November 23, 2006
Who Were We?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Magazine

Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Robert Kagan (Knopf, pp. 544)

The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, by Michael Lind (Oxford, pp. 304)

A slightly shorter version of this review appeared in the October 22 issue of the National Review Magazine.

President Bush and his neoconservative advisers, along with his compliant top brass, are pilloried as hegemonists and imperialists, spending vast amounts of blood and treasure in a vain effort to ram our brand of democracy down the collective throat of the Muslim Middle East. That now-familiar harangue comes from both leftists and paleoconservatives, who evoke everything in the past — from a naïve Woodrow Wilson to the self-righteous architects of Vietnam — to underscore the folly of the current ill-advised intervention in Iraq.

To the extent that such critics of the president try to refine their history, some claim that America heretofore was never a colonialist power and that its newfound imperialism betrays our founding principles; others, usually on the left, argue that it is at long last time to cease with high-talking Manifest Destiny, whose democratizing gospel for over a century more often cloaked slaughter and annexation, from beyond the Mississippi to the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

But is any of this true? Neoconservatives would counter that the backlash against the Bush Doctrine is grounded in amoral realism, at best; at worst, it is based on a dangerous parochialism of the Pat Buchanan type (of both Left and Right) that abhors any foreign effort that will supposedly perpetuate “empire” and empower “big government.” For the neocons, the proper historical referents are not misplaced American idealism at the Treaty of Versailles or in Saigon, but rather the bitter fruits of appeasement and isolationism of the 1930s, when inaction ensured that a regional menace like Adolf Hitler would grow to become a global carnivore. In addition, some proponents of an interventionist U.S. policy argue that such activism is — and always has been — the natural task of a uniquely powerful nation, one that has the power to do what it should do.

These fault lines are old, but they reappear predictably when either activism or withdrawal is perceived as dangerous and costly to the American people. And current public unhappiness over Iraq has rekindled old existential questions about American intervention abroad — both the practical wisdom of it, and a more soul-searching examination of who and what we Americans really are (and were). So it is not surprising to see two new and diametrically opposed views about the proper historical place of the foreign policy of the Bush administration: Does it represent continuity with, or a break from, America’s past?

Michael Lind is very upset with the Bush administration. Like many of those increasingly angry since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he advocates the return of realism as the proper American antidote abroad. The constant refrain of his strange book is framed unfortunately in the banality that there can be no security without power (as in past appeasement), while greater power in and of itself does not guarantee greater security (as in present imperialism).

The only novelty in Lind’s pragmatism — ensure American interests by building coalitions with the real, rather than the hoped-for, world — is a slick parallelism: The neocons of the 1990s (advocates of the new “garrison state”) were as foolish as the isolationists of the 1930s (who preferred the old “castle state”). Both, he thinks, were unilateralists. Both neglected the American military-industrial base. And both endangered American civil liberties — either by rendering us defenseless to foreign authoritarian regimes that would take away our freedoms, or, more recently, making us authoritarian at home to ensure militarism abroad.

Lind’s remedy (“The Concert of Power and The Concert of Trade”) reads like the recipe for a sort of Pat Buchanan/Brent Scowcroft consommé, with a sprinkling of protectionism of U.S. manufacturing in a dangerously globalized world, and an internationalist policy of containing possible enemies solely on the basis of realist principles and alliances.

But Lind’s often self-contradictory thesis bares little connection to the contemporary world of 2006, and his reading of history is often flawed. Dwight Eisenhower, as the current fad dictates, is approvingly quoted in his warnings about the military-industrial complex — as if a single farewell address summed up U.S. foreign policy between 1952 and 1960. But Lind fails to emphasize Ike’s very serious consideration of using nuclear weapons in Korea in May 1953, and the liberals’ rage over the globe-trotting, alliance-building John Foster Dulles, whose efforts they dismissed as unilateral provocation. Lind, in fact, quite paradoxically fears that we have wrongly weakened the foundations of a much greater “arsenal of democracy” than a frowning Eisenhower had ever dreamed of.

