Trying to make sense of the politics of US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

Andrew J. Bacevich and Adam Weinstein look at the Afghanistan withdrawal discussion in Trump demands Afghan withdrawal and Washington panics. But it’s time to leave, now. Responsible Statecraft 11/17/2020. They give a grim summary of what the US has achieved in 19 years of warfare there:

The legacy of the war in Afghanistan for Americans and for Afghans is somewhere between dismal and horrifying. Over 2,300 U.S. military personnel and at least 65,000 Afghan soldiers and police have been killed. As of 2019, the death toll for Afghan civilians was approximately 43,074 and 2020 is on track to add 3,000 more. From 2001 to 2015, there were 833 major limb amputations of U.S. military personnel serving in Afghanistan. Suicide rates among modern veterans is nothing short of a public health emergency. Despite this massive sacrifice, around 40 percent of Afghan territory remains contested or completely under Taliban control. The 2014 presidential election was contested and required U.S.-led and U.N.-backed mediation that only put a temporary bandage on a deeply dysfunctional system. The 2019 elections again required a political settlement negotiated behind closed doors. Corruption is so endemic in the Afghan government that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found $19 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in the last decade alone. Afghanistan remains the world’s number one producer of opium which is turned into heroin. [my emphasis]

And they take note of the defects of the proposed withdrawal:

Granted, the Trump administration’s withdrawal plan is less a plan than an aspiration. The logistical challenges in pulling out the remainder of U.S. forces by year’s end are daunting. But the only alternative offered by critics is to indefinitely hold our troops hostage to the outcome of a “peace agreement” that Washington cannot control. This replaces the unattainable objective of militarily defeating the Taliban with an equally evasive goal of a perfect peace deal in a country with complex ethnic, religious, and tribal cleavages. It is a prescription for remaining in Afghanistan forever. [my emphasis]

And they call attention to the result of one of the worst foreign policy decisions of the Obama-Biden Administration, the "surge" in Afghanistan:

[T]he Obama administration’s three-year long surge which saw as many as 100,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan, leaving 1,044 killed in action, 13,622 injured, and 8,693 Afghan civilians killed in the crossfire. A web of forward operating bases and combat outposts created the illusion of coalition control over large swaths of Afghanistan, but as soon the surge ended, the Taliban took back these gains. The obvious question is: When is enough, enough? [my emphasis]

Their bottom-line opinion on Trump withdrawing troops from Afghanistan before the Secret Service have to escort him out of the Oval Office? "If Trump succeeds in ending this particular 'endless war,' he will be doing Biden a favor." 

Sam Seder and the crew of The Majority Report react to a painfully superficial CNN discussion of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal issue in CNN Panelists Break Brains Trying To Figure Out Trump Troop Withdrawal 11/19/2020:

It's worth keeping in mind the Pakistan-India factor in this. Pakistan and India are rivals and both have nuclear weapons. The biggest point of dispute is the Muslim-majority Indian state of Kashmir, which Pakistan also claims. As long as the two countries disagree on the status of Kashmir, Pakistan wants to hold Pakistan as an ally to provide strategic depth in a potential conflict with India. The Taliban is viewed by Pakistan as an ally, the Afghan government as pro-India. One of many political complications in Afghanistan.

It was a huge missed in the immediate post-9/11 era that the US didn't undertake a major diplomatic push to get a major agreement between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. It would have been very helpful for the image of the US and the West more generally in the Muslim world. And it would have made stability in Afghanistan a more likely prospect.

But Bush and Cheney decided to invade Iraq instead. With results that are well known.

Quincy Institute panel what the military's role might be in a post-Presidential-election transition crisis

Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft held a panel discussion yesterday on the current but eerie topic of The US military’s role in a contested election 10/28/2020. The full video is available at the link, and also on Facebook. The three panelists were Bacevich, Amber Smith, and Mark Hertling. The link has brief bios on them. 

There also a Facebook link: https://fb.watch/1pwVmwn9wk/

On the sensational-sounding possibility of some kind of military coup happening in the wake of a contested election, they all agreed that the possibility was highly unlikely. They all agreed that an August Open Letter by John Nagl and Paul Yingling on the topic (“. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic”: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley Defense One 08/11/2020) that attracted quite a bit of attention was "irresponsible" on the part of Nagl and Yingling. Or, as Bacevich put it, "utterly irresponsible and stupid." But they did discuss the hypothetical of Trump losing the election and just refusing to leave office.

Bacevich put it this way, saying that if Biden wins the election he becomes President on January 20. "If Donald Trump decides he wants to continue to reside in the White House, who cares?" Biden would be President and that would be a minor problem to deal with. Smith said that in that case, which all three agreed was unlikely, it would be the responsibility of law enforcement and not the military to deal with it. Hertling suggested that if Trump refuses to leave the Oval Office, they should just turn out the lights, don't bring in any food, and wait for him to get tired and leave.

They also discussed that in case there was actual serious civil violence in some places after the election that neither local police or the state National Guard could adequately handle, the President does have the authority to declare martial law in an area or to invoke the Insurrection Act. Hertling commented that both laws are "squishy," meaning unclear in some ways. But all three panelists agreed on the obvious that neither should be used to suppress protests. Hertling said it would be justified only in cases of "extreme violence". That means, something a lot more serious than someone smashing store windows or setting a fire in a trash can.

Hertling also commented more generally that he is "absolutely opposed" to the increased militarization of the police.

And he stressed that state National Guards are normally trained in handling civil disturbances, crowd control, and so forth. But the military is trained to handle such matters primarily in a hostile foreign environment. And he noted specifically that it means that soldiers sent into American cities to handle such situations are more likely to start shooting earlier.

Bacevich expressed his opinion that it is a bad development for retired senior military officers - I assume he has mainly generals in mind though he didn't specify - to make partisan political endorsements, although as he noted, there is no law against it nor should there be. But his worry is that such endorsements contribute to normalizing the notion that it is legitimate for the military to be a partisan political body. Hertling explained why he disagreed, while Smith just complained about former military officers criticizing Trump.

I recall that Biden at one point responded to a question about Trump refusing to leave office in a somewhat offhand way by saying if that were to happen the military would just come take him out of there. In the moment, it conveyed the point that if he were elected President, he wouldn't stand for such a ploy by Trump. I was relieved to hear that at the time, because it showed more of a willingness to fight against Republican misconduct that Democrats are often willing to.

But technically speaking, that was a Biden "gaffe". Because it would be a law-enforcement responsibility, presumably the Secret Service, to take appropriate action to remove Trump if he decides to illegally trespass in the White House after a new President is inaugurated.

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

The fact that the US is confronted with the kind of serious problems that Bacevich describes does not mean that the country will deal with them in a constructive way. His own description of the nature of Trump’s electoral coalition illustrates that.

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

This book is reminiscent in some ways of one that appeared at the beginning of Bacevich’s Emerald City period, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment (1992). He identified some of the large challenges and dangers for American democracy that he saw then. Including the central role that the fear of international Communism had played in the maintenance of the US’ massive military establishment:

The fear of Communism was also responsible for three major developments in the military power as that existed in the political economy of contentment. The first, supplementing and extending what was an already large expenditure, was a further enormous increase in military and defense spending as the constituency of contentment gained full power in the 1980s; this was the Reagan arms buildup. The second was the emergence of a largely autonomous military establishment standing above and apart from democratic control. The third was a series of foreign ventures designed ostensibly to arrest the threatening spread of Communism but with the further purpose of justifying the expanding role of the military establishment by providing a presumed enemy. [my emphasis]

As Bacevich himself has long been explaining, the internal political imperatives connected to the military-industrial complex create strong incentives for an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. And if one enemy (the “Communist bloc”) goes away, there is not just vague psychological incentives but very material lobbies with ample funding that will be eager to create a new one. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has recently come under scrutiny for its years-long advocacy for war against Iran. (James Carden, “Will This Billionaire-Funded Think Tank Get Its War With Iran? The Nation 01/08/2020; Nick Wadhams, U.S. Official Central to Hawkish Iran Policies Departs NSC Bloomberg Politics 01/04/2020; John Judis, The Little Think Tank That Could Slate 08/10/2015)

Galbraith concluded his book on an explicit note of “sadness”:

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

A key point of Galbraith’s notion of the contented majority is the low voter participation in the US. The 2018 midterm election produced a striking increase in voter participation which produced a distinct shift to the Democrats and away from Trumpism. As Galbraith emphasized, the wealthy and more affluent Americans have high voting participation rates, while the participation rate of the less affluent is distinctly lower. That means the portion of the electorate that votes is considerably financially better off, whiter, older, and more conservative than the American people, the potential electorate. The Republicans are acutely aware of this fact and want to preserve that condition. Thus, they have aggressively pursued segregationist voter-suppression measures against black and Latino voters, measures that also often affect poor whites, as well.

This is one of the fundamental challenges for actually fixing the serious problems that Bacevich describes. Another is the extreme effect of private money in political campaigns, already a serious problem in 1992, far more extreme now in the Citizens United era. Those are both serious limitations on American democracy.

And with the vast increase of Executive power that Bacevich identifies as one of the four basic markers of the Emerald City era, the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College system has become a bigger problem than ever now that, as he says, the Presidency is “overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”

Moving away from neoliberal globalism is as necessary as it is difficult. This in itself requires not only confronting oligarchical power, but reducing it. And that inevitably involves not just limiting but reversing the current staggering concentrations of wealth and income. Rightwing populism will not fix those problems. But far-right populists like Steve Bannon do mobilize around those issues. The model “illiberal democracy” in the European Union right now is Viktor Orbáns Hungary that combines oligarchic rule with a certain level of social support for the less affluent with xenophobic nationalism and unaccountable oligarchic rule. In the United States, the progressive left offers a meaningful counter-appeal to that particular anti-neoliberal perspective. The corporate Democrats embrace corporate-deregulation neoliberalism. Any successful movement to build constructive political alternatives to neoliberal globalism will also have to be backed by a much-expanded labor union movement.

Moving away from militarized global dominance by the US will require a political movement that demands drastic changes in the current interventionist foreign policy, most obviously an end to the Forever War approach currently being pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations, including Trump’s. It will also require a major reduction in the US military budget and a major de-mystifying of the military in American political culture. As Bacevich points out in this book and elsewhere, the current idolatry of the military coincides with an unprecedented isolation of those actually bearing the burden of military service from the large majority of the American people. This situation needs to be countered either by military proscription (the draft) or by providing other concrete incentives to make military service more attractive to “middle class” families. But only a draft is likely to ensure that people like Trumps and Bushes would share even remotely equally in military service.

It’s less clear how the situation Bacevich problematizes as “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms” can be resolved in any short term. White racism is real, it’s damaging, and it’s wrong. It’s been an effective mobilizing tool for conservative and reactionary politics for the entire history of the Republic. Bacevich notes how not only did Obama’s election did not end racism against African-Americans, it was met by a militant racist counter-display. And gruesome elements of white racism like the often wanton murder of unarmed black men by white cops and the grossly disproportionate effect of law like prohibiting marijuana usage have had on African-American men.

Women’s rights have not yet been fully realized and the political assault on the core right to abortion – a right that is distinctly a woman’s right – is intense. Antiabortionists have gone a long way in many parts of the country to seriously restrict women’s access to abortion.

And as we’ve seen during the Trump Administration particularly, many Republicans are willing to literally howl in approval at Trump’s Nuremberg rallies for hostility to Latinos and immigrants, including the sadistic kidnapping of children from their parents and caging them in brutal and even life-threatening conditions.

And this is where a general appeal that “the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning” misses a critical element of the current situation. In the “cultural wars”, the current polarization is asymmetrical. Black people aren’t demanding that unarmed, young white men be murdered by rogue cops proportional to how young black men are murdered. Democrats may be overly fond of partisan gerrymandering, but they aren’t aggressively purging white voters from voter rolls. Women’s rights advocates aren’t demanding that women who don’t won’t abortions have abortions forced on them. Latinos aren’t demanding that native-born white children be kidnapped from their parents, caged, and occasionally allowed to die on the concrete floors of their cages. And there are no Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden rallies where angry mobs howl for such things.

Bacevich notes, not entirely inaccurately that Hillary Clinton in 2016 “conveyed a distinct cluelessness, as illustrated by her infamous dismissal of Trump's supporters as ‘deplorables’.” But the truth is that people who enjoy the thought of immigrant children being kidnapped from their parents are deplorable. People who chant “blue lives matter” as approval of extralegal murders of unarmed black people are deplorable. Christian fundamentalists who want to not only ban abortion but also jail or execute abortion doctors and women who do get abortions – or even jail women who have miscarriages! – they are deplorable. And for a non-trivial number of those taking such positions, their prejudices and hatreds are generally more important to them than even the economic well-being of themselves or their children. White nationalist identity politics provides some real psychological rewards. And people who are strongly authoritarian are always going to be attracted to characters like Trump who they can image as a Stern Heroic Leader.

The point here is not that people firmly attached to such positions are incorrigible for life on such matters. Some of them are. Others are actually capable of having a real dialogue and altering their viewpoints and viewing their own experience in a more complex way. For the hardcores, as David Neiwert writes in his book Alt-America (2017), “There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse.”

In other words, white racism, sexism, and xenophobia have to be challenged and defeated for democracy and social equality to flourish. And in the current situation of asymmetric polarization, no mutual live-and-let-live attitude between white racists and minorities, between fanatical antiabortionists and women, between rabid xenophobes and decent people. Which means that anti-discrimination laws and regulations as well as special protections for electoral rights will be absolute necessary for the foreseeable future. Asymmetric polarization is real, and it can’t be ignored or wished away.

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”

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”

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

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. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

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”

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 1 of 4)

"When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in." - G.W.F. Hegel, "Preface," Philosophy of Right

Andrew Bacevich can safely be called a fundamental critic of American politics and foreign policy. He’s also a historian and currently the head of the Quincy Institute, which promotes a realist and peace-oriented US foreign policy. His latest book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020) continues the tradition of sharp and critical analysis he is known for providing.

The Age of Illusions is an attempt to articulate a coherent metanarrative for US politics and foreign policy since 1989. Such metanarratives are very difficult to construct in a meaningful and substantive way. But Bacevich succeeds in articulating one that provides a useful point of reference to think about how well major events like wars and Presidential elections may or may not conform to it. In brief, he argues that the kind of free-market economic neoliberalism combined with a very interventionist foreign policy and a sometimes dubious vulgar-materialist/libertarian cultural ethos have worked out badly for most Americans and that current American politics is a symptomatic manifestation of that failure.

Bacevich is very impressed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s brand of Christian foreign policy realism. He even brought out a new edition of Niebuhr’s 1952 The Irony of American History. Bacevich does not appear to be particularly fond of Hegelian thought. He criticizes Francis Fukuyama’s (in)famous End of History notion, which was at least a Hegel-tinted concept. But for a Niebuhrian like Bacevich, indulging in the kind of Enlightenment faith in progress in which Hegel shared would always something to be regarded with caution. Fukuyama in his famous essay took the (approaching) end of the Cold War as the “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” and “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” (The End of History? The National Interest Summer 1989)

For someone with an Augustinian regard for fallen human nature, Fukuyama’s vision sounds like a serious case of hubris, which another major strand of Western thought regards as inevitably producing future falls. Heraclitus is quoted as saying that hubris needs putting out even more than a house on fire. (The sourcing of Heraclitus quotes is always a bit dicey, but it’s a notion credited to him.) Bacevich finds the value of Fukuyama’s essay in that it “belongs in the category of writings that capture something essential about the moment in which they appear, while simultaneously shaping expectations about what lies ahead.”

Bacevich’s narrative of the post-1989 world and particularly the US role in it is a story of hubris yielding its tragic and fiery results. And while he may be wary of Hegelianism, he has a strong appreciation for contradictions as a normal part of history and politics.

From Boone City to the Emerald City

He employs two literary/cinematic cities as major metaphors for two American eras: Boone City from the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for the Cold War, which in his narrative basically refers to 1945-89 ; and, the Emerald City of The Wizard of Oz for the 1989-2016 period.

“In the Middle America represented by Boone City, freedom isn't gaudy. It does not put on airs or bridle against received norms. Freedom imparts direction and confers purpose,” he writes. It was a vision that emphasized a classic form of negative liberty. “’Freedom from’ takes precedence over ‘freedom to.’ Almost of necessity, access to this unpretentious Eden is therefore limited, with women allowed only auxiliary membership and people of color all but excluded.” An optimistic version of freedom for white men, in other words, with extreme inequality for women and especially for African-Americans, the largest minority in the world of “Boone City”.

Bacevich is mostly focused on the foreign policy of the two eras. He reviews the establishment of the Cold War foreign policy that largely remained focused on the idea of “containment” of the Soviet Union, although a more militarized and ideological version of it than envisioned by its originator, George Kennan. As Bacevich observes, “Kennan himself, appalled by the nuclear arms race and U.S. interventionism in places like Vietnam, was to disavow his own handiwork.” We might add that before his passing in 2005, Kennan was also calling attention to the enormity of the environmental problems the world was (and still is!) facing.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the rise, flourishing, and failure of the subsequent post-Cold War paradigm, the “Emerald City”. The new concept that emerged from “1989” he frames this way, “The United States was exiting a very dark and dangerous forest. The way ahead glittered and gleamed. And the road leading to a global Emerald City appeared smooth, well paved, and clearly marked.”

He identifies four key markers for the Emerald City era as: globalization, more particularly the neoliberal, free-market, Washington Consensus, corporate-deregulation-“trade”-treaty version celebrated in caricatured fashion by Thomas Friedman; the global dominance of the US in which America would defend its position of the overwhelmingly dominant hyperpower of the world against the rise of any possible “peer competitor”, as the foreign policy jargon described it, a condition Bacevich also describes as militarized global leadership by the US; a significant expansion of personal, private freedom in which “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms”; and, a continuing expansion and exaltation of Presidential power in which If anything, “the presidency became yet bigger and grander, overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”

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”

Andrew Bacevich on the failure of US policy in the Middle East

Andrew Bacevich reminds us of the chain of events he related in his America's War for the Greater Middle East (2016) in a current essay, Trump’s Suleimani Strike is More of the Same Old Losing U.S. Game Plan in the Mideast Quincy Institute 01/04/2020:

The purported objective of the [US strategic] game [in the Middle East], which dates to the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine way back in 1979, is this: the use or threatened use of U.S. military might to impose order on the Persian Gulf and its environs. Ideally, that order would include respect for the values that Americans profess to cherish, among them democracy and regard for human rights. Minimally, it would permit the free flow of gulf oil to nations that rely on it to fuel their economies (our own not among them, given recent increases in U.S. domestic oil and gas production).

Yet since 9/11, U.S. military exertions in the region have destroyed what little order once existed there. In place of order, today there is anarchy: civil wars, failed states and terrorist organizations that did not even exist when the American “Global War on Terrorism” commenced nearly two decades ago. Iraq itself, today host to pro-Iranian militias and targeted by U.S. airstrikes, embodies that failure nearly 17 years after its supposed liberation. [my emphasis]

Commenting on Bacevich's 2016 book, Marwan Bishara wrote (America's war for the Greater Middle East Aljazeera 08/04/2016):

For Bacevich, US wars in the Middle East are driven not only by oil and the military industrial complex. He sees a collective illusion or naivete leading to more of the same blunders and mistakes.

And he shows how despite the proven failures, US leaders and strategists have continued to use the same Washington playbook.

Among others, ignoring the simple lesson that starting wars is nothing like ending them, and what Washington portrayed as military victories or "missions accomplished" have consistently mutated into different sorts of prolonged conflicts.

The victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan later revealed itself as a major loss. For Washington, Soviet withdrawal meant that the US won, but that was a short-sighted reaction. The first Afghan war paved the way towards a second one in 2001.

Bishara also takes note of the wide-reaching nature of Bacevich's criticism of US policies in that region:

Bacevich doesn't spare any of the politicians or generals involved in making the case for war. From Carter to Barack Obama through Ronald Reagan, Clinton and both the George Bushes, and from the performances of former generals Wesley Clark to David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and numerous others, Bacevich shows how the US political and military leadership has consistently overpromised and under-delivered. [my emphasis]

Here is Bacevich doing a presentation on his 2016 book, Andrew Bacevich ─ America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History 04/27/2016:

"Restrainer" foreign policy and understanding Russia's current role

The Quincy Institute (The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, QI) just launched its website. The invaluable Andrew Bacevich is the President. QI focuses on US foreign policy and describes its vision as a "world where peace is the norm and war the exception."

QI lists its principles as follows:

• Responsible statecraft serves the public interest.
• Responsible statecraft engages the world.
• Responsible statecraft builds a peaceful world.
• Responsible statecraft abhors war.
• Responsible statecraft is democratic.

At the end of 1992, these would have sounded like boilerplate foreign policy talking points, i.e., they would have sounded obvious. The fact that they take on a radical-sounding edge in 2019 - "responsible statecraft abhors war" - is a sign of how badly US foreign policy in the "unipolar moment" after 1989 has gone of the tracks for responsibility and pragmatic realism.

The website features an article by über-Realist Stephen Walt, A Manifesto For Restrainers 12/04/2019. In line with the QI principles listed above, Walt gives his own set of guidelines for a US foreign policy that is actively, constructively engaged with the world but also shows sensible restraint, in particular far more restraint in the use of military force.

I don't know if the label "Restrainers" will catch on. But I hope the policy orientation does.

Walt reminds us the extent to which the American End-of-History foreign policy post-1989 has involved military engagement:

The United States keeps taking on new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely debates their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more countries around the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these states are hard to defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and sometimes act in ways that damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less visible military activities in dozens of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy. Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the slightest reduction in America’s global presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having allowed itself to become overextended, the United States ends up fighting endless wars in places with no strategic value in order to convince allies and adversaries that it will still fight in places of greater importance. [my emphasis]

For those familiar with Walt's analyses, one can see echoes there of his critical evaluation of US relations with Israel (he co-authored the 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer; their 2006 working of the same title is online here) and his advocacy after the fall of the USSR for rethinking and replacing NATO. He warned, as did other realists including the late George Kennan, about the risks in expanding the membership of NATO further east.

Walt's broad view of foreign policy emphasizes that China is the most important rising power in the world and that US policy should focus on doing what it can to manage that process peacefully. "It should focus on commitments and missions that can command strong support from the American people - such as helping to ensure that a rising China does not dominate Asia - and eschew obligations that do not make America more secure."

This orientation is not consistent with the current fixation by much of the US foreign policy establishment on Russia, which is often discussed as though it's still a power with the strength of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Donald Trump's corrupt connections with Vladimir Putin's authoritarian oligarchic regime has made the Democratic Party talk about Russia as though it is a far more powerful adversary that it actually is. But Trump's sloppy management of foreign policy combined with his deferral to Putin's priorities in some areas does not mean that he's pursuing a constructive peace policy, as some antiwar leftists seem to have convinced themselves.

For one thing, to have a peaceful policy, an Administration needs to have a foreign policy. Trump's version consists largely of bluster, efforts to benefit the family business, and stumbling mistakes. He's expanded the military budget for no good reason and abandoned not only the US commitment to international cooperation on climate change, he's also tossed out nuclear arms control as any kind of serious priority. And his pursuit of a coup in Venezuela and his Administration's embrace of the coup regime in Bolivia are not signs of a peace-oriented foreign policy.

Walt's "restrainer" outlook does coincide with Trump's stumbling rhetoric around NATO, though Walt certainly doesn't endorse Trump's ridiculous claim that NATO partners aren't paying their "dues".

But he does allude to the ways NATO needs to change:

Restrainers believe allies will pull their weight only when they no longer see Uncle Sam as their first line of defense. Because NATO’s European members are significantly more populous and prosperous than Russia, they should assume primary responsibility for their own defense. Furthermore, the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan, curtail spending on counter-terrorism operations abroad, and let the contending countries in the Middle East balance each other. It should focus most of its military efforts on making sure that China does not achieve a dominant position in Asia, while insisting that its Asian partners pull their weight as well. Above all, the United States should not do more to protect allies than they are willing to do themselves. [my emphasis]

This implies some pretty serious changes in US policy: a more realistic view of Russia's power and world status, a lower US priority on dominating the Middle East, a seriously revised relationship with Israel, and almost certainly a significant adjustment if not complete reorganization of NATO, and the necessity for a common European foreign and military policy.

And always present is the "Spy vs. spy" element. Even in the best of times, intelligence is a shadow side of relations between countries that always has some potential to sidetrack relations, while intelligence cooperation can also strengthen relations. But because so much of that work has to be kept secret, it is especially difficult for the general public to follow or understand issues and events involving intelligence operations. And given Trump's entanglement with Russia along with Russia's use of propaganda operations to partially compensate for its economic and military limitations, developing a more constructive relationship with Russia will be a complicated political challenge domestically.

Tom McTague writes about Britain’s Secret War With Russia (Also in Defense One 12/04/2019), with a kind of narrative that is engaging but also easier to incorporate into a Cold War spy movie framework than into a nuanced foreign policy understanding of a complex set of relationships with Russia. He writes about an Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
lab in Switzerland:

Over the course of a few months in 2018, however, this gentle existence was upended, as the lab became caught in a cold war between Russia on one side and the United Kingdom and the West on the other, fought in public and in the shadows, online and in person, occasionally flashing hot in deadly fashion. From the attempted assassination of a double agent in a sleepy English city to the expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from Western capitals, this fight would grow and morph, drawing in a chemical-weapons attack in Syria and rolling scandals about Russian sports doping.

