Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [96]
So proposing to replace the American credo and the sacred trinity might seem a fanciful exercise, unlikely to yield anything of immediate practical value. Still, the effort is worth attempting, if only to lay down a marker. Before the movement comes the conviction—an awareness of things amiss combined with a broad vision of how to make them right. Challenging the Washington consensus requires first establishing the proposition that viable alternatives to permanent war do exist—that a different credo and trinity might offer a better way of ensuring the safety and well-being of the American people and even perhaps of fulfilling the mission that Americans persist in believing God or Providence has bestowed upon the United States.
The existing American credo assumes that the world is plastic, that American leaders are uniquely capable of divining whatever God or Providence intends, and that with its unequaled reserves of power the United States is uniquely positioned to fulfill those intentions. Experience since the dawn of the American Century in 1941, and especially over the course of the last decade, offers little support for these propositions.
The record of American statecraft during the era that began with U.S. entry into World War II and that culminates today with the Long War does not easily reduce to a simple report card. Overall that record is mixed, combining wisdom with folly, generosity with shortsightedness, moments of insight with periods of profound blindness, admirable achievements with reckless misjudgments. The president who devised the Marshall Plan also ordered the bombing of Hiroshima. The president who created the Peace Corps also dabbled in assassination plots. The president who vowed to eliminate evil secretly authorized torture and then either could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact or simply lied about it.
Critics fasten on these contradictions as evidence of Washington’s hypocrisy. What they actually reveal is the intractability of the human condition. Even the self-assigned agent of salvation persistently strays from the path of righteousness. No wonder the world at large remains stubbornly resistant to redemption. Notwithstanding prophetic pronouncements issued by American leaders, when it comes to discerning the future they, like other statesmen, fly blind. The leader of the Free World, surrounded by his impressively credentialed advisers, is hardly more capable of divining the global future than is a roomful of reasonably well-informed high school students.
As with American clairvoyance, so too with American power: Events have exposed its limits. Especially in economic terms, it is today a wasting asset.
Any new credo must surely take into account these lessons of the era now drawing to a close, acknowledging the recalcitrance of humankind, the difficulty of deciphering history’s purposes, and the importance of husbanding American power.
Note, however, that these very insights formed the basis of an earlier credo, nurtured across many generations until swept aside by the conceits of the American Century. Proponents of this earlier credo did not question the existence of an American mission. Embracing John Winthrop’s charge, issued to his followers on the eve of founding Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, they too sought to create a “city upon a hill.” This defined America’s obligation.2 Yet in discharging that obligation, in their view, the city’s inhabitants should seek not to compel or enforce,