William Pfaff does a head-scratcher column on the euro crisis

William Pfaff is one of my favorite commentators on international affairs. He recognizes that the euro and the European Union are in trouble. But I'm not sure he has a very good idea of why. In Euro Zone in Stalemate Commonweal 07/19/2012, he writes:

The European Union is at risk of being destroyed by the euro. The credit crisis founded on the swindle by Wall Street and retailed to Europe's banks has created divisions that are undermining what was supposed to be mutual confidence and solidarity among the 17 members of the euro zone.

"Making Europe Work" is an urgent need and was the subject of the fifth conference on EU reform held last weekend in Siena, Italy, under the joint sponsorship of Armand Clesse of the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell. It was not a cheerful affair, ending, after two days, in an even divide between those who think the EU will survive the euro crisis and those who think it will not. This, it is worth noting, from an academic and professional group disposed to support the European unity project.

Good point. But then he offers up this paragraph:

The euro is a rootless currency in that it was issued by fiat to replace the national currencies of the members of the European Monetary Union and to conduct a fiscal policy that "maintains price stability." This overriding mandate reflects the German obsession with inflation, because of its own experience in the 1920s, and the consequent inheritance and practices of the German Bundesbank.

What, has he been in deep conversations with goldbugs trying to sell him investment scams? The US dollar is also "issued by fiat". The goldbugs talk about "fiat currency" as though it meant that it was phony money. If you listen to Ron "Papa Doc" Paul talk about currency, he gets very explicit about thinking that the dollar is worthless. The term "fiat currency" is a legitimate financial term. But it's a technical term, meaning that the currency is based on the official status decreed upon it by law ("fiat") rather than being tied to some other thing, such as a commodity like gold or silver.

It's certainly the case that the charge of the European Central Bank (ECB) to maintain price stability is an "overriding mandate" that "reflects the German obsession with inflation." But that has nothing to do with the euro being a "rootless currency", whatever that might mean. And while the German inflation of 1923-4 has taken on theological status among conservative economists, the 2012 German obsession with inflation is part of the general One Percenter preference for using the depression to slam down workers' incomes and undermine union rights and weaken regulation, not because German CEOs are brooding about 1923 every morning when they wake up.

He goes on to discuss the sovereign debt crisis in a garbled way, although he does get it right when he identifies as a big problem "Germany's refusal to permit a consolidation of euro debt into European bonds, or a European Central Bank assumption of the role of lender of last resort to the zone, and effectively the ultimate guarantor of all euro debt," although by the fuzzy term "euro debt" he apparently means sovereign debt denominated in euros. But many readers might well assume that he means by "euro debt" any debt, public or private, denominated in euros.

I'm surprised to see the level of confusion that appears in Pfaff's piece, and I have to wonder if editing it for space may have wound up compromising its content. Some German politicians have groused about forcing Greece to leave the eurozone. But that is not the German government's official policy even toward Greece (at the moment of this writing anyway). And there is no official procedure in the eurozone laws and treaties for an exit from the euro. So I don't know where Pfaff gets a statement like, "Germany says that if [the austerity] solution is impossible, then Greece -- and probably others -- may have to quit the euro zone."

He does remember, unlike so many commentators on the euro crisis, that depressions handled poorly can produce unpleasant political results:

The consequences could be politically dramatic for Europe as a whole, leading to popular discredit of democratic governments with dictatorial nationalist parties taking power, repudiating foreign debt, imposing confiscatory tax policies and possibly expelling foreign workers, immigrants and foreign residents. Such a (minority) party already exists in Greece, and EU members Romania and Hungary -- candidates for eventual euro zone membership (if the common currency survives) -- are already under internal challenges to democratic norms to a degree that preoccupies the European Commission in Brussels and the European Parliament. These troubles are not directly economic in cause but contribute to the climate of developing political crisis.

I hope Pfaff is right that the deterioration of democratic institutions in Hungary and Romania "preoccupies the European Commission in Brussels and the European Parliament." Because it seems to me that they are treating the situations in Hungary and Romania more like minor problems while they obsess about making sure the European banks' stockholders don't have to bear any losses from their risky speculations and their investments in eurozone sovereign debt.

