Twilight of the American Century Read online

  Twilight of the American Century

  TWILIGHT

  OF THE

  AMERICAN

  CENTURY

  ANDREW J. BACEVICH

  University of Notre Dame Press

  Notre Dame, Indiana

  University of Notre Dame Press

  Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

  undpress.nd.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew J. Bacevich

  Published in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bacevich, Andrew J., author.

  Title: Twilight of the American century / Andrew J. Bacevich.

  Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] |

  Includes index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018021921 (print) | LCCN 2018040612 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104870 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104887 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104856 | ISBN 9780268104856 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104859 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268104863 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104867 (paperback : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government—21st century.

  Classification: LCC E902 (ebook) | LCC E902.B33 2018 (print) | DDC 320.973/0905—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021921

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

  This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

  To Steve Brown, Tom Engelhardt, and John Wright

  —

  Irrepressible New Yorkers,

  Irreplaceable Friends

  Jerusalem has sinned grievously; therefore, she has become an object of scorn.

  All who honored her now despise her, for they have seen her nakedness.

  —Lamentations, chapter 1, verse 8

  Contents

  Introduction. Straying from the Well-Trod Path

  Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets

  1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War (2013)

  2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer (2017)

  3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Decline of American Liberalism (2017)

  4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014)

  5. Tom Clancy: Military Man (2014)

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

  7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012)

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

  9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011)

  10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011)

  11. Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld’s Pentagon (2008)

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

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

  14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010)

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

  16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009)

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

  Part 2. History and Myth

  18. Saving “America First” (2017)

  19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017)

  20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017)

  21. American Imperium (2016)

  22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015)

  23. Always and Everywhere (2013)

  24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013)

  25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012)

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

  27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006)

  28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006)

  29. The Folly of Albion (2005)

  30. The Real World War IV (2005)

  Part 3. War and Empire

  31. Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries (2015)

  32. A War of Ambition (2014)

  33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013)

  34. How We Became Israel (2012)

  35. Breaking Washington’s Rules (2011)

  36. Why Read Clausewitz When Shock and Awe Can Make a Clean Sweep of Things? (2006)

  37. Living Room War (2005)

  38. Bush’s Grand Strategy (2002)

  39. New Rome, New Jerusalem (2002)

  40. Permanent War for Permanent Peace (2001)

  Part 4. Politics and Culture

  41. Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago (2017)

  42. Not the “Age of Trump” (2017)

  43. The Failure of American Liberalism (2016)

  44. An Ode to Ike and Adlai (2016)

  45. War and Culture, American Style (2016)

  46. Under God (2015)

  47. Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend (2014)

  48. One Percent Republic (2013)

  49. Counterculture Conservatism (2013)

  50. Ballpark Liturgy (2011)

  51. The Great Divide (2008)

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  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. 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 well-being of the United States as a whole is inextricably bound up with the well-being 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.

  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 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 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 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 as or more than 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 inter
ested in me. Those that I encountered in seminar challenged and subverted my worldview, particularly regarding the course of American statecraft. 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 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, including 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 army with its principal raison d’être. 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 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.