The Limits of Power

This week I picked up the recently-published book on current American policy by realist Andrew Bacevich, entitled The Limits of Power. Among Bacevich's most provocative concepts is his dissection of American National Security ideology, from which the following is an excerpt:

"President Bush's critics and his dwindling band of loyalists share this conviction: that the forty-third president has broken decisively with the past, setting the United States on a revolutionary new course. Yet this is poppycock. The truth is this: Bush and those around him have reaffirmed the preexisting fundamentals of U.S. policy, above all affirming the ideology of national security to which past administrations have long subscribed. Bush's main achievement has been to articulate that ideology with such fervor and clarity as to unmask as never before its defects and utter perversity.

"Four core convictions inform this ideology of national security. In his second inaugural address, President Bush testified eloquently to each of them.

"According to the first of these convictions, history has an identifiable and indisputable purpose. History, the president declared, 'has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.' History's abiding theme is freedom, to which all humanity aspires. Reduced to its essentials, history is an epic struggle, binary in nature, between 'oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.'

"According to the second conviction, the United States has always embodied, and continues to embody, freedom. America has always been, and remains, freedom's chief exemplar and advocate. 'From the day of our Founding,' the president said, 'we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.' As the self-proclaimed Land of Liberty, the United States serves as the vanguard of history. Revising, refining, and perfecting their understanding of freedom, Americans constantly model its meaning for others around the world. In 1839, the journalist John L. O'Sullivan described the young United States as 'the Great Nation of Futurity.' So it remains today. Within the confines of the United States, history's intentions are most fully revealed.

"According to the third conviction, Providence summons America to ensure freedom's ultimate triumph. This, observed President Bush, 'is the mission that created our Nation.' The Author of Liberty has anointed the United States as the Agent of Liberty. Unique among great powers, this nation pursues interests larger than itself. When it acts, it does so on freedom's behalf and at the behest of higher authority. By invading Iraq, the United States reaffirmed and reinvigorated the nation's 'great liberating tradition,' as the president put it. In so doing, 'we have lit a fire as well--a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.' Only cynics or those disposed toward evil could possibly dissent from this self-evident truth.

"According to the final conviction, for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere. Only when the light of freedom's untamed fire illuminates the world's darkest corners will America's own safety and prosperity be assured. Or as the president expressed it, 'The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.' In effect, what the United States offers to the world and what it requires of the world align precisely. Put simply, 'America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.' This proposition serves, of course, as an infinitely expansible grant of authority, empowering the United States to assert its influence anywhere it chooses since, by definition, it acts on freedom's behalf.

"This line of thinking comes with a rich and ancient pedigree. We can trace its origins back to 1630, when John Winthrop enjoined the first white settlers of Massachusetts Bay to erect a 'city upon a hill,' or to 1776, when Tom Paine declared that it lay within American's power 'to begin the world over again'--sentiments, as we have noted, that Ronald Reagan skillfully resurrected. Time and again during America's ascent to power, variants of this ideology provided the impetus for expansionism. Appearing in 1846 under the guise of Manifest Destiny, it lent moral cover to James Polk's efforts to secure the lebensraum Americans coveted. In 1898, urgent calls to 'liberate' nearby Cuba nudged William McKinley into a war that ended with the United States in possession of a maritime empire that extended all the way to the western Pacific.

"Yet only since World War II has this ideology established itself as the fixed backdrop for policy. Indeed, it derives much of its persuasive power from the way that Americans remember that war, converting the events of the 1930s and 1940s into a parable of universal significance. Hence the inclination to portray almost any heavy not to Washington's liking as another Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, with the failure to confront that adversary as tantamount to 'appeasement' and with nothing less than the survival of civilization itself at stake."