Tags: eu, euro, european union, william pfaff

The grim debt-ceiling negotiations farce and the drowning of American democracy

David Dayen gives a savvy evaluation of the current state of the debt-limit negotiations in And for His Next Trick The American Prospect Online 07/13/2011. And Digby expands on it in Rooting For Mitch Hullabaloo 07/13/2011.

This is not the first time, to put it mildly, that the progressive blogosphere has provided more solid commentary than the run of the pundits. But with this farcical debt-ceiling negotiation, that has been particularly so. Because having a negotiation over it at all was a farce from the start, political Kabuki. The Republican leaders in both the House and Senate said months ago that they would have to raise the debt ceiling. Wall Street was always going to insist on it, and the Republicans are there to serve their Wall Street masters first and foremost.

The Republicans were always going to have to put up enough House votes to enact the debt-ceiling increase. The negotiations theater played out only because the White House wanted to have such a pageant to put through elements of the drastic, Herbert Hoover-style austerity program that they are apparently actually convinced is both good policy and good politics. This negotiation never had to happen, and the White House knew it.

But our Pod Pundits couldn't and mostly didn't say that. Because they love Washington Kabuki theater, with its back and forth about who is up and who is down in the game, who is clever and who's been had, and so forth. The important thing for the voters and citizens is that the whole negotiation was a political pageant that never had to take place. Obama, for whatever (bad) reason has hoped for a Grand Bargain that would mean the Democrats cutting Social Security and Medicare. What exactly he expected from the Republican side of the so-called "bargain" is entirely unclear.

Digby has been deconstructing this process for months now, as have David Dayen and others at Firedoglake. And because blogs, Facebook and Twitter allow for a much wider, quicker interchange of news and ideas about such events than was possible when print and TV news media were the near-exclusive gatekeepers for such commentary, it makes it harder for Obama to pass off his opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as something forced on him by Republicans. Republicans did propose to cut Medicare - eliminate it, actually. But they managed to maneuver the Democratic President into proposed his own cuts to Medicare and to Social Security. Even the Ryan Plan doesn't go after the latter. And Obama has virtually unilaterally disarmed the Democratic Party from being able to use those two potent issues against the Republicans in 2012.

David in his article explains the point on which the pundit conventional wisdom of Tuesday was correct, the fact that Mitch McConnell's proposal Tuesday was an attempt to give the Republicans an "out" from an insupportable problem:

Washington is always a strange place, but this gambit from McConnell represents a complete inversion of the debate in the space of a few days. Once the hostage-takers, now the Republicans are the ones looking for an escape hatch. McConnell reportedly feels at the mercy of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Given that the fast-moving negotiations will generate a deal with so many discrete elements, OMB would have a lot of control over the final numbers. McConnell said yesterday there were only three options available to the GOP - "smoke and mirrors, tax hikes, or default." He obviously feels that any deal written in the White House will be tilted against his party.

And he notes, "for the first time in a while, you heard the words 'Republicans' and 'spineless capitulation' in the same sentence."

Yet if this is what winning looks like, Democrats can only cringe at the thought of what losing might be:

But if Republicans believe themselves to be without leverage, the Democratic President in the White House is in the opposite role. He's now the one using the debt limit to force a deal, one bigger than even his own party favors, with major cuts to cherished programs like Medicare and Social Security. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in response to McConnell's plan that President Obama still wanted to "seize this unique opportunity to come to agreement on significant, balanced deficit reduction."

Given the righteous conservative anger at McConnell and Obama's preoccupation with a bipartisan deal, this doesn't mean we can close the book on this debt limit increase just yet. But even if McConnell?s plan passes, the legacy of what Obama put on the table for cuts in these talks will haunt Democrats for many years, and we'll see those proposals again — with lines like "Even Barack Obama supported ..." attached to them. It was a damaging strategy. [my emphasis; punctuation corrected]

Digby expands the thought:

Indeed it was. And any "pivot" to jobs has been severely hamstrung by the President's endless rhetoric about "belt tightening" and spending cuts. But at least they won't be cutting spending with over 9% unemployment at the same time, so if they do manage to get some infrastructure on the table they won't have already robbed Peter to pay Paul and destroyed any stimulative effects.

