Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [98]
Outside of such circles, an awareness of America’s own imperfections—social, political, cultural, and moral—survived. The advent of the postwar American credo, with all of the costly undertakings that trailed in its wake, fostered for a minority a renewed appreciation of the all but forgotten Founders’ credo. Among critics of U.S. foreign policy, the old tradition of America as exemplar enjoyed a quiet renaissance.
Those critics questioned the wisdom and feasibility of forcibly attempting to remake the world in America’s image. They believed that even to make the attempt was to court corruption in the form of imperialism and militarism, thereby compromising republican institutions at home. Representing no one party but instead a great diversity of perspectives, they insisted that, if America has a mission, that mission is to model freedom rather than to impose it.
The famed diplomat-turned-historian George Kennan, a cultural conservative, was one such critic. Senator J. William Fulbright, a died-in-wool liberal internationalist, was another. The influential social critic Christopher Lasch, a self-professed radical, was a third. Martin Luther King, arguably the dominant moral figure of the American Century, was a fourth.
Writing to an acquaintance in the midst of the Korean War, Kennan argued that Americans had for too long subjected their garden to abuse. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that our country bristles with imperfections—and some of them very serious ones—of which we are almost universally aware, but lack the resolution and civic vigor to correct.” Here lay the real danger. “What is at stake here is our duty to ourselves and our own national ideals.”7 In a contemporaneous lecture, Kennan returned to this theme. To observers abroad, he suggested,
the sight of an America in which there is visible no higher social goal than the self-enrichment of the individual, and where that self-enrichment takes place primarily in material goods and gadgets that are of doubtful utility in the achievement of the deeper satisfactions of life—this sight fails to inspire either confidence or enthusiasm.
Rather than obsessing about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, the nation needed to set its own house in order. By demonstrating a capacity to nurture “a genuinely healthy relationship both of man to nature and of man to himself,” Kennan believed, Americans might “then, for the first time, have something to say to people elsewhere,” perhaps even becoming “a source of inspiration” to others.8
A decade after Kennan, in the midst of another dubious war, Senator Fulbright assessed the implications of believing that America’s own well-being required constant meddling abroad. It was, he wrote, “neither the duty nor the right of the United States to sort out” all of the world’s problems. “[M]any things happen in many places,” wrote the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “that are either none of our business or in any case are beyond the range of our power, resources, and wisdom.” It was long past time for the United States to “confine herself to doing only that good in the world which she can do, both by direct effort and by the force of her example,” abandoning her “missionary idea full of pretensions about being the world’s policeman.”9
Lasch, who spent decades ruthlessly dissecting American culture, concurred. “The real promise of American life,” he insisted, was to be found in “the hope that a self-governing republic can serve as a source of moral and political inspiration to the rest of the world, not as the center of a new world empire.”10
Martin Luther King went even further. In the spring of 1967, preaching on the raging Vietnam War, he insisted that the time had come “for all people of conscience to call upon America