The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (Bacevich, Andrew)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Bacevich, Andrew. The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory. Henry Holt and Co., 2020.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction
By the 1980s, the Cold War had become more than a mere situation or circumstance. It was a state of mind.
senior adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had warned, “We are going to do a terrible thing to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
a semblance of order and coherence.
At least in theory, the moment might have invited reflection on some first-order questions: What is the meaning of freedom? What does freedom allow? What obligations does it impose? Whom or what does it exclude?
defending freedom rather than enlarging it—
Rarely, if ever, had the transition from one historical period to another occurred quite so abruptly,
Confident that an era of unprecedented U.S. economic, military, and cultural ascendancy now beckoned, members of an intoxicated elite threw caution to the winds. They devised—and promulgated—a new consensus consisting of four elements.
· The first of these was globalization or, more precisely, globalized neoliberalism.
· The second element was global leadership, a euphemism for hegemony
· The third element of the consensus was freedom,
· The final element of the consensus was presidential supremacy,
cement the primacy of the United States in perpetuity, while enshrining the American way of life as the ultimate destiny of humankind.
By 2016, large numbers of ordinary Americans had concluded, not without reason, that the post–Cold War consensus was irretrievably defective.
1. Al, Fred, and Homer’s America—and Mine
in September 1945, an eruption of civil disobedience unlike any in U.S. history swept through the ranks of the armed forces,
None gave more than scant attention to what subsequently emerged as the two most troubling moral issues of the era, namely, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Americans had experienced World War II as a Manichean event pitting all that was good against all that was evil.
diversity, inclusiveness, or multiculturalism—issues now at the forefront of American politics—even the terms were then alien.
three-faceted conception of freedom—preserving (or paying lip service to) received values, while resisting Communism and simultaneously embarking upon an orgy of consumption—
That their nation should be simultaneously virtuous and powerful and deliriously affluent seemed not only plausible, but essential.
bargain forged during the brief transition between World War II and the Cold War, with freedom defined as a mélange of traditional values, fierce anti-Communism, and go-for-the-gusto materialism,
The real split—the lasting one—occurred between boomers who saw Vietnam as an event requiring them to take a forthright stand, whether
for or against, and those who saw the war as no more than an annoyance, not worth attending to except as a potential impediment to the pursuit of their own ambitions.
on the matter widely considered to be the defining issue of the day, Trump was a no-show. Many of his contemporaries fought. Many others protested. He remained firmly on the sidelines, implicitly betting that, in the long run, the war wouldn’t matter and that once it ended the country would largely revert to what it had been beforehand.
Nixon and Reagan succeeded in shoring up the postwar bargain precisely when Vietnam and the Sixties had laid bare its vulnerabilities.
With the possible exception of the Monroe Doctrine, Nixon’s China initiative (among other things thereby opening the United States to China) remains the most creative gambit in the history of American statecraft.
Reagan’s entire presidency was a pseudo-event, its achievements based on the masterful creation and manipulation of images.
We know what works: Freedom works. We know what’s right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.
2. The End of History!
Cold War was not so much waged as managed.
Kremlin’s “long-standing ambition to become the dominant world power” remained intact,
1989 represented Year Zero.
While it continued, most Americans explicitly or tacitly accepted the proposition that the Cold War had centered on preventing freedom from being extinguished. As of 1989, that objective had presumably been achieved, inviting Americans to look beyond freedom’s mere preservation and to consider instead its future prospects, which suddenly appeared limitless.
Reinhold Niebuhr had chided Americans for nurturing “dreams of managing history,” while fancying themselves “tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.”
the architects of this new post–Cold War consensus did not differ appreciably from the elites who had dominated American life during the Cold War or, for that matter, since the founding of the Republic.
relative indifference to religious tradition.
As the buzzword du jour, greed was out, freedom was in.
For this very reason, from John F. Kennedy (“ Ich bin ein Berliner.”) to Ronald Reagan (“ Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”),
“Is this the beginning of a new age?” Yet the overall tone of reporting left little doubt about the answer: Yes, of course it was.
the Cold War had been both ideological and geopolitical.
geopolitical considerations gradually eclipsed ideological ones. In that regard, developments occurring in the shadow of the Vietnam War proved crucial. When the United States aligned itself with Red China, forged an alliance with thoroughly authoritarian Egypt, and in 1979 threw its support behind Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan, ideas and values figured at best as an afterthought.