Of course, the negotiations aren't over yet. For the Democrats, it's been bad so far. And it could still go south from here.

And the truth is that US politics is at a particularly nasty point right now. As William Pfaff puts it in Robin Hood in Reverse Truthdig 07/12/2011:

By far the strangest thing about the American debate concerning national economic policy, currently concentrated on whether a law lifting the present limit on the deficit will or will not be passed, is that it has been conducted without discussion of the largest item in the budget. This is the aggregate cost of running military interventions of one or another kind in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and sundry other unhappy and unlucky sites in the non-Western world, and that includes the global program of illegal individual assassinations by drones or dedicated military or civilian killer teams—all in democracy’s name. Cut that, even merely its blatant excesses, and the budget problem would disappear.

Instead the congressional debate is ideological: superficially about national economic policy, but actually all but totally committed to the issue of what level of taxation the smallest and most wealthy segment in the American population — its corporate leaders, heads of banks and private financial institutions, its hereditary rich and beneficiaries of market windfall gains — should be required to pay.

The second most passionate subject of debate is how much the government will reduce the country’s existing Social Security pension programs, for those individual Americans who throughout their lives have contributed to what they considered irrevocable contracts with their government, and the modest popular medical care programs that now exist for the middle classes, the old and the indigent. These are Medicare and Medicaid, plus the new health care program passed (barely) by the Barack Obama administration. These have all become "Entitlements" — a hateful word in the modern American political vocabulary.

The internal American debate may be said to center around how much to rob the poor, and how much to enrich the rich.

The current radical maldistribution of wealth and income in the US is a pathological situation for our society. And it has created a toxic politics for a democracy. And ours is being drowned in corporate money.

Tags: david dayen, digby, medicaid, medicare, social security, william pfaff

William Pfaff's "The Irony of Manifest Destiny"

William Pfaff's The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy (2010) is a sober and sobering reflection on the current state of American foreign and military policy. Unfortunately, important insights are mixed in with vague and dubious historical generalizations. And with statements that are confusing, careless and even contradictory.

The best passages are where he deals with policies of the United States toward Muslim countries during the last 10 years and their immediate background, and those that highlight the global nature of American military aspirations and the hubris that display. My recommendation would be to start with Chapter 4, "From American Isolationism to Utopian Interventionism", and read through to the end, then circle back to the first three chapters.

Pfaff highlights an important reality of today that is not well understood in ordinary political commentary; that is, it's rarely mentioned as such. "American foreign policy, economy and society seem all to have become dominated the assumptions of permanent or serial wars against American enemies, identified by Washington as the enemies as well of democracy and Western civilization." (my emphasis) The idea that war itself is evil and something to be minimized and avoided whenever reasonably possible is hardly even paid lip service in American political discourse now.

He also recognizes that what was for a few years called the Long War didn't begin with 9/11, but is in a real sense a continuation of the Cold War, as described by Andrew Bacevich and the other contributors to The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (2007). Pfaff quotes Bacevich's work approvingly, and Bacevich blurbs the book as showing Pfaff's "standing as our wisest critic of U.S. foreign policy".