It is one thing to charge, as Lind does, that Guantanamo Bay — whose detainees currently include Ramzi bin al-Shaiba, co-planner of 9/11 — is a “concentration camp”; it is quite another to prove such a slander, especially of a facility whose non-uniformed and dangerous terrorists are provided with Middle Eastern food, Korans carefully handled by gloved guards, legal counsel to facilitate redress in federal courts, and frequent visits from the Red Cross. Lind often alleges, but never demonstrates, that the wiretapping of suspected terrorists, detention of jihadists in Cuba and Afghanistan, and the elements of the Patriot Act have eroded the Constitution. These measures are less severe than the suspension of habeas corpus, the closure of newspapers, the jailing of political opponents, or the internment of Japanese that occurred under the administrations of Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — wartime actions that Lind often mentions approvingly.

Lind laments: “Unfortunately, instead of welcoming the emergence of a peaceful multi-polar world, America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite in the 1990s and 2000s sought to convert America’s temporary Cold War alliance hegemony into enduring American global hegemony, at considerable cost to the American way of life.” Is he serious? The one million killed in Rwanda, the 200,000 slaughtered in the Balkans, the 150,000 butchered in the breakaway Soviet republics, and 25 years of Islamist terror attacks aimed at destroying Western commerce, travel, and security from Teheran to Manhattan were hardly proof of Lind’s “emergence of a peaceful multi-polar world.” And none of the most savage events in the Balkans, Rwanda, or the former Soviet Union had anything to do with America’s converting of an “alliance hegemony into enduring American global hegemony,” whatever that means.

If by the phrase “at considerable cost to the American way of life” Lind implies material impoverishment caused by our interventionism, he should at least note that the U.S. economy has grown nearly 25 percent since 9/11, with record-low levels of unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. If he means instead damage to “American democratic republicanism,” he should recall the constant leaks, court challenges, Senate resolutions, and national debates that have accompanied almost every element of the president’s executive efforts to ferret out international terrorists. For now, most Americans believe that the real danger to their democratic republicanism may be a dirty bomb at the airport rather than a FBI gumshoe listening in on their cell-phone conversation with their spouse.

Lind assumes that a missionary “liberal utopianism” guided U.S. policy after 9/11. Yet supporting democratization was not really the first, but far closer to the last, resort in curbing radical Islamic terrorism of the type seen over the past quarter-century. And the change came only after frustration with the failed realism and appeasement of the past 30 years, in which America supported corrupt authoritarians, and then ignored these regimes’ devil’s bargains with terrorists, who were encouraged to deflect blame onto the U.S. and Israel for their own sponsoring authoritarians’ self-inflicted failures.

As all “realists” do, Lind boxes himself into all sorts of moral dead-ends. He complains that we forsook realism in the 1930s to our detriment by not recognizing Stalin’s Russia as a future counterweight to Hitler’s Germany. Leave aside the moral considerations against using in peace a regime that had murdered 30 million of its own; even during the exigencies of subsequent global war, sober internationalists knew well that empowering the Soviet police state, through alliance and Lend-Lease, posed real future risks — as we soon learned, when an American-supplied Red Army rolled into Eastern Europe in GMC trucks.

Quoting Bill Kristol or Paul Wolfowitz about the glories of benign hegemony is not the same as demonstrating that that was America’s actual record in the 1990s — when in fact it slashed military budgets, and sought multilateral solutions from Oslo to Dayton. Indeed, it’s hard to accept Lind’s allegations of a near-garrison state in pursuit of hegemony when the post-9/11 wartime American military is still eight combat divisions smaller than it was a decade ago, and the GDP spent on defense remains around 4 percent. Currently less than a third of budget dollars go to defense; the exact inverse was true during most of the Eisenhower administration. To Lind, we have no allies in Iraq other than Britain; but by that reckoning the U.N.-sanctioned Korea intervention was also a unilateral enterprise, since the U.S. contingent then formed a greater percentage of total troops than it does now in the present coalition of the willing.

Lind also charges that America “is selling citizenship to foreigners in exchange for military service.” If such a blanket assertion were true on any wide scale, then the much-publicized supposed shortfall in recruitment would have easily been solved by some of the 11 million illegal aliens now residing inside the U.S.

