An excerpt from the conclusion of
The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, forthcoming by
Peter Beinart, about learning from American history that America can live safely and profitably in the world without dominating it.
What
America needs today is a jubilant undertaker, someone—like Franklin
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—who can bury the hubris of the past while
convincing Americans that we are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral.
The hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of
toughness before it, has crashed against reality’s shoals. Woodrow
Wilson could not make politics between nations resemble politics between
Americans. Lyndon Johnson could not halt every communist advance. And
we cannot make ourselves master of every important region on earth. We
have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot
bear, and our adversaries have learned it too. We must ruthlessly
accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is
not putty in our hands.
Franklin Roosevelt did not wage World War II so America could be the world’s sole superpower, or even Europe’s.
For
starters, that means remembering that we did not always believe we
needed to dominate the world in order to live safely and profitably in
it. In the decade and a half after the Soviet empire fell, dominance
came so easily that we began to see it as the normal order of things. We
expanded NATO into East Germany, then into Eastern Europe, then onto
former Soviet soil, while at the same time encircling Russia with
military bases in a host of Central Asian countries that once flew the
Hammer and Sickle. We established a virtual Monroe Doctrine in the
Middle East, shutting out all outside military powers, and the Bush
administration set about enforcing a Roosevelt Corollary too, granting
itself the right to take down unfriendly local regimes. In East Asia, we
waited expectantly for China to democratize or implode, and thus follow
Russia down the path to ideological and strategic submission. And we
stopped thinking about Latin America much at all since we took it as a
virtual fact of nature that no foreign power would ever again interfere
in our backyard.
We
were like the warrior guarding his village who suddenly finds that the
enemy has abandoned the battlefield, leaving vast tracts of territory
undefended, and so takes them for his own, since the acquisition
apparently involves little risk and cost. And once those lands have been
incorporated, he sees that even more is available: The inhabitants
offer little resistance, and even appear pleased to join the realm. And
as his domain extends further outward, the warrior begins to see its new
size less as a choice than a necessity: the bare minimum necessary to
keep his family safe. The old borders, which he once deemed sufficient,
now strike him as frighteningly exposed. In fact, he comes to suspect
that even his current territory is inadequate; he has grown so used to
expansion that mere stasis strikes him as a form of retreat. And
meanwhile, the lands just beyond his domain are no longer so welcoming
or unguarded, and mutinies have broken out in some of his recent
acquisitions. Fulfilling his obligations is no longer so effortless and
the resources at his disposal are no longer so plentiful. His challenge
is to step back from the border skirmishes that now occupy his time and
try to remember which lands he considered necessary for his security and
prosperity in those more sober days before the recent windfall, because
the days of windfall are now clearly gone.
If the men and
women who shape American foreign policy conduct this intellectual audit
they will discover a sharp discontinuity between some of today’s widely
held assumptions and the assumptions of successful American policymakers
in eras past. After 9/11, in the name of fighting terror, the Bush
administration declared war or cold war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, the
Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas, virtually every significant regime and
militia in the greater Middle East that did not kiss our ring. And in
its pursuit of regional dominance, it claimed that it was merely doing
what past generations had done in Europe and Asia. But that’s not right.
Franklin Roosevelt did not wage World War II so America could be the
world’s sole superpower, or even Europe’s. He wanted Four Policemen;
unipolarity was Hitler’s goal. And FDR did not wage war against all the
enemies of freedom: He allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler and Tojo.
During the cold war, America did not take on the entire communist world,
except for a period of hubristic intoxication that began with
McCarthyism and culminated in Vietnam. In the late 1940s we made common
cause with the communists in Belgrade, and in the 1970s and 1980s we
made common cause with the communists in Beijing, all to contain the
communists we feared most, who resided in Moscow. George Kennan saw the
purpose of containment as ensuring that no single power controlled the
world’s centers of economic and military might, not insuring that that
single power was the United States.
How
could our forefathers have been so cowardly and immoral? Stalin was a
monster; so was Mao, and they both had nuclear weapons aimed at us. Why
did we live with that sword of Damocles? Why did we accept their
dominion over billions of souls? Once upon a time, the answer was
obvious: Because we lacked the power not to. Franklin Roosevelt knew the
American people would not sacrifice their sons by the thousands to keep
Eastern Europe from Soviet hands. During Korea, Harry Truman blundered
into war with Beijing, and realized that in Asia too, the price of
denying America’s communist foes a sphere of influence was appallingly
high. Even Ronald Reagan proved so reluctant to challenge Soviet control
over Poland in the early eighties that conservative commentators
accused him of betrayal. In different ways, all these presidents
understood that in foreign policy, as in life, there are things you may
fervently desire but cannot afford. And in foreign policy, the
recognition that resources are limited, and precious, is even more
important since you are not merely spending other people’s money; you
are spilling other people’s blood.
Peter
Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate
professor of journalism and political science at City University of New
York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, is now available from HarperCollins. Follow him on
Twitter and
Facebook.
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