In this passage, Pfaff makes that connection by referring to the good-vs.-evil approach of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles:

The Dulles vision of bipolar struggle, promoted to global dimensions in the late 19505, continued to rule American policy thinking until after Communism's collapse. Its influence was still so great in 2001 that George W. Bush automatically constructed his global war on terror as what even at the time could be seen as a parody of the Cold War, even though the enemy in this new version of global struggle was an organization of a few thousand Muslim mujahideen and sympathizers, replacing as enemy in the administration's imagination and propaganda a Soviet Union of 150 million people, possessing the second largest strategic nuclear force on the planet, an imposing economy, and global allies and clients. Astonishingly, this notion was generally accepted in the professional policy community and among the international media. The consequence of this has been the substitution of fictions for fact in important deliberations of government, as repeatedly attested by recent experience. A virtual reality is willed into existence that blocks out reality itself. Sometimes this delusion is driven by domestic political advantage. More often it is a case of personal or collective illusion, motivated by ideology, or private commitments or advantage, that in turn demands confirmation by subordinate officials. [my emphasis]

He makes an important historical point about the ideology of spreading democracy, which is the rhetoric of Wilsonian internationalism and idealism that the Cheney-Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq War, in particular:

The policy of the George W. Bush administration to make the Islamic states democracies was supported by a neoconservative misreading of history - that after the Second World War the United States had "made" Germany and Japan into democracies. Both of those nations in the past were constitutional monarchies, with parliaments, sophisticated administrative institutions, advanced legal systems and courts, and national political parties. They had little need of instruction in representative institutions, only the motive to reestablish them - which defeat in the Second World War and Allied military occupation amply supplied. [my emphasis]

He notes, "The material interests involved in the Middle East are obvious, of course, but they do not explain the element of unreasonableness present" in US and British policy perspectives and decisions. This is important. There is a lot of effort made by policymakers to hide the less noble motivators of their foreign policy goals, like promotion of the interests of energy corporations. It's important to look beyond the rhetoric for that reason. But also, many historians and observers of current affairs are tempted to downplay the role that irrational turns of mind and even just plain stupidity can and do play in major decisions.


The book is full of valuable observations, coming as they do from an experienced and sensible long-time observer of these policies. For instance, he writes on Old Man Bush and the Gulf War of 1991: "He ... inaugurated a new series of American Middle Eastern military engagements with the Gulf War against Iraq, a superficially comprehensible decision, at the same time one whose deep sources remain today without a satisfactory explanation."

He stresses the too-little-appreciated point about the role India-Pakistan tensions over Kashmir play in the Afghanistan War: "Pakistan's own interest lies in manipulating both Taliban and foreign Islamist elements - as well as the United States, when feasible - in its own defense against its permanent enemy, India." This is a fundamental problem for NATO policy in the Afghanistan War and the widening conflict in Pakistan so long as Pakistan views the Afghan government as pro-Indian. Juan Cole elaborates on this in Obama in Asia: Meeting American Decline Face to Face TomDispatch 11/11/2010:

The U.S. military in Afghanistan is seen [by the Indian government] as a proxy for Indian interests in putting down the Taliban and preventing the reestablishment of Pakistani hegemony over Kabul. For purely self-interested reasons Prime Minister Singh has long taken the same position as the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, urging Obama to postpone any plans to begin a drawdown in Afghanistan in the summer of 2011.

The last three chapters are full of useful and important observations. Like the fact that the Cheney-Bush Administration opposed the International Criminal Court (ICC) "because of the [USA's] present vulnerability to indictments and prosecution for a number of practices that have been or are national policy."

Like his comment, "Direct American intervention polarizes and politicizes, given not only the widespread present unpopularity of the United States in the non-Western world, but also the frequent incompetence and destructiveness of these interventions."

I could easily cite other examples: his recognition of how the Western Cold War policy of encouraging political Islam as an alternative to left-leaning Arab nationalism played a huge part in creating the current conflicts with Islamists; about how fundamentalist ideas can be particularly appealing "to people educated in the applied sciences and technology" in which "the subject matter is fixed and unsusceptible to critical thinking, a matter of certitudes"; his observations on how absurd it is that the threat of "Al Qa'ida" effectively occupied the place in Long War propaganda that the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and its allies played during the Cold War; on how the Cheney-Bush administration needed the "Al Qa'ida" bogeyman (not merely the far more modest reality) to justify its wars and war crimes; his observations on the privatization of military functions and the rise in the Homeland Security complex; and on how the United States has not "since 1945 won a war, other than the invasion of the Dominican Republic [1965, LBJ], the pathetic conquest of Panama [1989, Old Man Bush], and the successful seizure of that menacing member of the British Commonwealth, the Caribbean island nation of Grenada [1983, St. Reagan]."