One of Lind’s targets is Robert Kagan, the well-known neoconservative who almost a decade ago was calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, and a return to a more muscular moral aggressiveness in U.S. foreign policy. He has now finished the first volume of a comprehensive two-part planned history of American foreign policy — and his analysis, conclusions, and scholarly rigor contrast with Lind’s scattershot approach. While marshalling historical support for contemporary neoconservatism may well be the subtext of Kagan’s book, past American policy, not current events, is the concern of this first volume. And Kagan’s thesis is as compelling as it is sobering.

Kagan demonstrates that the notion of an inward, parochial American republic prior to World War II is largely a myth. From the very beginning, Americans have been ambitious, rambunctious, and eager to spread a radically democratic and “Anglo-Saxon” gospel of civilization — initially beyond the thirteen colonies into the inland valleys of the Midwest, later westward to the Pacific Coast, and finally across the Pacific beyond Hawaii to the Philippines. It is possible that only limited 19th-century American means, not the absence of grandiose ends, stopped annexation of Canada and more of Mexico.

In other words, the checks on innate American ambition were more material than ideological. Kagan reminds us that our “call to greatness” got us involved in what Max Boot has called our “small wars” from the Barbary Coast to the Caribbean, and with a host of larger countries as diverse as Great Britain, Mexico, and Spain. Once the United States, in the late 19th century, became truly united and powerful, it understood only too well that at last it could accomplish what it had always wanted to attempt. Kagan is too shrewd to praise overtly these aggressive tendencies. But while demolishing Pat Buchanan’s nostalgic portrait of an idealized parochial republic that never was, he nevertheless makes a number of often forgotten points that are worth remembering in our present crisis of confidence.

First, Americans themselves were historically unaware of the effect of their zeal upon others; they naïvely assumed that most of the world wished to be subjected to “peaceful conquest” by the American democratic experience. Thus many of our good intentions were sometimes nullified by our own naïveté, as Americans forgot that such nation-building had to be done in a manner that would allow others not to fear a “dangerous” United States — and also to gain the lion’s share of the credit for their own progress.

Second, while it is true that the American system, forged over three centuries, proved unworkable abroad and often ended up replacing colonial and monarchic rule with strongmen rather than democracies, often the U.S. left countries much better off than it found them. And we should not let the disappointment in obtaining perfection mask the good that Americans accomplished in Hawaii and the Philippines.

Third, be careful — as Kagan argues in his most compelling chapter, “The Foreign Policy of Slavery” — in trying to associate adventurism abroad with illiberalism at home. More often in American history the opposite has been true. Intervention was not a Republican or Democratic monopoly; by the end of the 19th century it was associated with a progressive spirit. In contrast, the self-proclaimed anti-imperialists of the early and mid-19th century were Southern slaveholders, who feared that an expansive American culture — along with new territory — might render their archaic servile culture isolated, parochial, and irrelevant (unless it meant enhancing slavery by annexing Texas or going into the Caribbean). And the postbellum Democratic party either retained this reluctance to “waste” American resources abroad or, in fact, actively resented trying to extend modern democracy to the backward and non-white Other, partly in fear that a resulting powerful Yankee government might turn its attention not just to faraway oppressed Latin Americans and Asians, but also nearby to the Jim Crow, post-Reconstruction South.

What Kagan shows, although again this is not his overt intent, is that contemporary criticism of American idealism and intervention abroad is not always legitimately rooted in concern about harming both ourselves and others but, more disturbingly, in the worry that Americanness might well evolve beyond questions of race, geography, and language. If leftists are delighted that Kagan makes their case for an inherently aggressive United States, they will become only more disappointed to learn that he suggests that this has not always proved to be such a bad thing. And if Michael Lind’s The American Way of Strategy reads like melodrama, then the message of Kagan’s superb Dangerous Nation is surely tragic: Given the nature of the American commonwealth, its moral sense, and its rich natural landscape, it was inevitable that we would try to set things right without always knowing what we were doing — or the consequences of our zeal.