Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [59]
It was a great paradox. On the one hand, triumphalists celebrated the end of the Cold War as an achievement of profound significance. On the other hand, those who celebrated this victory were quick to caution against entertaining the notion that Americans could afford to rest on their laurels. The Promised Land still beckoned just yonder. Now more than ever it became essential to protect Americans from thinking that the best way to avoid wars was to stay out of them.
To illustrate this point, consider the testimony of Madeleine Albright. During the brief interval between the Cold War and the global war on terror, Albright cut a wide swath. Serving successively as UN ambassador and then as secretary of state, the first woman ever to hold the latter post, she did much to advance the cause of gender equality in public life. That said, her substantive contributions to diplomacy were exceedingly thin. Unlike, say, George C. Marshall, she launched no major policy initiatives that outlived her tenure. Unlike Kissinger, she did not engineer the reordering of great-power relationships. There is today no distinctive Albright Doctrine or Albright Plan or Albright Principle that animates or even influences U.S. policy.
Yet historians of American statecraft will surely grant Albright a prominent place, less for anything she did than for things she said. During her years in the spotlight, Albright held forth as the preeminent booster and exponent of a recalibrated Washington consensus. Although never especially eloquent and possessing little personal charisma, she had a gift for rhetorical repackaging. More effectively than any of the men who dominated the world in which she worked, she described, justified, and celebrated a version of American global assertiveness said to account for the new conditions created by the passing of the Cold War.
In making these points, Albright was expressing conclusions widely shared by her male colleagues and competitors. Yet she spoke with a clarity, directness, and transparent sincerity that few of them could muster. She really believed what she was saying.
Four of Albright’s utterances serve to illustrate the post–Cold War modifications made to the Washington rules that preserved their essence.
In the first, Albright offered her synopsis of contemporary history: “My mind-set is Munich. Most of my generation’s is Vietnam.”39 Albright flattered herself in fancying that her views differed from those of others in her circle. In truth, at a moment when Washington had drunk deeply from the waters of triumphalism, Albright’s comment neatly summarized views common to that circle: Remembering 1938 qualified as a categorical imperative; brooding over 1965 was counterproductive and would get you nowhere.
By reducing history to an either/or proposition—take your choice: Munich or Vietnam—Albright foreclosed the possibility of including other events as reference points for policy. This, too, fit nicely with the preferences of the foreign policy establishment. To grant the overthrow of Mossadegh or the Bay of Pigs, not to mention cataclysms like World War I or Hiroshima, equal standing with Munich as a source of policy relevance would have meant raising murky questions about the efficacy and moral legitimacy of American preeminence that Albright and other advocates of the Washington consensus refused even to consider. Better to keep things simple: good vs. evil; courage vs. cowardice; resistance vs. appeasement; freedom vs. slavery; survival vs. holocaust.
In her second remark, Albright described the status to which the United States had risen as a consequence of its participation in the immense historical drama centered on Munich. In this case, the immediate context was one of the recurring dustups with Saddam Hussein that punctuated the decade after Operation Desert Storm. “If we have to use force,” Albright declared with regard to the possibility of renewed air attacks against Iraq, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see