After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed (American Empire Project)

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Consider the toll in recent years from massively powerful hurricanes. In 2005, Katrina caused $125 billion in damage. In 2012, came Sandy: $75 billion. Twenty seventeen proved to be a banner year with Hurricanes Harvey ($125 billion), Irma ($65 billion), and Maria ($91 billion) occurring within a two-month period. These financial figures do not include the hundreds killed, thousands injured, and tens of thousands left homeless.34 Had such devastating losses resulted from enemy attack, Americans would have had no difficulty in situating them under the heading of national security failures, much like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. As it is, they are written off as misfortunes that fall beyond the writ of our trillion-dollar-per-annum national security apparatus. For any threat to which there is no obvious military response, the national security state gives itself a pass—the equivalent of a fire department refusing to respond to any emergency unless smoke and flames are evident.

Rachel Carson turned out to be light-years ahead of Kennedy’s men and all those “best and brightest” who have followed in the decades since. What Carson glimpsed in the early 1960s has now become plainly evident: To preserve the American way of life will require curbing its excesses. The countless decisions, large and small, made over the course of a century or more that define freedom in terms of indulging our appetite for consumption, mobility, and unlimited choice have created threats more dangerous than any faraway nation-state.35 We have become our own worst enemy.

The All-Volunteer Force created in response to the Nixon administration’s 1970 decision to abandon conscription tacitly acknowledged the collapse of the government’s authority to mandate military service. According to President Richard Nixon, “the unfairness of the present system” required its termination.20 More accurately, that system was imploding, leaving federal authorities with little choice but to junk it. The AVF represented a crash effort to devise a replacement.

the new arrangement had two tacit provisos. According to the first, white political elites, their ranks now including a smattering of Blacks, would continue to direct basic national security policy, deciding when and where it was necessary to fight. According to the second, actual combat fell under the jurisdiction of a racially mixed force that was disproportionately Black.

Powell was Barack Obama before Obama: cool, confident, and telegenic.

Operation Iraqi Freedom represented a desperate effort to preserve the authority and credibility of the “wise men” accustomed to presiding over the national security establishment—this at a time when “wise” was still largely synonymous with white and male.

Combined with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Gulf War elevated the prestige of the national security mandarins to new heights. No need for ordinary citizens to worry about national security or America’s safety or standing in the world: Members of an almost exclusively white policy elite had things well in hand.

With the establishment discredited and Trump’s efforts to devise an alternative approach to policy having produced nothing of value, the path to a new course of action informed by a heightened appreciation for the role of race in international affairs has presented itself. Call that approach Black-over-White. Such an approach will no longer classify crimes committed by twentieth-century colonial empires (including the United States) as any less abominable than crimes committed by twentieth-century totalitarians. Rather than viewing events through the lens of great power competition centered on Eurasia, it will highlight the exploitation and deprivation of peoples inhabiting what political elites once disparaged as the Third World, where third implied “less important” and carried connotations of racial subordination. Rather than talking of peace to justify preparations for war, Black-over-White might well mean a serious commitment to equality, social justice, and genuine peace.

Only by abandoning the pretense that the United States is immune to the temptations of empire will it be possible to avoid repeating the mistakes leading to the current crisis.

Bush did not literally send troops into Russia. Yet his attempted “liberation” of Iraq (even as another campaign in Afghanistan was ongoing) served as the functional equivalent. In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte counted on his seasoned and highly motivated Grande Armée and his own genius to overcome all obstacles. At the outset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hitler’s Wehrmacht was also a seasoned, highly motivated force, even if the Führer’s generalship did not rise to Napoleonic levels. In each case, however, the invaders bit off far more than they could chew. Preliminary success led not to decisive victory but to a debilitating war of attrition.

The quickest way to doom an empire is to expand when consolidation is the order of the day. Bonaparte in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 committed that cardinal imperial sin. So did Bush in 2003. None of those leaders recognized that his empire had reached its natural limits. None of them grasped the dangers of pressing further rather than firming up and consolidating what was already theirs.

