Virtue, power: the dilemma of US foreign policy - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by John Kane
AMERICA EMERGED FROM WORLD WAR II unquestionably the most powerful nation on earth. Few doubted that its victory represented the triumph of good over evil. A fundamental shift in American thinking now occurred, purportedly toward greater "realism" but actually to a belief in the possibility – indeed necessity – of virtuous power.
The "liberal consensus" that formed under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower took three major lessons from the interwar years. First, America had contributed to the disaster by failing to use its power to halt aggressors in their tracks; evildoers could be countered only if good people were prepared to deploy their power against them. Second, Pearl Harbor and wartime developments in weapons technology had destroyed America's sense of geographical isolation, convincing leaders that future defence of the homeland required a "strategic frontier" of overseas bases stretching around the globe. Third, the defeat of Wilson's dream by unilateralist senators had demonstrated that unilateralism led to isolationism and isolationism to disaster. Genuine domestic and international security could be guaranteed only if America used its might, in concert with other great powers including the Soviet Union, to guarantee a new multilateral organisation, the United Nations.
Power was thus no longer the antithesis of virtue, but its servant, and the power of virtuous America would found a new peaceful and prosperous world order. Yet, before the nation settled to this task, its energies were diverted by the challenge that had always been latent in the existence of the Soviet Union. Wilson had immediately recognised that the American mythology here confronted a competing universalism whose mission was also to save the world – but on assumptions quite incompatible with American understanding. The violent domestic passions that the Soviet challenge occasionally stirred after 1917 had been suppressed by the wartime alliance with Josef Stalin, but emerged again once the Soviets took control in a conquered Eastern Europe. Meeting the Soviet challenge would shift America's task from underwriting a co-operative world order to maintaining an international balance of power with profoundly Manichean characteristics.
It was the anti-communist crusade that unhinged the American rapprochement with power. Had the United Nations worked as intended, America's confidence in its virtuous power might have been confirmed rather than shaken. But the interaction of domestic and international factors in the Cold War caused American virtue to become dangerously identified with dogmatic anti-communism. An association made in the '30s between Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism and communism made liberals permanently vulnerable to conservative charges of encouraging communism or failing to combat it with sufficient energy. Liberals deepened the problem by also using fear of communism – after Russia's development of atomic weapons and the outbreak of the Korean War – to force isolationist Republican congressmen and a war-weary public to support large expenditures for global engagement. The inflated rhetoric of both sides produced a self-reinforcing pattern that led to the excesses of the McCarthy era. The prolonged "red scare" left a legacy of fear and distrust in American politics that would prevent President John F. Kennedy from withdrawing American "advisers" from South Vietnam and convince President Lyndon Johnson that he must win the developing war by an ever-greater commitment of troops.
American "defence of the Free World" led to the militarisation of society on a scale hitherto unimaginable, even as nuclear weapons made direct confrontation impossible. Yet the fallback policy of "containment" encouraged entangling alliances with unsavoury regimes simply on the basis of their strategic anti-communism, and ideological wars by proxy in peripheral countries of otherwise small interest. America became ensnared in a classic balance of power struggle requiring sordid compromises of the kind not easily accommodated by the national narrative. Not until the 1970s would Jeane Kirkpatrick produce an influential "realist" justification of America's support of petty tyrants, and even then the necessity was couched not in terms of pure national interest but of winning the anti-communist crusade. However, that was long after domestic divisions had exploded over Vietnam.
Vietnam was traumatising because it crippled the recently engendered faith in virtuous American power. Innocent virtue was injured because power was used in a cruel war whose public justifications failed. Worse, American might was effectively vanquished by an inferior foe, giving pride as deep a wound as innocence. The lingering "Vietnam syndrome", taken as indicating American reluctance to accept casualties in distant wars not clearly related to definite American interests, resulted more from the moral injury inflicted by the war than from its human costs. It was not just that Americans were dying, but that Americans themselves were induced to do terrible things for an apparently unjust cause. As John Kerry said in a 1971 congressional hearing: "The crimes that we commit threaten our country." The doyen of American realists, Hans Morgenthau, lamented that "the brutalisation of our armed forces ... is intolerable for the United States".
In humbling power and staining virtue, Vietnam confronted the nation with an agonising choice: which partner to the broken marriage to serve and restore – pride or innocence? If innocence, then America should withdraw from Vietnam immediately. If pride then, whatever the moral consequences, American power should be used to the utmost to win the war. This choice established the main lines of division between "peaceniks" and "patriots".
