Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 3 of 4)

The same month this book was published, the United States and Iran veered very close to immediate war over the ill-considered and likely illegal assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Obama’s drone wars and Clinton’s cavalier statement about Gaddafi’s death made it mor difficult for Democrats to make straightforward criticisms of Trump’s action – to the extent they wanted to do so at all.

The Emerald City Presidencies, continued

He also notes that the “armed intervention in Libya [was] nominally justified to prevent genocide, but actually intended to overthrow longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi,” i.e., yet another regime change operation with a bad outcome.

Bacevich makes a Niebuhrian judgment on the mentality that led to the Iraq War, which could also apply to general hubris of the Emerald City US period he defines by neoliberal globalism, militarized global dominance, a privatized expansion of personal freedom, and the ever-growing significance of Presidential power:

... a conviction that God has bestowed on the United States unique prerogatives is deeply embedded in the nation's collective consciousness. Yet this particular variant of American Exceptionalism incorporated three distinctive themes: unvarnished militarism, missionary zealotry, and extreme nationalism. Prior American experience had offered glimpses of each. Distinguishing this particular recurrence [the Iraq War] was the chain reaction they produced as they came together.

Just as the neoliberal illusions crashed repeated in the 1990s and 2000s in the developing world and most spectacularly for America and Europe as well in 2008, Bacevich offers us a narrative framework to understand similar processes playing out in US foreign policy and the elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency, which joined the most irresponsible version of narcissistic personal freedom (Trump’s general decadence and corruption) with the dangerous unilateral power of the US Presidency.

Bacevich’s political perspective

Bacevich is not a politician or an ideologue. He has a complex combination of perspectives. Although much of his analysis of the world is consistent with a progressive viewpoint, his also has perspectives that would fit into a reasoned conservative viewpoint. Though in the age of Trump and Citizens United, in practical politics such a viewpoint effectively doesn’t exist. As we see daily with the parade of Republicans and alleged conservatives cheerfully defending Trump’s violations of the Constitution, his contempt for American electoral laws, and his crass criminality.

But he definitely is not promoting some “third way” or “beyond left and right” perspective. Because people promoting those kinds of notions are most often promoting some variation of hard right politics or occasionally some feel-good fantasy that we can have democratic politics without conflict, controversy, or partisanship.

He has a forthcoming book called American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, featuring a variety of readings from American conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, much of whose perspective had such an influence on him, was in the 1950s a realist Cold War liberal who became very much a critic of the Vietnam War. In Bacevich’s earlier book American Empire (2002), he draws carefully on two critics of American foreign policy, the Progressive historian Charles Beard (who sadly in his later years became a dogmatic rightwing isolationist ) and the left historian William Appleman Williams , both of whom gave particular attention to the domestic sources of American foreign policy.

A Trumpist interregnum?

This book appeared in the final month of Trump third year as President, and the text of course dates from earlier. So Bacevich is cautious in in his assessment of Trump’s work-in-process Presidency.

He believes that Trump’s election was a rejection of the Emerald City conventions across the board, even though neither Trump’s campaign messages nor his actual policies can be described as particularly coherent:

Himself a mountebank of the very first order, Trump exposed as fraudulent the triumphalism that served as a signature of the post-Cold War decades. On this score, Trump mattered and bigly.

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. In fact, End-of History boosterism, backed by the conviction that America had perfected a system of political economy, mastered war, and discerned the true meaning of freedom, has turned out to be utterly wrongheaded, doing untold damage to Americans and others. 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. [my emphasis]

Democrats who style themselves as The Resistance critically miss the most important lesson that can be currently drawn from Trump’s Presidency. As he puts it with two of his book’s most important metaphors, “the Emerald City consensus is as defunct as the Boone City consensus that preceded it.” And, echoing the Book of Daniel (“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. 5:27), he makes this Owl of Minerva judgment:

The post-Cold War recipe for renewing the American Century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won't anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-Cold War consensus through a shredder.

His “Acknowledgements” at the book’s end is dated April 2019, so he might well word some of his assessments about the Trump Presidency a bit differently in January 2020, when it was published. Not many people would be writing at the time of publication, for instance: "Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran and the other signatories to the agreement remained in full compliance with its terms. If Trump's action was intended to provoke the Iranian government into some action that could be construed as a casus belli, as Iranophobes clearly hoped, it failed."

Iran just announced it will no longer abide by the terms of the JCPOA. And on the first weekend of January, war with Iran looked like a distinct and immediate possibility.

But his point in this concluding chapter where those sentences appear is that democracy in America still has a immediate fighting chance and that even a clumsy pullback from some of intrusive military policies of the Emerald City consensus is not automatically the catastrophe that military contractors and their lobbyists might want us to believe. It’s always possible that in a couple of years, that might sound like false optimism, i.e., things aren’t all that bad, perhaps the most dangerous self-reassurance for a democracy under immediate threat.

But no one reading this book will think its author imagines Trumpism to be harmless. On the contrary, he’s making a point that Bernie Sanders supporters will recognize and applaud, that Trumpism isn’t a fluke or a singular threat: it’s an understandable and undesirable result of the failures of a neoliberal order and an excessively interventionist and hubristic foreign policy, which Clintonites and Cheneyites and Obamaites were very much part of constructing. And he also takes full account of the fact that much of what Trump claims as his accomplishments are puffery, bluff, and a large quantity of hot air.

In a Niebuhrian world haunted by Original Sin, nobody gets off the hook.

Yet Bacevich isn’t looking for some alternative utopia of easy harmony. In fact, he makes an argument that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (who advocate a 21st-century version of Madison's Federalist #10 theory of democratic polöitical conflict) would appreciate:

... the 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 or Republicans vs. Democrats or what currently passes for conservative vs. what gets labeled progressive.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”