America Right or Wrong Read online

  America Right or Wrong

  America Right or Wrong

  Second Edition

  An Anatomy of American Nationalism

  ANATOL LIEVEN

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  © Anatol Lieven 2012

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  First Edition published in 2012

  Impression: 1

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  ISBN 978–0–19–966025–4

  Printed in Great Britain by

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  For Misha, Beloved Distraction

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  One

  An Exceptional Nationalism?

  Two

  Thesis: Splendor and Tragedy of the American Creed

  Three

  Antithesis Part I: The Embittered Heartland

  Four

  Antithesis Part II: Fundamentalists and Great Fears

  Five

  The Legacy of the Cold War

  Six

  American Nationalism, Israel, and the Middle East

  Conclusion

  Notes

  References

  Index

  Preface

  The most important target of this book is Americans themselves. I hope that in a small way it may do something to influence the policy debate in the United States, by revealing some of the underlying myths and historical, cultural, and ideological impulses that drive U.S. thinking and U.S. policy. However, this book is being published not only in the United States, but in Britain. The first edition was also translated into French, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. I have therefore had to explain in some detail a number of things about the United States that will be familiar to educated American audiences, and for this I ask your pardon.

  Many people have generously helped with advice during the writing of this book. It would not have been possible without the unstinting help and support of Natasha Fairweather, of A. P. Watt, who worked tremendously hard to find publishers for a highly controversial manuscript, and was a great source of encouragement and strength in moments of discouragement. I am most grateful to David McBride and his colleagues at Oxford University Press for commissioning and editing this new 2012 edition of the book, and to Tim Bartlett, of Oxford University Press, Michael Fishwick, of Harper Collins, and Charlotte Cachin-Liebert, of Lattes for commissioning and editing the original version.

  A great debt of gratitude is owed to Michael Lind and Stephen Holmes, who gave me the benefit of their profound insights into the American tradition, and also encouraged me to persevere with this project. Andrew Bacevich, Bill Maynes, Tom Hughes, Walter Russell Mead, William Pfaff, Norman Birnbaum, Stephen Walt, Michael Kraig, Adam Shatz, Justin Vaisse, Tom Geoghehan, Marina Ottaway, Minxin Pei, and my brother, D. C. B. Lieven, all very generously took the time to advise me on one or another part of the manuscript. On Chapter Six, concerning the U.S.–Israeli relationship, David Chambers, of the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, was of inestimable help, as were Brian Klug, Suzanne Goldenberg, and James Zogby. Responsibility for the statements and arguments made in the book is, of course, entirely my own.

  I am grateful to my colleagues in the War Studies Department of King’s College London for their help with the production of the second edition of this book, and in particular to Ashley Lait, whose help with the research was indispensable. I thank Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for allowing me to embark on the original version of the book, and to my colleagues at Carnegie for their help and support. Rashed Chowdhury and Zhanara Nauruzbayeva worked tremendously hard and diligently on the research. Their intelligence, insights, and perspectives were also a great help to me. Amanda Muller helped gather much information on American domestic politics. Special thanks are due to Kathleen Higgs and the staff of the Carnegie Library. They were not only superbly efficient in procuring books, but extremely patient with a combination of bizarre-sounding requests and extreme lateness in returns.

  Finally, my gratitude and love go to my wife Sasha, who bore the twin burdens of a new baby and a book-writing husband with her customary grace, and to my son Misha, to whom this book is dedicated, and who has provided a cheerful background to the writing of this new edition.

  America Right or Wrong

  Introduction

  America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  This book is an exploration of certain old and deeply rooted features of American political culture that I have grouped together under the term “nationalism.” It examines these phenomena against the background of four great and interlinked historical developments of the first decade of the twenty-first century: the reaction of the United States to the terrorist attacks of 9/11; the growing social and economic deterioration of large parts of the white working and middle classes; the radicalization of the Republican Party, which I have argued in this book should really be renamed the American Nationalist Party; and the response of the United States to new challenges, above all the rise of China.