On the state of Al Qa'ida as of 2009, he recommends Marc Sageman, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Confronting al-Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond 10/07/2009.

One of Pfaff's most important and most disturbing observations comes near the end, when he speculates about what might prompt the United States to adopt a far less militarized and interventionist foreign policy:

The United States may simply find itself with no choice but to fall back on itself, no doubt embittered by disappointment. That might provide a soft ending to empire. The hard ending would be palpable defeat in crucial undertakings. These would have to be defeats that cut through the insulation of ignorance, misinformation, and complacency that has prevailed in the country during the first decade of the new century and such is perhaps impossible. The external crisis would have to be deeper, and be more personal in its effects, than the Vietnam defeat, and that too seems unlikely.

However, the book is populated with sloppy generalizations and even errors that can be distracting. Examples:

• The workers' revolt in Communist East Germany was in 1953, not 1952. (p.77)

• Benito Mussolini himself didn't invent the concept "totalitarian". (p. 36) Hans Maier wrote in "'Totalitarismus' und 'politische Religionen'. Konzepte der Diktaturvergleiches" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte July 1995 that, although Mussolini adopted the term as his own as early as 1925, "Clearly it was not Mussolini and his partisan supporters that introduced the concept into the discussion, but the opponents of the Fascists from the liberal-democratic, socialist and Catholic camps," such as Luigi Salvatorelli, Giorgio Amendola and Lelio Basso. (my translation)

• The US ousted Maximilio I from his post (1832-1867) as Habsburg Emperor of México?!? (p. 163) Benito Juárez would have been surprised to hear that! The US did pressure France, on whose behalf Maximilio was acting, to pull out of México. But Maximilio stayed in place after the French departure and was ousted by the Mexicans themselves.

• At one point, he seems to blame the Presbyterians ("the Reformed Churches") for the 16th-century Wars of Religion and Thirty Years War. (p. 21) Not really fair to the poor Presbyterians.

• Popular piety may regard the Qu'ran as "the living word of God". (p. 117 footnote) But Islamic theology and tradition see it as the words of the Archangel Gabriel as revealed in visions to the Prophet Muhammad.

• He conflates the "backyard steel smelters" of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward with the Cultural Revolution. And in doing so, blurs a valid historical point, that the radical ideology of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was based on Chinese Cultural Revolution notions. (pp. 126-7)

• He steps on what could have been a good point about Henry Kissinger buying into a fantasy about the Islamist prospects for reconstituting an international caliphate, by turning it into one about Kissinger's Westphalian understanding of international relations being different from Condi-Condi's. (pp. 135-6)

A more substantial confusion has to do with the question of to what extent the Cheney-Bush Administration was cynically using the slogan of Wilsonian internationalism and support for democracy for interventions desired for other purposes. He writes in Chapter 4 describing Bush policy as if the democratic ideology was the motivation of the Cheney-Bush Administration's decision makers. But later he brings in energy and other concerns and eventually writes that "it is difficult to say" whether they took the spreading-democracy hype seriously. There probably were true believers in the democratic mission like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. And he makes a valid point about neocon Jacobins and their Straussian skepticism about democracy in general, including in the United States. But even in their conduct in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Cheney-Bush Administration's alleged commitment to democracy was used pretty cynically. And in other areas of foreign policy, the passion for democracy wasn't much on display.

The larger historical theories he spells out in the first three chapters are too general and vaguely argued to be of much value. His basic point is that Enlightenment rationalism pushed aside European Christian outlooks on the world and created a search for secular utopias, which motivated the Terror of the French Revolution. This search for utopia led to Nazism and Stalinism in the 20th century. And to Wilsonian internationalism and the Cheney-Bush/neocon notion of spreading democracy in Troskyist-like wars of liberation.