The way it ended—euphoric young Germans dancing atop the Wall—imparted to the entire Cold War a retrospective moral clarity that it did not deserve.
policy intellectuals a remarkable stir. The author was Francis Fukuyama, hitherto a little-known policy analyst. The title of the piece that vaulted him to instantaneous fame: “The End of History?”
writings that capture something essential about the moment in which they appear, while simultaneously shaping expectations about what lies ahead.
Other distinguished examples include Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The United States Looking Outward,” Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and the poet Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.”
What the views expressed by Mahan, Turner, and Kipling had in common was this: Each discerned that an era of history had run its course. A new day was dawning, bringing with it new imperatives to which Americans would necessarily conform, whether they wished to or not. If wise, they would do so willingly.
Mahan, Turner, and Kipling wielded influence not because their ideas were true but because they were timely. They filled a need, even before that need was fully formed and recognized.
The principal institutions of American power—Congress and the executive branch, the national security apparatus, banks and multinational corporations, universities and the mass media—could simply maintain the routines that had worked so well in delivering history to its prescribed terminus.
For several decades thereafter, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” would serve as an all-purpose rationale for U.S. national security policies.
evidence of “giddiness bordering on nuttiness.”
“the end of history” conveyed demonstrable truths but because the implications embedded in that phrase were so eminently serviceable. Truth took a backseat to expedience.
United States should orchestrate whatever history was to follow “the end of history.” Having won, “we” were now in charge. By expounding on such expectations, Fukuyama invested them with credibility. In this way, he left an indelible mark on the emerging post–Cold War era.
3. Kicking 41 to the Curb
In times of unforeseen duress, the absence of principle enhances flexibility.
Bush brought to a successful close an era he thoroughly understood. His reward was to be sent packing as Americans judged inadequate his capacity to explain and deal with what was coming next.
the president professed to glimpse better things still—a “new world order”—
“The world is in transition,” he declared. Toward what? On that, Bush seemingly had few clues. If the world was new, why was the prescription so familiar?
The real story was not of a sax-playing baby boomer displacing a genteel member of the Greatest Generation, but of insurgents hostile to the establishment that both President Bush and candidate Clinton embodied crashing the political scene.
The first of those insurgents was Patrick Buchanan,
Ross Perot,
The third insurgent took a quieter, more oblique approach. Her name was Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“There is a religious war going on in this country,” Buchanan thundered. “It is a cultural war,
“The dynamic force shaping that world is nationalism,” Buchanan insisted.
So, too, with Hillary Clinton’s arrival on the national political stage in 1992. Her gender, when combined with her ability and her ambition, made her a dangerous figure who posed a direct threat to the “traditional values”
4. Glimpsing the Emerald City
I am a big believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not.”
statecraft and the means of policing this Pax. Its theme was global leadership.
And in the early 1990s, the Pentagon budget did modestly decline. Yet with other nations seizing the opportunity to shrink their own forces, in many cases drastically, the U.S. share of worldwide military expenditures actually increased.
That Pentagon estimates of Soviet military capabilities tended to be long on “poetry” and short on “plumbing” was widely recognized, deplored by a few, tacitly accepted by most.
Soon enough, the stewards of national security devised an alternative justification for American military power, one that emphasized capabilities to be employed, rather than threats to be contained.
“Shaping the international environment”
In the historical narrative that most Americans carry in their heads, past wars help establish a basic chronology.
Linked together, America’s wars provide a narrative spine to what might otherwise appear to be simply “one damn thing after another.”
spinning Vietnam as a success proved impossible.
The fall of the Berlin Wall restored the narrative of national ascent.
According to an interpretation that gained wide favor in Washington, superior military might had played a decisive role in determining the final outcome.
As if to corroborate this verdict, hard on the heels of the Cold War came the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991, a grand exclamation point tacked onto the end of a momentous decade.
Much as the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804, members of the American political elite after 1989 conferred on the United States the title of “sole superpower.”
hyperpuissance or hyperpower.
no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead.
Yet at the time, defining leadership as a function of matchless military might was about as controversial as referring to Elvis as “the King.”
By common consent, the defining characteristics of this new Information Age were speed, control, and choice.
Considered in retrospect, JV2010 was to the art of war what credit default swaps became to the business of banking: the means to perpetuate a breathtakingly impudent fraud.