  The developments are interconnected. The Bush administration’s strategy in response to 9/11 reflected old and deep patterns of American attitudes to the outside world, and right-wing American attitudes to other Americans. The wars launched by Bush were coupled with tax cuts that reflected the swing of the Republican Party away from the New Deal–based policies of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and toward radical free-market capitalism—an economic philosophy that progressively undermined the economic and social standing of the Republicans’ own white middle class base. These two policies together drove up the U.S. budget deficit under Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, to unprecedented levels, and helped pave the way for the great recession after 2008, which produced a radical downward plunge in white middle class living standards.

  The result has been embittered and hysterical politics on the Right in America, which have combined with features of the U.S. Constitution to produce a dangerous stasis in government. Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s strategies after 9/11 made it impossible for the United States to mount any serious response to the rise of China.1 If, as is probable, China overtakes the United States economically and challenges it geopolitically, this may inflame American nationalism still further, in ways that could endanger world peace.

  American nationalism has contributed to this crisis in a number of different ways. The chauvinist, religiously, and racially bigoted sides of American nationalism (what I have called in this book the American nationalist antithesis)
have stoked aggressive policies abroad and paranoid hatreds at home that are undermining the ability of American democracy to conduct a reasonable discussion of policies and interests.

  On the other hand, American civic nationalism (the American nationalist thesis) has also played its part in creating this stasis. The democratic and constitutional values of what has been called the “American Creed” have been of inestimable value to the United States, and through America to the world. In every generation they have inspired Americans to renew their political system and extend its liberties. Throughout history, they have helped produce the traditional American spirit of practical opportunism that has enabled Americans to find answers to new sets of problems. This in turn has established the United States as a model and example that has had a positive influence on people all over the world.

  America still does contain immense reserves of imaginative thought and political energy. In our generation, however, the tremendous past success of the American model has combined with the power of American civic nationalism in American society to produce a very different effect as far as a large minority of Americans are concerned. This nationalism has bequeathed to them an essentially mythological version not only of their country’s history and role in the world—which is standard for most nationalisms—but of their existing society and economy. This nationalist mythology is not rooted in reality, and is indeed strikingly impervious to it. It prevents many Americans from understanding what is happening to them and their country in rational terms and crafting rational responses. Instead, they are explaining what has happened in irrational terms and crafting irrational responses.

  Above all, the quasi-religious veneration for the Constitution and the “founders” that lies at the core of American civic nationalism makes it much harder to think of and discuss limited but essential ways in which it needs to be changed to meet the needs of a society so very different from that of the America for which it was designed more than 200 years ago.2 In their combination of worship of the Constitution with a new form of old white middle class fears and resentments, the Tea Parties represent a combination or synthesis of the American nationalist thesis and antithesis.

  My own work is founded on the work of American scholars of the past and present. In particular, I have looked to that great generation of American thinkers who sought to understand the phenomena of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War in terms of aspects of American history and culture: figures like Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, C. Vann Woodward, and perhaps most of all Louis Hartz, whose work is of crucial importance for an understanding both of the reaction to 9/11 and the rise of the Tea Parties, but is almost unknown in the United States today outside narrow sections of academia.3

  “Nationalism” has not been the usual prism through which American political culture has been viewed. Most Americans have spoken of their attachment to their country as “patriotism,” in an extreme form as “superpatriotism,” or in an ideological form as “Americanism.” Critics of the United States, at home and abroad, have tended to focus on what has been called American “imperialism.” The United States today does indeed harbor important forces that can be called imperialist in their outlook and aims. However, though large in influence, these people are relatively few in number. They are to be found in overlapping sections of the intelligentsia and the foreign policy and security establishments, with a particular concentration among the so-called neoconservatives.

  However, to inspire many Americans to support imperial projects, it is necessary to appeal to them in terms not of imperialism, but of nationalism. Unlike large numbers of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others at the time of their empires, the vast majority of ordinary Americans do not think of themselves as imperialist, or as possessing an empire. As public disillusionment with the war in Iraq and the growing desire for withdrawal from Afghanistan have demonstrated, they are also simply not prepared to make the massive long-term commitments and sacrifices necessary to maintain a direct American empire. Indeed, Bush’s unprecedented combination of war and tax cuts demonstrated very clearly that the Republicans did not in fact expect the American population as a whole to make sacrifices for America’s empire.