There is validity in his point. National Socialism in Germany and the Soviet brand of Marxism-Leninism had elements of utopian thought, which led to some genuine horrors. But he draws a sharp distinction between Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Soviet Union and China and such movements in smaller countries like Vietnam and Cuba, where he sees the ideology as almost incidental to the nationalism they also espoused.

But his argument is weakly constructed. For one thing, the pre-Enlightenment Wars of Religion, especially the 30 Years War of 1608-1648, would likely have been every bit as destructive as one of the two World Wars of the 20th century if they had had 20th-century means of warfare - poison gas, aerial bombardment, atomic bombs. How Pfaff's construction comports with the revival of religious wars in recent decades is a question with which he doesn't really grapple in this book-length essay. And at one point, he also throws German Romanticism into the chain of causation; but one of the characteristics of Romantic philosophy was a rejection of the central role of Reason in Enlightenment thinking. For that matter, Nazi ideology in particular rejected Enlightenment rationalism and embraced neo-Romantic notions to support its main element of utopianism (or rather dystopianism), the theory of the superior Aryan race.

Pfaff's definition of nationalism is confusing. Did the destructive effects of European nationalism come from the Enlightenment or Romanticism? Is nationalism in Islamic countries based on nationalism or on some larger religious-cultural attitude? This is left unclear.

Pfaff also blames the whole concept of a theory of history for the rise of destructive utopian political movements and states. But it's a huge leap from elaborating theories of history that seek to understand patterns of development to inviting "organized violence to make themselves [the theories of history] come true."

He writes as if separation of Church and State were clearly established sometime during the medieval era in the West, claims that such a separation was not the case in the Islamic world, but also says Islamic divisions of authority among secular and "religiously trained legal scholars" were "comparable to, but different from, feudal arrangements in the West" in which Church and State were intertwined but not identical institutions. His account of the Ottoman Empire suggests that the conflation of the Islamic religion with state power began with the Ottoman rulers in the nineteenth century. His formulation of the whole issue is hazy, if not downright confused.

My basic complaint about the theory he elaborates in the first three chapters - a theory of history, actually, though he claims to reject the whole concept of such a thing - is that it's largely a philosophically Idealist approach, basing itself essentially exclusively on intellectual history. It's only later in the book when he gets around to discussing economic considerations in the relatively specific context of recent US policy toward the Muslim world. And he's explicit in justifying his basically Idealist approach:

I do not consider material interest an adequate explanation for the conduct of governments and nations, least of all the American, although I do not underestimate the importance of access to energy and material gain in the currents influencing policy in every world capital. Nonetheless, fundamental motives must be looked for in the intellectual and moral realms of national decision, and in the vulnerability of people - intellectuals and political professionals notably among them—to the vulgarization of ideas in political ideology, which, as the twentieth century demonstrated, can justify nearly anything - even the most outrageous (as measured by the norms of ordinary rationality). [my emphasis]

In other words, he is operating on an Idealist theory of history which pretends not to be a theory of history and all. And which doesn't hang together all that well in terms of intellectual history.

It adds to the picture of insufficient coherence that he cites in support of his theory two classical-liberal philosophers who have put enormous confidence in a kind of free-market dogma that Pfaff himself suggests can also be a dangerous form of utopianism: Karl Popper, a friend and philosophical cousin to Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist much admired by rightwing libertarians today; and John Gray, also a fan of Von Hayek, who once said of his perspective, "What I liked was Thatcherism's Bolshevik aspect, which was to shake up the whole of Britain quite fundamentally," though in more recent work he has also been critical of the neoliberal globalization assumptions (John Gray: Forget everything you know The Independent 09/03/2002).

Bottom line on Pfaff's book: there's really good stuff there in Chapters 4-6.

