By Gideon Rachman
Published: December 3 2010 22:09
Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, by Andrew Bacevich, Metropolitan RRP£17.99 304 pages
How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, by Gideon Rose, Simon & Schuster RRP$27 432 pages
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States was left as the world’s only superpower. But the “unipolar moment” did not last long. By the time Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, it was already clear that the era of untrammelled American confidence and power had come to a close. Two major events have undermined the swagger and self-confidence of US foreign policy. The first was the failure to secure clear victories in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The second was the financial and economic crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, 2008. These three new books all respond, in different ways, to this new environment.
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University and a former colonel in the US army, has written a radical, angry and sometimes amusing book, Washington Rules, which challenges both the morality and the logic of American grand strategy since the beginning of the cold war. By contrast, Gideon Rose believes in the fundamental beneficence of America’s role in world affairs. In How Wars End, he asks a narrower question that is, nonetheless, of vital importance as the US struggles to find a way out of the Afghan war: how has America ended its military interventions around the world since 1914, and what lessons can it learn? In The Frugal Superpower, Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, takes a third approach that focuses on how the global economic crisis has undermined the fundamental basis of American power in the world.
Prof Bacevich begins Washington Rules by explaining his own personal journey to foreign policy apostasy. He writes: “By temperament and upbringing, I have always taken comfort in orthodoxy ... I found assurance in conventional wisdom.” He began to question the standard verities about American foreign policy at the age of 41, on a visit to Berlin, shortly after the fall of the wall. The poverty that he encountered undermined his previous belief in the Soviet threat. The death of Bacevich’s son in the second Iraq war, which is not mentioned in the book, has also doubtless added an edge of anger to his condemnation of what he calls “America’s path to permanent war”.
Bacevich is associated with the “American empire project” – a research and publishing effort with a self-explanatory thesis that has published other radical critics of US foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. But Bacevich’s own explanation for the growth of America’s military power seems to have as much to do with bureaucratic politics and the lobbying of interest groups as with any “imperial” instincts in the American body politic. He quotes with approval President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he warned Americans against the power of the “military-industrial complex”. Much of the book is devoted to trying to illustrate what this phrase means in practice.
Bacevich believes that debates among foreign policy experts and apparent changes in policy, as politicians came and went over the past 50 years, disguised a fundamental continuity in policy. America’s commitment to an ever-expanding military presence around the world was a result, in his view, of the capture of policy by military men and politicians who had a personal and professional stake in an expansive, “imperial” US presence around the world.
Depressingly, he argues that President Obama is just the latest president to have been captured by the Washington establishment, who have come up with a new justification for military intervention – in this case, a “counter-insurgency doctrine” for Afghanistan that is a recipe for “endless war”. Simply stated, Bacevich’s argument sounds like it could be just a conventional leftwing critique of US power. But Washington Rules is saved from this dreary fate by the clarity of the author’s writing and thinking, and the energy with which he sets about slaughtering sacred cows. Whatever one thinks of the central thrust of the book, Bacevich makes many telling points along the way. I particularly liked his rejection of the usual term “isolationist” to describe those who have opposed America’s recent wars. He is right to insist that the term “anti-interventionist” is more precise and accurate. Bacevich also has a gift for the cruel and arresting sentence. He writes of Robert McNamara, the cerebral defence secretary during the Vietnam war, that “McNamara’s considerable analytical ability had facilitated the killing of several hundred thousand non-combatants.”
The verve of the writing and the argument carries Washington Rules a long way. But, as with many polemics, there comes a moment when the thesis is stated with such extremity that it begins to lose credibility. At one point, Bacevich implicitly compares modern America to Nazi Germany. He writes: “Fifteen years after the armistice of 1918, Germany was back ... Fifteen years after the fall of Saigon, the same could be said of the United States.”
Even if this comparison is a slip, it points to a wider problem with the book – an inability to accept nuance and complication. There is no doubt that the US has committed some horrible foreign policy blunders since 1945. But there is no sense in Bacevich’s book that, ultimately, American power in the cold war served a moral purpose and delivered a moral end: the peaceful defeat of a dreadful Soviet dictatorship that had murdered millions of its own people and subjugated many of its neighbours.
Because Bacevich is so alive to the follies and flaws of American policy, he does not pause to imagine the world without American power, either during the cold war or today. The US military presence in the Middle East and the Pacific is huge and brings many problems in its wake. But would either area of the world really be in a better state if the Americans simply packed up and left? I doubt it.
Newly appointed as editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Gideon Rose epitomises the American foreign policy establishment whose ideas Andrew Bacevich finds so pernicious. Certainly Rose has few of the self-flagellating doubts about America that trouble Bacevich. He believes that American “grand strategy ... has been generally good for the United States and the world at large” because America has used its power “to carve out an ever larger ‘zone of peace’ and create a mostly benign structural context in which local, economic, social and political development could proceed”. As Rose sees it, America has been engaged on “nothing less than an ongoing campaign of global pacification” – embarked upon for a mix of political and economic reasons.