  Apart from the effects of modern culture on attitudes toward military service and sacrifice, American culture historically has embodied a strong strain of isolationism, which is especially strongly marked in the Tea Party movement that developed in 2009, and later in response to the policies of the Obama administration. This isolationism is, however, a complex phenomenon that should not be understood simply as a desire to withdraw from the world—though this sentiment is undoubtedly present. Rather, American isolationism in part forms another face both of American chauvinism and American messianism, in the form of a belief in America as a unique “city on a hill.” As a result, it is often closely related to nationalist unilateralism in international affairs. This aspect of isolationism forms part of a view that if the United States really has no choice at all but to involve itself with disgusting and inferior foreigners, it must absolutely control the process, and must under no circumstances subject itself to foreign control, or even advice.

  Unlike previous empires, the U.S. national identity and what has been called the “American Creed” are founded on adherence to democracy. However imperfectly democracy may be practiced at home, and hypocritically preached abroad, this democratic faith does set real limits to how far the United States can exert direct rule over other peoples. The United States since 1945 has therefore been an indirect empire, resembling more closely the Dutch in the East Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the British in India.

  As far as the mass of the American people is concerned, even an indirect American empire is still “an empire in denial,” and in presenting their imperial plans to the American people, the Bush administration was careful to package them as something else: on the one hand, as part of a benevolent strategy of spreading American values of democracy and freedom; on the other, as an essential part of the defense not of an American empire, but of the American nation itself.

  A great many Americans are not only intensely nationalistic, but bellicose in their response to any perceived attack or slight against the United States: “Don’t Tread on Me!” as the rattlesnake on the American revolutionary flag declared (a slogan taken up by the Tea Parties, though as a statement of antigovernment individualism rather than nationalism). This attitude was summed up by that American nationalist icon, John Wayne, in his last role as a dying gunfighter in The Shootist: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”4

  As an expression of pride, honor, and a capacity for self-defense, these are sympathetic and indeed admirable words. However, it is useful in this context to remember an eighteenth-century expression, “to trail one’s coat.” This meant deliberately to provoke a quarrel by allowing your coat to trail along the ground so that another man would step on it, thereby allowing you to challenge him to a duel. One might say that American imperialists trail America’s coat across the whole world while most ordinary Americans are not looking, and rely on those same Americans to react with “don’t tread on me” nationalist fury when the coat is trodden upon. Over the next generation, this combination of U.S. attitudes risks colliding disastrously with a rising Chinese popular nationalism that is also extremely sensitive to real and perceived slights.

  This tradition in America also means that it would be highly unwise to assume that the instinctive but unfocused and poorly thought-out isolationism of many in the Tea Parties will lead their representatives to take a more pacific and multilateral approach to international affairs than that of the Republican Party in general.

  This is also due to sheer ignorance of the world outside the United States, which—coupled with basic chauvinist prejudices—makes Tea Party representatives in Washington easy subjects of manipulation by Republican foreign policy exper
ts, the great majority of whom—as of 2012—remain essentially neoconservative in their imperialistic and unilateralist approaches to U.S. strategy.

  Coupled with particular American prejudices against Islam in the wake of 9/11, public ignorance of the Muslim world allowed the Bush administration to carry out a catastrophic extension of the “war against terrorism” from its original—and legitimate—targets of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to embrace the Iraqi Baathist regime, anti-Israeli groups in Palestine and Lebanon, and quite possibly other countries and forces in future. This reserve of embittered nationalism has also been tapped by the Republicans with regard to a wide range of international proposals that can be portrayed as hurting America or infringing on American national sovereignty, from the International Criminal Court to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. The United States under Bush drove toward empire, and the domestic political fuel fed into the engine was that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism.

  After the election in 2008 of President Barack Obama, American nationalism was heavily exploited by the Republicans in their battle to undermine him. Particularly striking was the furious Republican attack on the president for his statement in 2009 that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

  In fact, President Obama followed this up with what was in fact a statement of classical American civic nationalism, albeit with a multilateralist tone:

  I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.