Executive-dominated war policy and American Exceptionalism

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1999) was a historian who was outspoken in his activism for liberal Democratic candidates and in particular against the Vietnam War. He was known for his books like The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950) and Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). The latter expressed his continuing reverence for Enlightenment concepts of Reason. He also co-authored an influential American history textbook with Samuel Morrison and William Leuchtenburg.

Several of his essays from 1969-1974 were collected in The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character (1974). His writing made a big impression on me when I was an undergraduate. In his writing during the Vietnam War stressed how mistaken and disastrous American intervention there was. He also advocated Congressional restrictions on the President's war powers, not just in Vietnam but more broadly.

His criticisms were common among antiwar Democrats, who we might think of in retrospect as the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party at that time, during the Vietnam War. The War Powers Act was passed as a result of the Vietnam War experience, in particular. As we see in the debate over the Saudi war in Yemen, even today Congress hasn't completely forgotten that the Constitution gives Congress the decision power over war.

In theory, some conservatives and libertarians are in favor of restricting Presidential war powers. And during the Clinton Administration, the Republicans in Congress did make some effort to restrict American military action in the Balkans. Given the Congressional Republicans' responses to Trump's Presidency in 2017-18, one could be excused for doubting that Grand Old Party is all that serious about upholding the Constitutional order beyond the partisan pretence of doing so for positions they support at any given moment.

In The Defeat of America, Commager identifies two strong trends in thinking about foreign policy that he sees reaching back even before the American Revolution:

First is the assumption, or the myth, of American uniqueness - a myth which justified and encouraged the habit of isolation. Second is the assumption of the political, social and moral superiority of America - a myth which rationalized Manifest Destiny, mission, imperialism and, in our own time, the imposition on the rest of the world of something that can be called, without stretching analogies too far, a Pax Americana. [my emphasis]

These days, we talk about this cluster of attitudes as American Exceptionalism. In her campaign for President in 2016, Hillary Clinton declared in a speech to members of the archconservative Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW), "I don't understand people who trash talk about America, who talk about us as being in decline, who act as though we are not yet the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph) 07/25/2016 (just after 1:10 in the video):

Commager's criticisms have a radical sound today, as they did at the time. And there's nothing wrong with that, since American foreign policy has created some radical problems and made some radically bad assumptions, which by no means ended with the Vietnam War.

Referring in particular to various cases since the Second World War, including in his list the Korean War, the Truman Doctrine, and "pareticipation in the Vietnam War even before 1956", among others, he notes of those cases:

All are inspired by and directed to Communist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the cold war. All are functions of our obsession with communism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to contain communism everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of Communist conspiracy or Communist subversion is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with communism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our war in Vietnam - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where communism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with communism.

The continuing relevance of these observations can be illustrated by employing the substitutions indicated with italics in the following to events of recent decades:

All are inspired by and directed to terrorist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the War on Terrorism. All are functions of our obsession with Muslim terrorism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to fight terrorism  everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of terrorism or Muslim extremism is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with terrorism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our unending wars in the Greater Middle East - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where terrorism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Ronald Reagan, both President Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump , we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with military intervention.

Particularly since the intervention of Russia in the 2016 Presidential election, Russia has become an image of The Enemy with more obvious resemblances to the days of the Cold War.

The point here is not that we should embrace "isolationism," which Andrew Bacevich rightly describes as more of a bogeyman than an actual policy option. That's also true of Trump's "America First" posturing, which has strong ideological echoes of Old Right Isolationism before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Terrorism is a real problem and so is Soviet cyber-mischief. And we do have major treaty commitments to an expanded NATO, including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that are more vulnerable to military action by Russia than were the NATO members prior to 1989.

The point is to recognize that American attitudes, fed and encouraged by some very material interests like arms manufacturers (aka, war profiteers) and energy companies, also look for a foreign policy to justify themselves. Inflated notions of an American world mission and unrealistic fears can distract from more realistic concerns. And, as Commager was very aware, they can and do create problems that could have been avoided with a little more caution and good sense.

Goya: The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters