INTRODUCTION
NOT SO INNOCENT
During the summer of 2020, as I was writing this book, nervous Americans sensed the onset of a terrifying Apocalypse. Wildfires scorching vast areas of California, Oregon, and Washington and hurricanes pummeling the Gulf Coast reinforced those terrors. Fears that events were literally taking an apocalyptic turn became explicit and widespread. Editors inserted the term itself into headlines. THE APOCALYPSE FEELS NIGH.1 THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE HAS ARRIVED.2 HOW THE APOCALYPSE BECAME THE NEW NORMAL.3 AN APOCALYPTIC AUGUST IN CALIFORNIA.4 APOCALYPSE IN CALIFORNIA—COMING TO YOU SOON.5 By implication, that you could be anyone anywhere.
Fires and floods were only the latest in a succession of punishments Americans were obliged to endure. First had come the toxic and divisive presidency of Donald Trump. Then in the spring of 2020, a deadly pandemic engulfed the nation, nearly bringing it to its knees. Trailing just steps behind came an economic collapse so severe as to elicit comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before Americans had fully absorbed these disruptions, a mass movement demanding a reckoning with the nation’s legacy of racism erupted, unleashing, in turn, a white nationalist backlash.
Rancor, pestilence, want, and fury: These are the Four Horsemen comprising our own homemade Apocalypse. Each came as a shock to the system. Each exposed weakness and rot in institutions whose integrity Americans had long taken for granted. Each caught members of the nation’s reigning power elite by surprise.
Trump’s ascent to the White House exposed gaping flaws in the American political system, his manifest contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law placing in jeopardy our democratic traditions. The coronavirus pandemic exposed gaping flaws in the prevailing concept of national security, with Americans exposed to life-threatening perils to which government authorities responded tardily and ineffectually.6 In a matter of weeks, the economic crisis it induced threw tens of millions out of work and drove millions of businesses into bankruptcy. As for the popular uprising known as Black Lives Matter, it exposed deep-seated and widespread residual opposition to genuine racial equality.
The calamities that accumulated during 2020 fostered a sense of things coming undone. The political order seemed unable to cope. Crises following one another in rapid succession tested Americans as they had not been tested for generations. Each crisis compounded the significance of the others. Taken together, they gave birth to a moment of profound and disturbing revelation.
What this revelation will ultimately signify remains to be seen. Perhaps post-Apocalypse America will experience a great revival, comparable to what occurred in the 1860s, when a radical realignment of national politics accelerated the nation’s emergence as the world’s wealthiest country, albeit only after the fiery trial of civil war. Or perhaps, as it emerges from its present trials, the United States will suffer the fate of the Third French Republic in the 1930s. Sustained political dysfunction combined with a dismally inadequate response to external danger spelled the end of France’s standing among the great powers.
The premise of this book is quite simple: Regardless of whether our self-inflicted contemporary apocalypse leads to renewal or further decline, the United States will find itself obliged to revise the premises informing America’s role in the world. Put simply, basic U.S. policy must change.
Even before COVID-19 swept the nation, taking hundreds of thousands of American lives, cumulative policy failures ought to have made it clear that a national security paradigm centered on military supremacy, global power projection, decades-old formal alliances, and wars that never seemed to end was at best obsolete, if not itself a principal source of self-inflicted wounds. The costs, approximating a trillion dollars annually, were too high.7 The outcomes, ranging from disappointing to abysmal, have come nowhere near to making good on promises issued from the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon and repeated in the echo chamber of the establishment media.
Through its own fecklessness during the 1920s and 1930s, the government of France laid the foundation for its 1940 defeat by Nazi Germany. Similarly, the fecklessness of U.S. policy during the two decades after 9/11 paved the way for the afflictions of 2020.
The terrorist attacks of September 2001 prompted Washington to double down on its commitment to military supremacy and global power projection as essential to keeping Americans safe and preserving our way of life. No alternative course received serious consideration. No debate about the prerequisites of basic national security occurred. The beating of war drums allowed no room for hesitation—or even serious reflection.
However belatedly, the Apocalypse of 2020 demands that Americans finally take stock of what post–Cold War national security policies have produced and at what cost. Nearly two decades after 9/11, we can no longer afford to postpone acknowledging our own folly. It’s time to remove the blinders. This, too, describes my book’s purpose: to identify the connecting tissue between the delusions of the recent past and the traumas that are their progeny.
Our Apocalypse didn’t come out of nowhere. It had antecedents, evident in the very way we have packaged the past—what we have chosen to remember and what to discard, what to enshrine and what to ignore.
Sadly, however, even today that failed national security paradigm remains deeply entrenched in Washington. Its persistence testifies to the influence of the military-industrial complex, the lethargy of an officer corps that clings to demonstrably flawed conceptions of warfare, and the policing of mainstream discourse to marginalize critical voices. Enabling each of these is the pronounced apathy of the American people who, apart from ritualistic gestures intended to “support the troops,” have become largely indifferent to the role this country plays in global affairs. Above all, however, a defective approach to policy survives because those charged with thinking about America’s role in the world cling to a series of illusions that derive from a conveniently selective historical memory.
Entry into the precincts where insiders formulate American statecraft comes at a price. It requires individuals to forfeit or at least to suppress any inclination to genuinely independent thought. To be accepted as a member in good standing of the American political class is to pledge allegiance to a worldview. Central to that worldview is a particular conception of history and of America’s designated role in bringing that history to its intended conclusion.
In 1776, Tom Paine wrote that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” In the centuries since, Paine’s disciples and imitators have claimed for the United States the prerogative not only of instituting new beginnings but of specifying ultimate destinations. Indeed, through its own evolution toward an ever “more perfect Union,” America itself embodies history’s final destination—or so members of the political class purport to believe.
All such claims fall under the heading of American Exceptionalism, a concept that stands in relation to basic U.S. policy as the Facebook motto “Bring the World Closer Together” does to the mission of that corporate behemoth. Such taglines—“Workers of the World, Unite!” and “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” offer other examples—serve as a source of legitimacy while avoiding any reference to power. Rather than describing actual purpose, they disguise it. Take such slogans seriously and you can get away with just about anything, as the United States has done for much of its history.
Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote a book called American Empire that took issue with the ideology of exceptionalism. As an epigraph meant to signal the book’s purpose, I chose a comment that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made on February 19, 1998, during an appearance on NBC’s Today show. “If we have to use force,” she said, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”8 Prompting this jaw-dropping assertion—–a monument to the vainglory pervading the American ruling class, both then and now—were preparations within the administration of President Bill Clinton to target Iraq with yet another round of air strikes, deemed necessary by authorities in Washington who had persuaded themselves that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to the United States.
Four days after Albright spoke, the World Islamic Front proclaimed a “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Co-authored by Osama bin Laden, then an obscure militant Islamist, that document identified the expulsion of U.S. forces from the Arabian Peninsula as a moral imperative requiring the support of Muslims worldwide.9 Here beckoned the actual future, one to which Albright and other members of the foreign policy establishment would remain steadfastly oblivious until the World Trade Center collapsed in a pile of smoke, debris, and dust. The baleful train of events that ensued, notably a series of costly wars that played directly into the hands of those same jihadists, testified to the inability of that establishment either to discern the future or even deal with the present, much less position the United States as history’s vanguard.
Nor was this deficiency confined to the top level of the political hierarchy. In claiming to “see further,” Albright was speaking the lingua franca of American statecraft. Persons of less exalted rank than secretary of state adopted a similar patois, even if in somewhat more vulgar form.
A year after my son was killed in Iraq in May 2007, I accepted an invitation to speak at a Memorial Day event in our hometown of Walpole, Massachusetts. Rather than give a speech, I read a distinctly non-celebratory poem written by a British soldier-poet during World War I. Also appearing on the program were two local officials, the state assemblyman and the state senator who at the time represented our town. Then entering its fifth year, the Iraq War had obviously not gone well. To my astonishment those two legislators, their duties not even remotely related to military affairs, each launched into a rousing presentation that offered variations on Albright’s theme: The ongoing war was a righteous one; the troops were certain to prevail; the eventual triumph of freedom and democracy was assured.
At that moment, I got an inkling of just how far the toxins of American Exceptionalism had seeped into the body politic. Soon enough I concluded that redefining the nation’s role in the world will remain all but impossible until Americans themselves abandon the conceit that the United States is history’s chosen agent and recognize that the officials who call the shots in Washington are no more able to gauge the destiny of humankind than their counterparts in Berlin or Baku or Beijing. Even at home, the shots they call all too often go astray, as illustrated by the federal government’s belated and hapless response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like citizens around the world, ordinary Americans are mostly along for the ride, awaiting the next unpleasant surprise, a point the events of 2020 surely ought to have driven home. Americans don’t make history, whatever speechifying members of the political class may claim; they suffer its torments and adapt to its demands.