The often-violent confrontation was, at bottom, a confrontation of America with itself, or of actual America with mythological America. President Richard Nixon understood the dilemma and saw that his electoral promise to restore the unity of the American people could be fulfilled only if he gave them both victory and an assurance of virtue – at least in appearance. He and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger settled on a protracted lie to gain "peace with honour", namely "Vietnamisation" of the war to allow the withdrawal of American troops. To give the lie a semblance of reality, the anticommunist war was continued for four more bitter years, even as Nixon and Kissinger pursued a realpolitik policy of détente and coexistence with the great centres of communism, Russia and China. In the eventual fall of Saigon in 1975, it was hard to discern where American "honour" lay.
After Vietnam, the urgent task of American leaders was to restore belief in intrinsic virtue and assure Americans it would not again be betrayed by power. President Jimmy Carter's solution was to make human rights rather than rigid anti-communism the centrepiece of US foreign policy – a criterion that could be applied as easily to Latin American dictators as to communists, or to America itself. If America's power were guided by, and exerted on behalf of, human rights, its foreign policy would finally possess that virtue the myth had always demanded.
But Carter, beset by domestic and international crises, was comprehensively lambasted by Reagan and the Republicans for stressing American guilt at the expense of pride, and morality at the expense of power. Reagan promised to restore American power and pride while bluffly reassuring Americans that their virtue had never been lost. The "great communicator" was actually the great comforter, telling heartsick Americans what they craved to hear and believe. In place of Carter's redemptive strategy of sin and repentance, he offered simple denial: Vietnam had been a noble cause, betrayed by un-American radicals, against a still undefeated "evil empire". Military spending was beefed up and the Reagan Doctrine of providing aid to "democratic" forces fighting the "virus" of communism in Third World countries instituted: an attempt to replay Vietnam with a more satisfactory ending. Reagan managed to cheer the public with a couple of small-scale military adventures – bombing Libya's Colonel Gaddafi and invading the revolutionary island of Grenada – that pandered to pride rather than restored self-esteem. Otherwise the Reagan Doctrine was severely obstructed by the wish for "no more Vietnams" and congressional obstinacy over funding right-wing revolutions.
Reagan's surprising alliance with reforming Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev helped initiate the unexpected collapse of the evil empire that occurred under his successor, George H.W. Bush. This dramatic event dissolved the ideological bifurcation that had both justified and necessitated America's militarisation and leadership role after World War II. Yet Bush, in a speech delivered on the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, warned that the world still required a "strong and engaged America" because of the dangers presented by terrorists, renegade regimes and unpredictable rulers.
His subsequent victory over Hussein demonstrated conclusively that Reagan's avuncular denial had merely soothed the dilemma of power and virtue without solving it. Bush himself exclaimed: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." Time wrote that Vietnam's legacy of doubt and divisiveness had been shattered by a combination of "the rightness of the cause and the swiftness of the victory". Virtue and power had been restored and reunited. Bush, inspired to talk of a "new world order", wrestled with the old Wilsonian question of how to reconcile "collective engagement" and leadership with continued American independence.
Yet the aftermath of the first Iraq War proved intensely disappointing, thanks to Bush's refusal to topple Hussein, or to support Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings he had himself encouraged. There were good realpolitik reasons for this withholding which would become all too obvious in the second Gulf War. But none squared with the simple moral narrative Bush had told – of a mad, bad, dangerous dictator akin to Hitler, who must not be appeased – to gain support from a nation unwilling to go to war for apparently mercenary, self-interested reasons centring on oil. Bush was thus caught on the old dilemma, just as his son would be when he tried to complete his father's "unfinished business" in Iraq.
THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICAN POWER AFTER VIETNAM was not that it had been significantly diminished. It remained preponderant, yet somehow emasculated. It had not even been fully deployed in Vietnam, a truth that gave rise to the legend that America had fought with "one hand tied behind its back". Resentful conservatives became less concerned with humility than with wiping out the humiliation of Vietnam. Democrats, meanwhile, moved further left, becoming the party of injured innocence, as suspicious and fearful of power as the peace activists of former times.
This, at least, was the caricatured view that each camp took of the other. Yet conservatives (and especially neo-conservatives, whose anti-communism had propelled them from the left to the right) could not dispense with the idea of crusade as a justification for asserting power. Indeed, the collapse of communism presented them with a serious problem until September 11 provided a new, potentially eternal enemy. Meanwhile, liberals in office could not ignore the sheer, blatant fact of American power – and none tried. Their task was not to diminish global involvement, but to moralise and purify it. There was indeed an interesting development during the Clinton era: many post-Vietnam liberals who regarded American military power as dangerous and illegitimate were converted to its use for preventing genocidal crimes and human rights abuses in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and elsewhere.