“Full-Spectrum Dominance.”
two elements of the post–Cold War super-story—globalization and militarized global leadership—attracted widespread bipartisan support.
third element of the post–Cold War super-story, which intruded directly into the sensitive realm of culture and morality. Its theme was freedom itself,
passing of the Cold War relieved Americans of any further obligation to exhibit more than nominal cohesion.
5. Bedfellows
Ultimately, the people do choose their president. Yet the choices presented to the people reflect the preferences and interests of a deeply entrenched and supremely self-confident establishment. In voting for president, Americans don’t choose between apples and oranges. They choose between two barely distinguishable varieties of apple. Such at least was typically the case until 2016.
nonsense on stilts.
none of the three ranks among presidential greats or near greats. Nor will Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The three post–Cold War presidents will likely end up ranked alongside Tyler, Buchanan, and Cleveland rather than in the company of Polk, Lincoln, and McKinley.
they embodied the overheated expectations of the Emerald City consensus.
Yet all three were slow to recognize its defects.
they allowed the ship of state to run aground. Their collective failure paved the way for Donald Trump to take the helm as leader of the Free World.
Clinton took office intent on enshrining his presidency as marking the transition to a new age.
defining quality of Clinton’s approach to cultural issues proved to be risk aversion.
Clinton concluded that circumstances dictated a specific response.
So as with globalization, the United States, despite its preponderant power, somehow found itself without any real choice. It had to act. Only with time would the adverse implications of action become clear. Unknowingly, Clinton was nudging the United States down a path toward permanent war, with the eventual loss of American preponderance one result.
confrontation with Milo( ević yielded three distinct conclusions.
· First, it revealed the pusillanimity of America’s European allies, who proved unable to stem the barbarism engulfing parts of the former Yugoslavia as that country came apart.
· Second, it exposed the weakness of post–Soviet Russia, which lacked the muscle to fulfill its self-assigned role as protector of the Slavs.
· And finally it demonstrated the feasibility of relying on military action to enforce norms and punish bad behavior, almost without cost to U.S. forces,
seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.
routinized the use of force, thereby furthering the militarization of American global leadership.
during his eight years in office, checks on American-style corporate capitalism all but disappeared.
President Wilson had taken it upon himself to propose a “new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail.”
As had been the case with Wilson, so it proved with Bush: As challenges mounted, wisdom and prudence dissipated.
The central theme of Bill Clinton’s tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush’s tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization—another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences.
As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/ 11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate.
The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst.
a combustible form of American Exceptionalism that formed after the end of the Cold War but remained largely dormant until Osama bin Laden provided the necessary detonator.
To run the Pentagon, Bush recruited a militarist, Donald Rumsfeld. To serve as Rumsfeld’s deputy, he appointed a zealot, Paul Wolfowitz. As his own running mate, he chose an arch nationalist, Richard Cheney.
They were, to use a term coined by the historian Jacob Burckhardt, “emergency men.”
“Go massive,” he directed his aides. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
basis for a new world order, Made in the USA, directed from Washington, and enforced by American military muscle.
Bush outdid both Wilson and the Lord, limiting himself to a mere Five Propositions.
· First, America’s purposes are beyond reproach.
· Second, viable alternatives to the principles defining the American way of life do not exist.
· Third, when forced to fight, the United States wages war on behalf of righteousness itself.
· Fourth, each of the first three propositions confers on the United States unique prerogatives as self-assigned global peace enforcer.
· Fifth, the ultimate triumph of this American-constructed new world order is foreordained.
not simply a Bush Doctrine, but a Bush Eschatology.
What Fukuyama had posited as theory, Bush now declared to be reality.
political equivalent of a Potemkin village, pretending to debate matters that were not in actuality up for discussion.
Our forty-fourth president’s signature achievement was to briefly prolong the life of the Emerald City consensus.
(Obama) So his achievements, while real, produced ironic results. Three in particular stand out. In each, his efforts inadvertently laid the basis for a powerful backlash.
· The first category required Obama to conduct a salvage operation. He saved globalized neoliberalism.
· second element of Obama’s legacy relates to the uses of U.S. military power.
It was during his presidency that the very idea of war termination vanished from national security circles. The concept of “forever wars” took hold.
a democratic society, the key to normalizing war is to divert public attention from its continuing existence. As with air or water pollution, if no one notices, it doesn’t matter, at least politically.