Tags: establishment press, militarism, us foreign policy, william pfaff

The perilous ideological foreign policy of the US as the Elect among the nations

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Voice of Unconventional Wisdom New York Review of Books (11/112010 issue; accessed 10/27/2010) summarizes the world position of the United States, describing the framework William Pfaff uses in his new book, The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy (2010):

He [Pfaff] explains how the acquisition of great power by the United States has meant "a subordination of ethical values to an ideology of national triumphalism," which he sees as part of the strange and indeed terrifying transformation of Western Enlightenment civilization into "our twentieth- and twenty-first-century experience of extreme ideological violence."

American Progress by John Gast (c. 1872)

I haven't read Pfaff's book yet. It's not clear from this quote whether Pfaff includes nationalism as one of the ideologies producing "extreme ideological violence." But I'm intrigued by the ways that Enlightenment rationalism and notions of purity can lead to extreme violence.

Wheatcroft writes that "for more than sixty years the United States has tried to control [a fractured world], culminating in a historically unprecedented attempt to create American domination in what we misleadingly call the Middle East."

Citing Pfaff, he cites a difference between Europe and the USA in the understanding of countries in the religious sceme of things.

In Europe, the crisis in traditional religion brought about by the Enlightenment undermined confidence in the existing condition of society, especially after the French Revolution, but this, Pfaff points out, crucially did not happen in America, where something more than mere confidence survived. "The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world,” Thomas Paine wrote in Rights of Man, “as if we had lived in the beginning of time." The exalted sense of being immaculately newborn fed a national faith in "manifest destiny" (a phrase first used in 1839), an assumption that American success and American power must be a reflection of American virtue.

For more than 130 years, with some exceptions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, this took the form of political and military isolation—until Woodrow Wilson. With him, Pfaff writes, “the national myth was turned into a philosophy of international action." Wilson’s interventionism, didactic and ignorant at once, failed to create a new order of world peace, and was followed by a hiatus when America once more withdrew into its shell, until rudely awoken in 1941. [my emphasis

In that quote, Wheatcroft invokes the conventional story of the triumph of "isolationism" in the 1920s and early 1930s. I've become very leery of such invocations, because "isolationism" is a bogeyman that has been used since the end of the Second World War to stigmatize any and all critics of American interventionism. Andrew Bacevich has been pointing out for years that there are no significant advocates of isolationism in the US any more.

The far right, including the John Birch Society, is nominally isolationist, based on a conspiratorial view of the world and current affairs. But even that sort of isolationism is really based on the same kind of hardcore nationalism that constitutes Dick Cheney's foreign policy perspective. It's worth noting in that regard that Congressman Ron Paul is a favorite among the Bircher and militia sorts. And his son Randy "Aqua Buddha" Paul generally follows his father's political outlook, down to his segregationist views on civil rights legislation. (Old Man Paul probably shares his son's philosophy of Don't tread on me, tread on that woman over there.) But Aqua Buddha in his Senate campaign this year has endorsed the consensus nationalist foreign policy of the Republican Party.

Frank Rich, in a 2006 quote cited by Wheatcroft, reflects this conventional assumption that rabid isolationist sentiment is always on the verge of seizing the passion of the public (from Ideas for Democrats? New York Review of Books 10/19/2006 issue):

If Truman and Marshall came back from the dead, they could not sell a Marshall Plan to the isolationist and xenophobic America that the Iraq war has left in its wake, not just among some Democrats ... but, in an even more virulent form, among the Republican base. The Marshall Plan we theoretically brought to Iraq, a $22 billion farrago of waste and corruption, will serve as a poster child against foreign aid in congressional races for years.

The only true isolationism is in the portion of the Republican base so hardcore they worry that Glenn Beck is too liberal. But Rich, one of our star liberal pundits, locates it mainly in the Democratic Party, i.e., he equates it with criticisms of the Iraq War.

Wheatcroft continues:

A second great war left behind that chaotic world, and a forty-year rivalry between the United States and Soviet Russia followed. But after the war, in Pfaff's account, manifest destiny mutated into the "rigid and moralistic foreign policy” of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (another Presbyterian like Wilson, imbued with the doctrine of predestined election). Pfaff not only admires George Kennan but, as so many did not, understands him and the complexity of his ideas. Kennan’s wise advocacy of "containment" and letting time do its work was perverted toward ever-increasing militarization and futile wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. [my emphasis]

Such sweeping but brief generalizations of decades of time always leave infinite possibilities to raise objections, sophomoric and otherwise, to the picture they present.

