Twilight of the American Century Read online

  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.

  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 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 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 second 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.

  I had by this time become accustomed to describing myself as a conservative. That said, I had little use for what p
assed 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 the following:

  • 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).

  In 2014, I retired from teaching. Whether my students knew it or not, I was going stale and they deserved 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

  PART 1

  Poseurs and Prophets

  1

  A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

  Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War

  (2013)

  Dear Paul,

  I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war provides as good an occasion as any to do so. Distracted by other, more recent eruptions of violence, the country has all but forgotten the war. But I won’t and I expect you can’t, although our reasons for remembering may differ.

  Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smart—the ones with fancy résumés who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TV—really aren’t. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

  You were an exception, however. You had a knack for framing things creatively. No matter how daunting the problem, you contrived a solution. More important, you grasped the big picture. Here, it was apparent, lay your métier. As Saul Bellow wrote of Philip Gorman, your fictionalized double, in Ravelstein, you possessed an aptitude for “Great Politics.” Where others saw complications, you discerned connections. Where others saw constraints, you found possibilities for action.

  Truthfully, I wouldn’t give you especially high marks as dean. You were, of course, dutiful and never less than kind to students. Yet you seemed to find presiding over SAIS more bothersome than it was fulfilling. Given all that running the place entails—raising money, catering to various constituencies, managing a cantankerous and self-important faculty—I’m not sure I blame you. SAIS prepares people to exercise power. That’s why the school exists. Yet you wielded less clout than at any time during your previous two decades of government service.

  So at Zbig’s luncheons, when you riffed on some policy issue—the crisis in the Balkans, the threat posed by North Korean nukes, the latest provocations of Saddam Hussein—it was a treat to watch you become so animated. What turned you on was playing the game. Being at SAIS was riding the bench.

  Even during the 1990s, those who disliked your views tagged you as a neoconservative. But the label never quite fit. You were at most a fellow traveler. You never really signed on with the PR firm of Podhoretz, Kristol, and Kagan. Your approach to policy analysis owed more to Wohlstetter Inc.—a firm less interested in ideology than in power and its employment.

  I didn’t understand this at the time, but I’ve come to appreciate the extent to which your thinking mirrors that of the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Your friend Richard Perle put the matter succinctly: “Paul thinks the way Albert thinks.” Wohlstetter, the quintessential “defense intellectual,” had been your graduate-school mentor. You became, in effect, his agent, devoted to converting his principles into actual policy. This, in a sense, was your life’s work.

  Most Americans today have never heard of Wohlstetter and wouldn’t know what to make of the guy even if they had. Everything about him exuded sophistication. He was the smartest guy in the room before anyone had coined the phrase. Therein lay his appeal. To be admitted to discipleship was to become one of the elect.

  Wohlstetter’s perspective (which became yours) emphasized five distinct propositions. Call them the Wohlstetter Precepts.

  First, liberal internationalism, with its optimistic expectation that the world will embrace a set of common norms to achieve peace, is an illusion. Of course virtually every president since Franklin Roosevelt has paid lip service to that illusion, and doing so during the Cold War may even have served a certain purpose. But to indulge it further constitutes sheer folly.

  Second, the system that replaces liberal internationalism must address the ever-present (and growing) danger posed by catastrophic surprise. Remember Pearl Harbor. Now imagine something orders of magnitude worse—for instance, a nuclear attack from out of the blue.

  Third, the key to averting or at least minimizing surprise is to act preventively. If shrewdly conceived and skillfully executed, action holds some possibility of safety, whereas inaction reduces that possibility to near zero. Eliminate the threat before it materializes. In statecraft, that defines the standard of excellence.

  Fourth, the ultimate in preventive action is dominion. The best insurance against unpleasant surprises is to achieve unquestioned supremacy.

  Lastly, by transforming the very nature of war, information technology—an arena in which the United States has historically enjoyed a clear edge—brings outright supremacy within reach. Of all the products of Albert Wohlstetter’s fertile brain, this one impressed you most. The potential implications were dazzling. According to Mao, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Wohlstetter went further. Given the right sort of gun—preferably one that fires very fast and very accurately—so, too, does world order.

  With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America’s for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to
seize, for its own good as well as for the world’s. Not long before we both showed up at SAIS, your first effort to codify supremacy and preventive action as a basis for strategy had ended in embarrassing failure. I refer here to the famous (or infamous) Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon policy shop you then directed. Before this classified document was fully vetted by the White House, it was leaked to the New York Times, which made it front-page news. The draft DPG announced that it had become the “first objective” of US policy “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” With an eye toward “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role,” the United States would maintain unquestioned military superiority and, if necessary, employ force unilaterally. As window dressing, allies might be nice, but the United States no longer considered them necessary.

  Unfortunately, you and the team assigned to draft the DPG had miscalculated the administration’s support for your thinking. This was not the moment to be unfurling grandiose ambitions expressed in indelicate language. In the ensuing hue and cry, President George H. W. Bush disavowed the document. Your reputation took a hit. But you were undeterred.

  The election of George W. Bush as president permitted you to escape from academe. You’d done yeoman work tutoring candidate Bush in how the world works, and he repaid the debt by appointing you to serve as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierarchy. You took office as Osama bin Laden was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a position of real authority anticipated what was to occur. America’s vaunted defense establishment had left the country defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this as evidence of gross incompetence requiring the officials responsible to resign, you took it as an affirmation. For proof that averting surprise through preventive military action was now priority number one, Americans needed to look no further than the damage inflicted by nineteen thugs armed with box cutters.