Far from relishing its ever-expanding global commitment, the US has “usually backed into it reluctantly” because there is little domestic appetite for taking on the role of the world’s policeman. If this is a description of an imperial America, it brings to mind the famous claim of a British historian, Sir John Seeley, who once wrote that the British empire had been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind”.
But while Rose is certainly not a radical critic of US foreign policy, he has written a subtle and elegant book that gives the lie to the notion that establishment thinking on America’s role in the world has been captured by an unreflective militarism.
On the contrary, Rose’s book is an effort to explain how to end wars. His perspective is deeply influenced by Carl von Clausewitz, the celebrated 19th-century German strategist, who argued that war was simply a continuation of politics by other means. In Rose’s view, America has typically got itself into military trouble when it has forgotten the political ends that it is fighting for. Another central idea in the book is that politicians, like generals, are often pre-occupied by the supposed lessons of the last major conflict – and that this inevitably shapes their exit strategies, as well as the war itself.
Rose illustrates his argument with a series of short histories of American military conflicts since 1914, concentrating on the way in which politicians sought to shape the postwar settlement. Along the way, he provides some fascinating details. It is instructive, for example, to be reminded that Woodrow Wilson, US president during the first world war, was thinking about the American civil war as he sought to negotiate in 1918.
Because Wilson is remembered by many as the quintessential liberal, his sympathies are unexpected. Rose writes: “He wanted to spare Germany the ravages that had befallen his beloved south after its total defeat a half-century earlier.”
Those looking for a road-map showing the way out of the Afghan war will be disappointed by Rose’s book, which must have been completed many months ago. The author writes cautiously that: “As of this writing, the war in Afghanistan is hard to call.” He makes a plea, however, for clarification of the political goals that America is fighting for as a means to secure a satisfactory end to the conflict. In Rose’s view, politicians should start any conflict by first envisaging what a “stable postwar political situation” might look like – and then working backwards, making sure that military tactics and an eventual exit strategy are closely aligned. This kind of thinking was clearly absent in the second Iraq war, where victory was followed by chaos. And it looks increasingly like the Afghan war is also bedevilled by a lack of clarity over its political goals.
The Afghan war also provides the starting point for Michael Mandelbaum’s examination of the limits of American power. The author begins his narrative with President Obama’s speech at West Point last year in which he announced the dispatch of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. As far as Mandelbaum is concerned, the most significant element in the speech was Obama’s “acknowledgement of economic constraints on American foreign policy, a theme very seldom heard from an American president since Roosevelt took the United States into World War II”.
The Frugal Superpower argues that the Afghan War is no aberration. It marks the beginning of a new era of constraint in US foreign policy. After the crash, it is increasingly apparent that “mounting domestic economic obligations will narrow the scope of American foreign policy”. In a brief but remorseless work, Mandelbaum first sets out “the tyranny of numbers” and the growing claims on America’s budget. In his view this will make America less able to play the central role in the international system that the US, and the rest of the world, has come to take for granted. America will “no longer provide as large a market for other countries’ exports”. And there will be no further Iraq or Afghan wars, since the US will lack the resources to embark on expensive exercises in state-building.
The Iraq and Afghan wars have hardly been advertisements for the beneficial use of American power. So many people, both in the US and around the world, might greet the prospect of a new era of American foreign policy restraint with applause and relief. Mandelbaum believes, however, that a diminished American global role will destabilise international relations and will open the way for Russia and China, in particular, to challenge the global order established by the US in the aftermath of the cold war.
The question that is raised in different ways by all three books is what the world will look like, if and when US power goes into retreat. Bacevich seems to have few doubts that a more modest global role will be better for both America and the world. Rose and Mandelbaum belong to the opposite school. Mandelbaum concludes his book by writing: “One thing worse than an America that is too strong, the world will learn, is an America that is too weak.”
A sharp American economic revival in the coming years – or a future revelation that the apparent Chinese miracle is instead a Japanese-style bubble – might alter this assumption of inevitable relative decline for the US. However, at the moment, it does look like the economic and financial crisis of 2008 was the moment that both revealed and accelerated the decline of American economic power, and the political power that flows from it.
If that is right, the next generation will be a test for the rival theses of Andrew Bacevich, Gideon Rose and Michael Mandelbaum. If Bacevich is right, the world will be a better place if the US is forced to abandon its quasi-imperial role. According to Rose and Mandelbaum, much of the rest of world may come to regret the diminution of American power. This is one of those rare academic debates that should be settled by unfolding global events over the next 20 years and more.
Gideon Rachman is an FT columnist and author of ‘Zero Sum World: Power and Politics after the Crash’ (Atlantic)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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