Obama enabled Americans to make their peace with war.
Yet casualty sensitivity did not translate into an aversion to using force.
So in the final year of his presidency, for example, nearly twenty-five thousand American bombs and missiles rained down on targets in various parts of the planet. Yet total U.S. combat losses that same year numbered twenty-six.
· The final category of Obama’s legacy brings us to the most pronounced difference between Boone City and the Emerald City: the meaning of personal freedom. In Boone City, freedom was allowed to some, but not all.
his presidency represented a missed opportunity.
left untouched the egregious disparities of wealth
he did little to curb American militarism.
Obama might have alerted Americans to the dangers of nursing “Messianic dreams”
Only Obama understood that, as Niebuhr had written, “the course of history cannot be coerced … in accordance with a particular conception of its end.”
6. State of the Union
With stunning suddenness, the center gave way, exposing a country already divided into two starkly antagonistic camps.
privilege and inequality emerged as dominant traits of that democracy.
By way of illustration, compare the average earnings of CEOs with those of employees. In 1965, this so-called compensation ratio had been 20: 1; in 1989, 59: 1; by 2016, it had mushroomed to 271: 1.
forty-three million Americans were living in poverty that year—
According to polling data, poverty and income disparity ranked at the very bottom of problems that mattered to Americans.
Although the economy was recovering, the benefits were anything but evenly distributed. For most Americans the aftermath of bust was something other than boom. The rich were once again getting richer, but the take-home pay of working-class Americans remained stagnant, as it had for decades.
Studies revealed a sharp decline in social mobility dating back to the 1980s, but worsening in the wake of the Cold War.
homeless population averaging 549,000 on any given night; 44.2 million Americans who were receiving food assistance
30 million schoolchildren receiving low-cost or free school lunches.
On a daily basis, tens of millions of Americans were enduring what one writer that year called “financial impotence.” These were not the poorest of the poor, but those persuaded that the deck was stacked against them.
the 2016 election, financial impotence was to turn into political outrage, bringing the post–Cold War era to an abrupt end.
inverse relationship between wealth and likelihood of being killed or wounded in service to the country.
Do the casualties incurred represent a cross section of the American people in all of their wondrous variety? Simply put, no.
highly publicized instances of tokenism—
wealthier communities suffer far fewer casualties than do less affluent ones.
So the all-volunteer force is not so much recruited as bought and paid for.
three large themes had governed the relationship between citizens and soldiers. During extended periods of peace—the 1920s and 1930s, for instance—most Americans paid little attention to those who served. During conflicts deemed justifiable and necessary—World War II and the early Cold War, for example—Americans warmly supported the troops, with elite participation in military service one concrete manifestation of that support. Wars deemed unjustified and unnecessary—Vietnam providing the best example—found substantial numbers of Americans, representatives of the elite very much in the vanguard, mobilizing in opposition and undermining the very legitimacy of the existing military system. The post–Cold War era recast the relationship between the American people and their military. Today, Americans have become inured to war and to an accompanying atmosphere of never-ending national security emergency.
Is this arrangement democratic? Fair? Morally defensible? If nothing else, does it at least produce beneficial outcomes? Honesty demands a negative
our purposes, the key point is this: Trump did not create the conditions in which the campaign of 2016 was to take place. Instead, to a far greater extent than any of his political rivals, he demonstrated a knack for translating those conditions into votes. Here the moment met the man.
7. Plebiscite
Virtually none were willing to grant the possibility that Trump filled a legitimate need, that his historical function, whether assigned by Fate, Providence, or a God with a wicked sense of humor, was to make it impossible to ignore any longer the anomalies and incongruities to which the post–Cold War period had given rise.
those who supported Trump and those who simply stayed home—together totaling approximately 171 million adult citizens—represented an entirely understandable, if regrettable, response to the trajectory of events that had occurred since the end of the Cold War.
Sanders reprised the role that former vice president and inveterate New Dealer Henry Wallace had played back in the election of 1948.
Without economic democracy there could be no political democracy.
During this “Great Compression,” destined to last into the 1970s, the rich got richer, but low-income and middle-income Americans also benefited appreciably, enough to reduce the gap between the well-to-do and everyone else.
Until Sanders (and Trump) came along, protest was confined to the fringes, while the seemingly impervious juggernaut of globalized neoliberalism kept rolling on.