In her address to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton declared that “America is great because America is good.” It would be tempting to write off Clinton’s banal and utterly predictable statement as nothing more than standard political pandering. To do so is to miss its true significance. She had, after all, played a not insignificant role in fostering the costly wars that advanced the cause of the jihadists after 9/11. As a member of the Senate, Clinton had voted in favor of President George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. As secretary of state in 2011, she had engineered an armed intervention in Libya that unleashed the forces of anarchy there. Yet in her address accepting her party’s nomination as its candidate for president, she was still intent on signaling that her credentials as a true believer in American Exceptionalism were in good order—even if doing so required considerable quibbling.
Give Donald Trump credit for this much: He did not labor under the illusion that America is great because it is good. Not long after denying Clinton her all-but-assumed election victory, he sat for an interview in which he was pressed to explain his friendly attitude toward Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. “He’s a killer,” the interviewer charged. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump responded. “You think our country’s so innocent?”
Startling, distinctly unpresidential, and for Trump never to be repeated, here was a truth long deemed inadmissible among adherents of American Exceptionalism. By professing that truth, Trump had committed heresy. It was as if the pope had charged Christ’s apostles with perpetrating a hoax on Easter Sunday.
The inverse of innocence is not guilt but moral awareness. This book uses Trump’s admission as a point of departure. Proceeding from the premise that the United States is neither innocent nor lacking in alternatives, the chapters that follow explore how a morally aware nation facing numberless challenges at home and abroad, but still retaining considerable power and influence, could adapt itself to a rapidly changing global order.
Doing this requires first unearthing the substructure of existing U.S. policy, the seldom-examined assumptions and taken-for-granted practices that have sustained the national security apparatus and shielded its myriad activities from anything more than perfunctory oversight. So in the chapters that follow, I do not concern myself with whether to reduce nuclear arsenals, curb presidential war powers, cancel particularly pricy weapons programs, reconstitute the tradition of the citizen-soldier, or cut the Pentagon budget by some specified amount. Rather, my aim is to shed light on why such worthy proposals never receive more than cursory consideration within the closed circles where policy is debated and decisions made. In other words, I focus on underlying factors that perpetuate a patently defective status quo and prevent much-needed reform.
On that score, After the Apocalypse may be read as a reflection on manufactured memory. Whether related to family, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or nation, the past is a human construct. It is not fixed but malleable, not permanent but subject to perpetual reexamination and revision. The value of history correlates with purposefulness. Changing times render obsolete the past that we know and require the discovery of a “new” history better suited to the needs of the moment.
The global order today is not what it was when I was born in 1947. Yet in Washington, basic assumptions regarding America’s anointed role in history still derive from that moment of transition between epic triumph just concluded and protracted struggle only just begun. If anything, the subsequent course of the Cold War deepened World War II’s hold on the American collective consciousness. Even the myriad disappointments and miscalculations of the post–Cold War decades have left the historical consciousness of 1947 remarkably intact.
Americans have much to learn from the accursed events of 2020. Not least of all they should come to understand how the history that they blindly accept as true has lost its relevance. Repositioning the United States in a radically changed global order will require a radically revised understanding of our own past. In this context, historical revisionism is not an academic exercise but a precondition of sound statecraft.
So After the Apocalypse examines the manufactured memory embedded in prevailing conceptions of American global leadership; the obsolescence of the “West” as a geopolitical construct; the distortions induced by “special relationships”; the consequences of preferring familiar or bureaucratically convenient threats to those that are actually pressing; the evolving significance of race in U.S. national security policy; the complexities of imperial mismanagement when denying the empire’s very existence; and the policy implications of changes in the nation’s collective consciousness now reaching full flood. The book closes by spelling out how an appreciation of such factors could translate into an arguably more sensible and affordable approach to national security.
Nearly twenty years have passed since the shock, horror, and humiliation of 9/11. The events of that single day ought to have discredited once and for all post–Cold War claims that God or Providence had summoned the United States to determine the future of humankind. Policy elites insisted otherwise. Intent on affirming America’s place as the engine of history, they embarked upon a course of action that laid the basis for the convulsions of 2020, with ill-advised adventurism abroad allowing vulnerabilities at home to fester unattended. During that interval reckless irresponsibility defined the principal theme of American statecraft.
An alternative course remains possible, one based on realism, prudence, scrupulous self-understanding, and an appreciation of the world as it is rather than as policy elites might wish it to be. The monumental arrogance and ignorance prevailing in the inner circles of power have led Americans to misapprehend their place in the global order. After the Apocalypse identifies habits and delusions—some dating back decades—that account for our present confusion. In that sense, although in some respects a policy book, it is also a meditation on history and its misuse.
In order to conceive of and implement a responsible approach to statecraft, Americans will have to think anew. The need for them to do so could hardly be more urgent.
Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Bacevich
