligation about to expire, we contemplated “getting out” and trying our hand at civilian life. But with the economy doing poorly, a family to care for, and the army offering graduate school followed by a tour teaching at West Point, we opted to “stay in.” Short-term expediency had prevailed.

So it was off to Princeton to study history under the tutelage of an illustrious and learned faculty. I arrived completely unprepared and spent two years trying to conceal my ignorance. I read hundreds of Introduction 5

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pages a day, testing my wife’s patience while giving too little attention to our young daughters. Fearing failure, I somehow concluded that my task was to absorb as much information as possible; my fellow graduate students knew better. Mastering the arguments mattered as much or more as mastering the facts. Historiography rather than history per se was the name of the game.

I was not particularly interested in or attuned to the ideas then in fashion on university campuses. But this was the mid-1970s, still the heyday of the New Left, and ideas were interested in me. Those that I encountered in seminar, particularly regarding the course of American statecraft, challenged and subverted my worldview. I both resisted these ideas and absorbed them. They became lodged in my subconscious.

Much as I had survived Vietnam, I survived Princeton. I worked hard, showed up on time for class, met deadlines, and followed the rules. Perhaps suspecting that a dour, but compliant army captain was unlikely to cause permanent harm to the historical profession, my mentors allowed me to graduate.

Returning to West Point where our family continued to grow, I tried my hand at teaching. It did not go well. For some bizarre reason, I set out to provide the young cadets assigned to my section room with an experience comparable to a Princeton graduate seminar when all they wanted was sufficient knowledge to pass the course—precisely what I myself had wanted a dozen years earlier.

Once again, we contemplated “getting out.” I applied for the Foreign Service and satisfied all the necessary requirements for joining the State Department. From career soldier to career diplomat sounded like an attractive move. But when the offer of an appointment actually materialized, it involved taking a cut in pay. We now had three very young children. Again, expediency won out.

After West Point came a decade of troop duty, to include two tours in what was then West Germany. Assignments as a commander or operations officer alternated with fellowships and attendance at army schools.

The Cold War was winding down, but in the field we found it convenient not to notice. After Vietnam, the Cold War had provided the

6 Introduction

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army with its principal raison d’etre. Preparing to defend against an all-out attack by the Warsaw Pact, which we pretended to think could come at any minute, infused everything we did with urgency and a sense of purpose. We worked as if freedom’s very survival of hung in the balance.

That said, I did not much care for the day-to-day routine of soldiering. I disliked being away from home for long stretches, sitting up half the night on gunnery ranges, and being cold, wet, tired, and miserable on field training exercises. Most of all, I hated the exorbitant waste of time: mindless meetings that went on for hours, the pre-­ briefings that preceded the briefings that were anything but brief, the pre-rehearsals that preceded the rehearsals that preceded the actual event, the drafting and endless revision of dull, jargon-filled documents that nobody ever read.

I had begun to write, at first by contributing occasional articles to service journals. Then over the course of a three year period, I wrote an interpretive history of the army during the interval between Korea and Vietnam, co-authored a monograph about US military involvement in El Salvador during the 1980s, and converted my Princeton dissertation into a publishable book. In each of these projects, I found considerable satisfaction.

This is not to say that anyone noticed. Yet I was discovering that here was something I liked to do very much. I enjoyed the challenge of formulating an argument. I enjoyed the hard work of composition.

Most of all, I enjoyed drawing connections between past and present, employing history as an instrument of illumination.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War ended. My own military career likewise ended soon thereafter, abruptly and ingloriously.

Command, I had learned, is something of a juggling act. It requires closely attending to all that is happening today even while putting the finishing touches on what is to happen tomorrow and next week while simultaneously preparing for what should occur next month or next year. When the synchronization works, the results are gratifying, almost magical. Maintain that synchronization and you’ve got a disciplined high-performing outfit in which all involved can take pride.

Introduction 7

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But as with juggling, just one miscalculation can produce catastrophe. In the summer of 1991, I dropped a ball. And in the immortal words of Bruce Springsteen, “man, that was all she wrote.”

Soon after the Cold War had ended, I assumed command of one of the army’s more storied units. Not long thereafter, Saddam Hussein foolishly invaded Kuwait. In the subsequent campaign to liberate that country, we remained at our home stations, mortified at being left behind in Germany while friends went off to fight. Shortly after Operation Desert Storm ended, however, and with Kuwaitis still eyeing Saddam nervously, we received orders to deploy to the Gulf. Although a second Iraqi assault on Kuwait was even less likely than a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had been, the Emir of Kuwait needed reassurance and my regiment was tagged to provide it.

The mission went well until it didn’t. I did not take seriously any threat posed by Saddam. I took very seriously the possibility of a terrorist attack of the sort that had befallen the US Marines in Beirut, Lebanon less than a decade earlier. I failed completely to anticipate the real threat: a vehicular fire touching off massive explosions that destroyed millions of dollars of equipment and caused dozens of casualties among my own soldiers.

With my unit committed to what was still nominally a war zone, I had directed that our ammunition be stored so that we could engage the enemy on a moment’s notice. This, of course, is what we were meant to convey to the Kuwaiti government. The very purpose of our mission required that we maintain a ready-to-fight posture. In retrospect, I took that requirement way too literally.

In any event, at a time when it appeared that the United States Army could do no wrong, I had presided over a spectacular failure. Of greater significance to me personally, I had brought dishonor to the regiment entrusted to my care.

Over the course of some two decades on active duty, I had on several occasions observed commanders dodging responsibility for misfortunes that had occurred on their watch, usually by fingering some subordinate to take the fall. I had vowed never to do that.

