STILL HANGING around the neck of the Truman administration —
which it is now fashionable for some conservatives to applaud — is
the albatross legacy etched by rote in stone during the 1950s: “Who
lost China?” And though the blame can be placed, as always, on the
administration, party, and President in power when China slid into
the grip of Communism, the possibility must be reckoned with, then
as now, that the weight of events can slip out of the grasp of
great powers — even America. Faced with the seemingly
unprecedented drift of nations away from the agenda and interest of
the United States — including allies, enemies, and strategic
competitors alike — the new catchphrase for the times could well
be “Who lost Earth?”
History reminds us that the world often demands of policy that
which mere mortals cannot provide. Dilemmas are old as sin, and one
of the more painful lessons of world hegemony is that you cannot
always have your cake and eat it too. China remains the classic
example. In the wake of the Second World War, the U.S. funneled
money to the Nationalists in order to tip the balance of power away
from Mao Tse-tung. But Mao’s insurrection, fueled by the defeat of
Japan, was powerful enough to throw American strategists of the
finest pedigree into a very particular crisis. Too little money,
and not only would the Nationalists crumble but the Truman
administration would seem resigned to Communism; too much, and —
as had been made clear — the clumsy and poorly led Nationalist
armies would go down to defeat anyway having done the extra
disservice of draining the American treasury at a time of sharpest
need.
Another such pickle transpired in Vietnam — back before the
arrival of a single U.S. “military advisor.” There — and in a very
similar vein — the trouble was that the French empire was
collapsing, on account of not just indigenous fervor but
metropolitan economics. France was bankrupting herself trying to
keep an empire, and given the condition of postwar European
infrastructure this was about as stunning as a sunrise at dawn. The
U.S. faced an ugly paradox: paying France to fight a losing war
against the Viet Minh would parody the slow-mo failure in China;
but failing to arm and underwrite the French army’s militarist
nostalgia trip in Indochina would cause the collapse of the French
economy — which was on toothpick stilts as it was. The default of
the government would tip Paris at once into the hands of
impoverished Communism. NATO would be a dead duck, and America’s
grand anticommunist strategy a dead dog.
WE’RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, then and now. Bush can always be blamed by
critics for hurling us into a place — Iraq — we need never have
been, but boils are boils and if not lanced they tend to explode in
untidy fashion. What had already metastasized in the Islamic world
— most particularly, the secret of the Bomb — was not and could
not be reversed or even entombed in carbonite. To crib from
Trotsky: you may not be interested in taking the plunge, but the
plunge, all too often, is interested in taking you. Such are the
times in which we live. Russia is steadfast in its determination to
not be Western. China continues to consider itself another (that
is, not our) planet. India and Japan are on America’s side, but for
their own reasons, and South America and Africa remain as alienated
as ever. Western Europe loves us no more than it ever has, intent
on trending toward that vaunted future Elysium of independent
grandeur. And the Middle East is a cauldron of revilement.
That the world has turned largely against the basic American
agenda — with the slim exception of a bias toward profitable trade
and democracy — can be blamed on the Bush administration, whose
problem it is (for now). But responsibility is not exclusively
fault. The direction of Earth today is governed by anti-American
forces, primarily cultural, that are partially a consequence of
administration policy but, more broadly, are the result of
system-level refusals to maintain the 1990s in supposedly
globalized and pro-American fashion. May we not forget how deep
anti-Americanism ran, in those days, from Serbia to Afghanistan to
China and beyond.
THE GOOD NEWS, such as it is, is that bleaker times have presaged
today’s. The situation in the 1970s was dire enough for one
Jean-Francois Revel to subtitle his book, The Totalitarian
Temptation, as Why Is U.S. Foreign Policy Failing Almost
Everywhere? “Why,” he asked,
is Soviet totalitarianism popular in Africa? Why is
Castro a star and Kissinger is a villain, in spite of his brief
lionization and notwithstanding his credentials as a detente maker?
Why does the President of the United States have to be heavily
protected in Rome, Tokyo, Paris, or Stockholm against hostile
demonstrators while in some Western cities any Eastern statesman
walks or drives peacefully through friendly or indifferent
crowds?
The irony of the age is that this ripe anti-Americanism was
exacerbated
and abated as the result of over 60 military
operations conducted by the U.S. Armed Forces between 1949 and
1989. Gore Vidal cites this fact in his missive entitled
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So
Hated, but there is no doubt that at the fall of the Berlin
Wall international good will for America was at an all-time high
that was more or less maintained through the month of September,
2001.
This result was the hard-earned effort very much in keeping with
the vision of Earth described by the very un-neocon James Baker: “I
was of a generation that embraced wholeheartedly the concept of
Pax Americana, an America engaged as a force for creative
and constructive change around the world…. In my mind, this has
always simply been a given.” The key feature of Baker’s outlook —
like that of Woodrow Wilson, in an irony of its own — is the
ingrained desire that American intervention be a tool for peace,
undertaken by peaceful means, with violence only as a last resort:
that is, after the war had already started. The profundity of the
war in Iraq is precisely the sharpness of its break in American
policy from that venerable principle.
AND SURE ENOUGH the war in Iraq has brought on a current crisis
that will shape American politics for, at a minimum, the next four
years. Regardless of one’s opinion on that war, and on those who
support and oppose it, the feeling of doom and gloom that prevails
when the conversation turns to Iran and our options ought to be
held at some kind of bay. The consolation of history lends a
perspective of its own which ought to encourage not only prudence
but steadfastness. Earth has been more lost to us than this. The
Herculean task of American foreign policy is to eliminate our
enemies faster than, in the process of elimination, we can create
them. In the process, it’s is good to know, and to know how, we
squared the circle in even darker times.