Clinton’s perspective—politics providing the means to make incremental repairs to a flawed but essentially sound system—
Whether or not his solutions were realistic, Sanders gauged the temper of the times far more accurately than had Clinton.
On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, “We came, we saw, he died.”
what made her unfit to serve as commander in chief were those decisions regarding Iraq and Libya.
Yet even this partial, if formidable, list begs the question: What was the underlying vision that informed Clinton’s “vision”?
her vision amounted to little more than an elaborate endorsement of the status quo.
capacity to push the buttons of millions of voters who believed themselves ill-served and left behind—abandoned even—by establishment politicians of both parties.
As a strategic thinker, Trump had no particular talent. Yet as a strategic sensor, he was uniquely gifted,
while Clinton was touting her plan for solar panels, Trump was transforming the election into a referendum centered on a single question: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the country is headed? Answer yes or no.
8. Attending to Rabbit’s Question
Donald Trump’s detractors commit this categorical error: They confuse cause and effect. They charge him with dividing America when, in fact, it was pervasive division that vaulted him to the center of American politics in the first place.
Considered as an episode in the ongoing history of the United States rather than as a sudden national nervous breakdown, what meaning can we assign to the Trump presidency, even if only on a tentative basis?
Recall as well the button-pushing provocations that candidate Trump employed to incite establishment outrage, thereby delighting those holding that establishment in contempt.
By unfurling the black banner of “America First,” he implicitly subverted the foundational myth of contemporary history—World War II as a “Good War” that gave credence to America’s providentially assigned liberating mission.
affecting Israel, the national interests of the United States figure as an afterthought.
While a noxious and venal blowhard, the president turned out not to be the disruptive force that his critics charged him with being.
the widely held sense that the election of Donald Trump represents a turning point of sorts is not without foundation. It’s just that his critics misconstrue what that turn connotes.
With Trump in the White House, claims that the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era of American political, economic, military, and cultural ascendancy became impossible to sustain.
The genius of Trump’s “Make America great again” campaign slogan derived from its implicit admission that assertions of greatness made in the wake of the Cold War had turned out to be both empty and perverse.
Trump is playing only a minuscule part in a tragedy unfolding on a grand scale.
Trump and Hillary Clinton as contemporary equivalents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
during the interval between 1989 and 2016, Americans were blindsided by events that contravened such expectations. Unforeseen problems eroded the advantages that the end of history had ostensibly conferred. Exploitation produced not advantage, but eclipse.
That eclipse has taken three forms.
· First, the era of Western primacy, with the United States as the ultimate successor to once-formidable European empires, has now ended for good.
· Second, the era in which the benefits of technological advance necessarily outweigh any negative consequences is now winding down.
· Third, the era in which “taming” nature translates directly into human benefit has now run its course.
These issues will define the balance of the twenty-first century: an eastward shift of global power; technological dystopia; and potentially irreversible environmental degradation. To none of these does neoliberal globalization, the pursuit of militarized hegemony under the guise of global leadership, and freedom defined as the removal of limits provide anything even approximating an adequate response. Quite the opposite.
realigning that traditional sense of mission with current conditions.
1989 installed America in a commanding position, then someone screwed up royally.
Perhaps heresies deserve a second look.
time might be ripe for introducing into the conversation ideas previously classified as beyond the pale.
Trump’s rejection of the post–Cold War vision of an open world policed by the armed forces of the United States earned him the presidency.
immediate need is not to impose a new consensus, but to allow serious debate. In a country as deeply divided as the United States, the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning. Americans deserve choices that go beyond Trump vs. Clinton
comparable cause presents itself today, even if obscured by Trump Derangement Syndrome. That cause is climate change.
Even the Pentagon sees the warming planet as a problem (an example of Trump’s subordinates disregarding the boss). What the Pentagon has yet to acknowledge is that the threat posed by climate change already exceeds the threat posed by Islamic terrorism and will eventually surpass that of Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or even Xi Jinping’s China, none of them, it should be noted, exempt from that very same threat.
Considered in retrospect, it becomes apparent that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mark the “end of history.” Nor did it constitute a turning point in the history of the United States. It merely removed the brakes, accelerating processes already well advanced. The end of the Cold War promised the fulfillment of a distinctly American version of modernity. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency testifies to the abject failure of that project.