But the basic idea is right. And it's a very important one. The United States foreign policy, which under Cheney and Bush became an ideology and a physical reality of permanent war, really is based on a rigid ideology, an ideology that the United States is required to cleanse the world of evil. Or, as a CIA officer said to Bob Woodward as quoted in his book Bush at War (2002), "America will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation."

(Wheatcroft designates that as a Bush quote, which is apparently a common error.)

Tags: us foreign policy, william pfaff

America, history's great Exception?

Several articles from recent months have looked at the need for a more realistic and less self-inflated foreign policy for the United States, including:

Twilight of the Republic? Seeds of Decline, Path to Renewal by Andrew Bacevich Commonweal 12/01/06 issue

Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America by William Pfaff New York Review of Books 01/18/07 (02/15/07 issue)

Bacevich writes:

In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared the promulgation of freedom to be "the mission that created our nation." Fulfilling what he described as America’s "great liberating tradition" now requires that the United States devote itself to "ending tyranny in our world."

Many Americans find such sentiments compelling. Yet to credit the United States with possessing a "liberating tradition" is like saying that Hollywood has a "tradition of artistic excellence." The movie business is just that-a business. Its purpose is to make money. If once in a while the studios produce a film of aesthetic value, that may be cause for celebration; but profit, not revealing truth and beauty, defines the purpose of the enterprise. ...

Crediting America with a "great liberating tradition" sanitizes the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U.S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale and thereby provides a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism; it is a prerequisite to self-understanding. (my emphasis)

Pfaff writes:

The noninterventionist alternative to the policies followed in the United States since the 1950s is to minimize interference in other societies and accept the existence of an international system of plural and legitimate powers and interests. One would think the idea that nations are responsible for themselves, and that American military interference in their affairs is more likely to turn small problems into big ones than to solve them, would appeal to an American public that believes in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets, considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and professes to be governed by constitutional order, pragmatism, and compromise.

A noninterventionist policy would shun ideology and emphasize pragmatic and empirical judgment of the interests and needs of this nation and of others, with reliance on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, giving particular attention to history, since nearly all serious problems between nations are recurrent or have important recurrent elements in them. The current crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Iran are all colonial or postcolonial in nature, which is generally ignored in American political and press discussion.

Such a noninterventionist policy would rely primarily on trade and the market, rather than territorial control or military intimidation, to provide the resources and energy the United States needs. Political and diplomatic action would be the primary and essential instruments of international relations and persuasion; military action the last and worst one, evidence of political failure. Military deployments abroad would be reexamined with particular attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the conflicts of clients, or reinforce intransigence in the complex dynamics of relations among nations such as the two Koreas, China, Taiwan, and Japan, where lasting solutions can only be found in political settlements between principals.

Finally, here's a comment about how whatever "exceptionalism" the US may have benefitted from, it hasn't been enough to save us from one of the perennial hazards of faulty leadership. From What is Bush and Cheney's Game vis-à-vis Iran? by Jeffrey Kimball History News Network 01/29/07:

How the mind of an individual occupying the office of the presidency works is, to say the least, noteworthy, because of the enormous power he (or she) can wield. How this mind works is even more significant when the president’s personality is highly unusual. George W. Bush's personality - as well as that of his vice-president—falls into this category. Bush and Cheney's slant on the nature of the world and foreign and military affairs is sufficiently idiosyncratic to make a difference in the calculus of foreign policy, adding an unpredictable, chaotic element to the standard formulas for war and diplomacy. The United States is not so exceptional that it has been immunized from the tragedies brought on by seriously flawed leaders throughout history who willfully, incompetently, or irrationally engaged in reckless threat-making. (my emphasis)

Tags: andrew bacevich, jeffrey kimball, us foreign policy, william pfaff