Through it all, Russia and Britain went toe-to-toe in an international intelligence and PR battle, one in which each landed blows, exposing fissures in their respective systems and societies. Yet, as NATO leaders meet in London this week to discuss the future of the military alliance 70 years after its founding, other lessons emerge, with implications for the wider contest between Russia and the West, which are vying for influence, respect, security, and raw geopolitical power. [my emphasis]

Let's note that the "blows" exchanged after the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal were (so far as we know) metaphorical blows on the level of diplomatic expulsions and information operations. McTague elaborates in good Cold War fashion:

Whereas NATO was founded to unite the Western world against the threat of conventional military aggression by the Soviet Union, eventually contributing to the Communist bloc’s demise, the alliance is today confronted with a recalcitrant Russia that seeks to leverage propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion and discontent, and that exhibits a willingness to use its traditional military force and intelligence agencies to expand its influence. It is a Moscow that is able to project disproportionate power — despite being dwarfed in economic size and resources by even mid-tier Western countries — thanks to a web of international influence, aggression, tactical cunning, and criminality. [my emphasis]

That "despite being dwarfed in economic size and resources by even mid-tier Western countries" is an extremely important qualifier that too often gets swallowed up, as McTague continues immediately:

At the same time, NATO and its members are divided, distracted, and shorn of a coherent strategy to deal with Russia’s efforts. The grouping’s superpower, the United States, is led by a president whose commitment to the alliance’s underlying principle of collective defense is in doubt; its other significant members are consumed by domestic strife (Britain), questioning NATO’s strategic future (France), or lack the military might and political will to fill the gap (Germany). And faced with a new array of threats from Russia, the alliance has more than once been caught unawares, at times thanks to its own unforced errors but also in no small part due to a lack of long-term vision to do anything other than de-escalate tensions. Despite Russia deploying a chemical weapon on the streets of a NATO member (also Britain), the country’s international freeze is already beginning to thaw, its economy is growing, and its leadership, on the face of it at least, remains secure. It has successfully expanded its influence in the Middle East and has secured its illegal land grab in Crimea. [my emphasis]

Calls to action are appealing in politics. And the US national security establishment generally shows a bias toward activism, which far too often translates into calls for military action. And we see that reflected in the passages quoted. Instead of the "new array of threats" invoked, the remainder of the article is devoted to discussing the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Britain, an action credibly attributed to Putin's government. Of course, countries have to react to incidents like this, and they do. McTague gives us an interesting description of strategies Russia used in response to being publicly accused of the action.

But whether or not the Spkripal assassination attempt can be meaningfully described as "deploying a chemical weapon on the streets of a NATO member," the Cold War framing he gives the article presents Russia as a super-efficient, hostile, and expansionist power presenting the NATO countries with a pressing military threat while the latter are floundering in helpless disarray, with a flourishing economy, a secure regime, and a vast web of international influence.

We could also state the situation he describes in a different way: Russia engages in information operations in various countries with some degree of success, though the effects are difficult to measure, but the countries of the NATO alliance have been coping with similar disinformation campaigns while conducting their own. Western governments have plenty of experience in dealig with them, even though Twitter and Facebook haven't always been around as media platforms.

Russia's seemingly intensive use of information operations results in no small part from their need for asymmetric methods in dealing with more powerful countries and the NATO alliance. Russia is to a significant extent a petrostate, and the five-year slump in oil prices have significantly burdened its economy. After decades of deepening involvement by the US in the Middle East, an involvement that has produced massive disasters and shown the limits of US influence there, Russia is engaging in a similar effort, but there is no real sign that Russia can count on it benefitting them any more than it has the US in the last two decades.

Meanwhile, it has occupied and annexed Crimea and is supporting separatist movements elsewhere in Ukraine, including by limited direct military intervention, giving it significant burdens in the need to defend Crimea, while Ukraine has been successfully countering the Russian military pressure with Western assistance. Since Cold Warriors have been bragging for decades how Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan were a major blow to the USSR's continuing existence, there seems to be reason to think that those involvements are more a problem for Russia than some kind of magnification of its power. But at least if Putin's government is reasonably secure for the time being, that offers real opportunities to reach mutually beneficially arrangements with Russia on a broad spectrum of issues.

Hopefully, the "rstrainer" view will increase greatly in the post-Trump era with the result that sensible caution and prudent restraint will play a larger role than it has since the End of History.

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