Only one recourse appeared available: Accept responsibility for what had occurred, finish out my command tour, and quietly leave the

8 Introduction

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service, confident that the army would do just fine without me. This is the course I proceeded to follow.

How well I could do without the army was a different question altogether. We now had four children, two of them of college age. There were bills to pay. Although hiring on with some a defense contractor might have been a possibility, the mere prospect of doing so was highly disagreeable. Now in my mid-forties, I needed to find a new calling.

In truth, even during my last years in the army, I had begun to feel increasingly restless and out of place. I had mastered the art of striking a soldierly pose, which largely involved attitude, posture, vocabulary, and dubious personal habits. (I drew the line at chewing tobacco).

However belatedly, I sensed that I had drifted into the wrong vocation.

To some of us, self-knowledge comes slowly.

That said, I had no clear sense of what my new calling might be. I had spent countless hours planning training exercises and tactical operations. I had no plan for my own life and my family’s future, however.

I knew I liked to write. And I felt vaguely drawn to that life of the mind that I had long ago glimpsed under Mr. Burke’s tutelage. Might these inclinations enable me to make a living? Buoyed by the generosity of friends and the kindness of strangers willing to take a chance on me, I now tested that proposition.

As a direct result, I gained entry into academic life, albeit through the side door. A stint at Johns Hopkins served as an apprenticeship of sorts during which I learned how to teach (finally) and started writing for wider audiences. In 1998, Boston University offered me a senior faculty appointment, an unearned and undeserved opportunity with transformative implications. I accepted with alacrity. Our wandering days now finally ended. We became New Englanders.

As a serving officer, I had remained studiously apolitical. Now, however, I was no longer a servant of the state. Prior inhibitions about expressing my own views regarding the state of American politics, statecraft, and culture fell away. Soon enough, events drew me to four broad issues that with the passing of the Cold War deserved far more critical attention than they were receiving, at least in my view.

The first of those issues related to changes in the prevailing understanding of what freedom should permit, require, or disallow. The

Introduction 9

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s­ econd dealt with the tensions between America’s conception of itself as freedom’s principal champion and its proper role as a global power.

The focus of the third issue was the use of US military might, not infrequently justified by citing the nation’s ostensible duty to advance the cause of freedom. Finally, there was the system devised to raise and sustain the nation’s armed forces, thereby fostering a specific (and to my mind problematic) relationship between soldiers and society.

By the time I took up my position at Boston University, these were already becoming central to my writing agenda. Yet in ways that I had not anticipated, moving to Boston sharpened my thinking. To escape from the orbit of Washington was to see its narrowly partisan preoccupations and imperial pretensions for what they were. With distance came clarity and focus.

Given the terms of my appointment, I had no need to worry about tenure or promotion. So I could write what I wanted and publish where I wanted without having to consider whether I was chalking up the requisite number of scholarly points. Here was freedom, indeed.

Much to my surprise, invitations to write books materialized. Beginning soon after 9/11 and continuing over the course of the next ­decade-and-a-half, I published a series of volumes, along with dozens of articles and reviews, that critically assessed American imperialism, militarism, civil-military relations, and the changing meaning of freedom. I developed an abiding interest in understanding why the United States does what it does in the world and concluded that the answers were to be found by looking within rather than abroad. No doubt US policy draws on multiple sources. Yet ultimately it expresses the conviction that we are God’s new Chosen People.

Roughly midway through that period my only son was killed in action in Iraq. Just about everyone sooner or later suffers the loss of loved ones. Certainly, I had. While I was still attending West Point, my father had died in an accident. My wife’s brother, my closest friend in high school, had died much too soon, having been badly wounded in Vietnam and never thereafter really getting his life on track. But my son’s death was excruciatingly painful, not only for me, but also for my wife and our daughters. Nor did I find it a faith enhancing experience.

But we endured.

10 Introduction

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I had by this time become accustomed to describing myself as a conservative. That said, I had little use for what passed for conservatism in the Republican Party or among pundits of an ostensibly conservative persuasion. I had over the years come to my own understanding of the term by reading a mix of thinkers not easily pigeon-holed as belonging exclusively to the Right or the Left. These included Henry Adams, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Evelyn Waugh, Reinhold Niebuhr, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin, William Appleman Williams, Walker Percy, and Christopher Lasch.

The position I eventually staked out for myself was as a non-­ partisan conservative who saw much to admire among progressives.

That from time to time I was able to publish in periodicals associated with the Left pleased me to no end.

In a 2008 article, urging principled conservatives to vote for Barack Obama rather than John McCain in the upcoming presidential election, I offered my own list of conservative tenets. They included: • a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint; • a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law; • veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation; • a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements; • respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values; • a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.

I should have added recognition of a collective responsibility to promote the common good. But apart from that omission, I stand by what I wrote (and, given the alternatives on offer, have no regret for having twice voted for Obama).

Introduction 11

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In 2014, I retired from teaching. Whether my students knew it or not, I was going stale and they deserve better than I was able to give.

Besides I wanted to spend time with my wife, while turning to new writing projects. On matters of particular interest to me, there is much that I still want to say and that needs to be said, even if the likelihood of making a dent in prevailing opinion appears negligible.

I could hardly have anticipated the political earthquake triggered by the election held to choose Obama’s successor. Yet in retrospect, a series of tremors, some large, others small, had offered ample warning.

The essays reprinted below recall and reflect on some of those tremors dating back to 9/11. Yet they by no means constitute the last word.

There remains much more that needs saying.

Walpole, Massachusetts January 2018

12 Introduction

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