Yet whatever position one took, the effect was to elevate military above diplomatic issues. Foreign policy debates revolved endlessly around the question of when and how military force could be justified. The most prominent answer was the (Colin) Powell Doctrine, a modern restatement of old-fashioned isolationist caution. Ironically, the conservative movement – moved by anti-communism and hostility toward the United Nations – had migrated from isolationism to "engaged unilateralism", embracing the utility of preponderant American power and laying plans for its indefinite continuance. This threatened to transform world leadership into world dominance, though naturally for a holy cause.
Nevertheless, the initial "hands-off" approach of George W. Bush's administration seemed to reflect Secretary of State Powell's pragmatic caution rather than this new conservative ambition. The Islamist attack of September 11, 2001 changed everything, however.
It reinstated American innocence – in the shape of a victim's innocence – and fired patriotic pride. American might could surely be deployed justly to defeat the new evil enemy. This accidental coincidence of power and virtue delivered foreign policy into the hands of various right-wing ideologues and intellectuals. The heady idealism of neo-conservatives, desirous of reshaping the world for liberal democracy, came fortuitously and momentously together with the attitudes of hardline conservatives who had never accepted the humbling of American power post-Vietnam. Defence administrators who had spent their careers striving to rebuild America's military strength (in Donald Rumsfeld's case to reshape it for a new era) – who had neither military nor diplomatic experience (Powell contemptuously referred to them as "chicken hawks") – showed limitless faith in the efficacy of American military power.
The attack on Afghanistan was well understood, that on Iraq was not. Trumped-up reasons – weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's implied connection to Osama bin Laden – were substituted for grand geo-strategic goals that could not easily be sold to the public. When these proffered justifications failed, base motives such of greed for oil and profit were attributed to the prevaricators (for example, by bereaved soldier's mother Cindy Sheehan). A costly and endless war of choice meant to serve special interests could not be a virtuous use of power. Iraq was not Vietnam, but the result was the same.
All might have been well had the world seen the swift establishment of a peaceful Iraq after a brief, victorious war. This was never on the cards. The administration's willingness to intervene with force did not imply abandonment of non-entanglement, either in the conduct of the invasion (which disparaged the UN and old allies, relying only on a decidedly subservient "coalition of the willing") or, more disastrously, in its aftermath. The lack of postwar planning and consequent failure to assert authority – leaving a vacuum that allowed the drift toward insurgency – were not accidental, as George Packer's book Assassins' Gate (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2005) makes quite clear. They were purposely willed by top members of the administration, according to whose ideological lights American responsibility ceased upon delivering Iraqis their freedom. Ordinary Iraqis (presumed to be like "ordinary Americans") would naturally grasp new opportunities, including economic ones, to create a democratic nation capable of paying its own way. America might properly use its power to break nations but was not, Rumsfeld categorically repeated, into "nation-building" (thus his fantastic "six weeks in and out" mentality).
The dominant administration view was that American power could be deployed without cost to benefit a nation, a region, ultimately the world, without the necessity of entanglement in prolonged occupation and government of a foreign state. When contaminating entanglement was the actual outcome, Americans renewed their reputation as imperialists – albeit bizarrely incompetent ones. Worse, a self-consciously tough administration's excessively optimistic view of the efficacy of American military power was matched by an almost preternatural blindness to the damage done to innocent virtue by torture, extreme rendition, Guantánamo detainment, and so on. America's moral stock plummeted as it had not done since Vietnam; anti-Americanism grew apace. At home, a war increasingly seen as unjustified and unwinnable became a suppurating sore that steadily degraded the administration's political capital. Once again, American power was discredited and its virtue sullied, and the American mission put in grave doubt.
THE DEMISE OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM seemed to represent a triumph of the American mythology over that of the Soviets, but the actual moral tale was more complex. Waging the Cold War had provoked moral crisis. Though the dilemma of reconciling American virtue and power had seemed simplified by the Cold War – they were necessarily conjoined in the great crusade – that conflict had merely exposed the contradictions more painfully. No final or satisfactory solutions to the dilemma had been found as America began its "war on terror". Americans thus stumbled headlong into a new era of conflict, entangled less by damaging alliances than by their own continuing moral confusion, now masquerading as moral certainty. ♦