Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [61]
In her farewell to the State Department on January 19, 2001, Secretary Albright likened the events of her tenure to those recounted in Present at the Creation, the famous memoir of postwar diplomacy written by Dean Acheson, who had headed the State Department under President Truman. “Together, you and I have been present at the transition from one era to the next,” she asserted. With her colleagues she had shouldered the “responsibility to build or adapt institutions that would enhance security, prosperity and freedom for generations to come.” This work was certain to continue under her successor. In the American system, she said, “the parties and the personalities may change, but the principles that guide our republic do not.”44
Her comments contained a kernel of truth. In the midst of an ostensibly momentous global transformation, Albright had ensured the preservation of the principles guiding American statecraft, successfully insulating them from serious scrutiny. That accomplished, she now handed off to a new administration the responsibility for applying those principles.
As events soon demonstrated, leading members of this new administration shared Albright’s perspective, to a far greater extent than she or they would readily admit. George W. Bush and his chief lieutenants believed with her that the lessons of Munich took precedence over any putative lessons of Vietnam: Evildoers were not to be tolerated. They concurred in her conviction that the United States is uniquely equipped to peer into the future and discern history’s purpose (which, it transpired, centered on the elimination of tyranny and even evil itself). When it came to using force, they too bridled at constraints and were even more eager than she had been to put American military power to work. Not least of all, like her, President Bush and those around him subscribed to a moral calculus in which the ends justified the means. Whatever mayhem might occur as a result of U.S. actions, good intentions ensured that American innocence remained unstained and uncompromised.
Unlike Dean Acheson, who not only witnessed but contributed directly to a period of considerable creativity, Albright had created nothing. Her contributions were those of a midwife. Yet viewed from that perspective, her achievement qualifies as noteworthy: She had delivered the Washington rules, fully refurbished, into a new millennium.
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RECONSTITUTING THE TRINITY
By the 1980s, the American penchant for intervention was already showing signs of robust recovery, with defenders of the Washington consensus enjoying similar success in reshaping the instruments of global power projection and fending off calls to scale back the U.S. global presence. By the end of the century, the whole sacred trinity was back, bigger and better than ever.
The Soviet Union had done its best to help, as had adherents of radical Islam. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, along with Soviet military and economic assistance to leftist revolutionaries in Central America during the 1980s, fostered the impression, fueled by hawks in the United States, that the Red Menace was reaching new heights. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran, also in 1979, leading to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the humiliating capture of American diplomats by radical Iranian students, supposedly demonstrated the consequences of giving the impression that the United States was becoming weak and pusillanimous. Iranians saw the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis as just retribution—payback for Washington’s incessant meddling in Iranian affairs. Americans chose to see it as an unwarranted assault on innocent representatives of a well-meaning nation.
To the extent that Vietnam had inspired any inclination to shrink the Pentagon’s global “footprint,” that inclination quickly ebbed and,