Chief among the mythic knowns to which most Americans have reflexively subscribed are these: that history has an identifiable shape, direction, and destination; that it is purposeful, tending toward the universal embrace of values indistinguishable from American values; that pursuant to propagating those values, history confers on the United States unique responsibilities and prerogatives.

Over the course of U.S. history, American Exceptionalism had incorporated two themes. According to the first, America was to serve as an exemplar. According to the second, America was to liberate. Whether consciously or intuitively, Trump was now proposing to substitute a third theme: American Exceptionalism as a grant of privilege, providing that in any “deal” Americans should get more than their fair share. No more having their pockets picked. No more indulging free riders. No more getting played for suckers by conniving foreigners. This was American Exceptionalism stripped of any moral content.

The principal sponsor of the new revisionism, making its appearance just prior to the spasms of 2020, was the New York Times, the most influential publication in the nation, if not the world. Without firing a shot, revisionists thereby captured a primary citadel of the establishment.

The enterprise formally known as the United States of America derives its legitimacy from the Revolution of 1776, supposedly justified by self-evident truths and ostensibly undertaken in pursuit of inalienable rights, central among them a commitment to liberty. Nikole Hannah-Jones, director of the 1619 Project, now dismissed this as balderdash, asserting that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” In short, the purpose of the American Revolution was not to secure freedom but to deny it. The aim was to create not only a new historical narrative, but a new historical consciousness. This was revisionism on a breathtaking scale.

defining the matter at hand as a dispute between free thought and politically correct thought overlooked an altogether different and arguably more substantive dimension. To redefine the past in light of a convergence between the 1619 Project and the Black Lives Matter movement was necessarily to embark upon a wholesale refashioning of America’s role in the world.

In vowing to oust Donald Trump from the White House, Joe Biden acknowledged—and perhaps validated—this shift in priorities. Early in his run for the presidency, Biden was still reciting clichés, promising to restore the nation to its accustomed place as acknowledged leader of the global order. By August 2020, in accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party, he had embraced a revised version of the History That Matters. Rather than promising to save the world, he now presented himself as an agent of domestic renewal. Indeed, his explicit vow to save “the soul of the nation” hinted at his own version of an America First agenda even as he steered clear of that radioactive phrase.17

Between 1989, when history supposedly ended, and 2020, when Americans were encountering more history than they could comfortably digest, the nation had endured a plethora of unwelcome surprises. During that short interval, history resumed with a vengeance, signaling its return by laying various ambushes into which Americans blindly stumbled. By whatever measure—lives lost or ruined, businesses destroyed, trust in basic institutions eviscerated—the resulting costs proved to be enormous.

If ever a people deserved recognition as history’s spoiled brats, it is the privileged tribe known as Americans, especially members of the generation fortunate enough to have been born at the dawn of the American Century.

For Jews, never again refers to the Holocaust and (for many) to the requirement to maintain in Eretz Israel an indestructible sanctuary for the entire Jewish people. For Americans, especially for those who are not Jewish, never again warns against the United States ever shirking its responsibilities. Whereas the war against the Nazis threatened Jews with extermination, it delivered America to the apex of global power. For Israeli governments, never again establishes survival as the ne plus ultra of statecraft. For the U.S. government, never again is a call to action.

Soon after World War II, this summons formed the basis for a durable foreign policy consensus. As a conscious expression of historical learning, that consensus centered on avoiding any recurrence of the mistakes made during the 1930s in belatedly and ineffectually responding to the gathering danger posed by Hitler. The United States would permanently forswear isolationism. It would maintain at the ready mighty armed forces. It would never appease. It would come to the aid of those victimized by aggression. It would resist evil.

Much like the French General Staff that waited passively while the Wehrmacht prepared to attack, the dominant factions in both political parties and the most influential voices in the commentariat remain imprisoned by an obsolete mental framework. Still, identifying principles that just might move the United States in a more positive direction remains possible.

For the foreseeable future, leading the world will have to take a back seat to repairing the nation. The French Army’s assumption in 1940 that the next war would be just like the last one paved the way for failure. American leaders shackled to the assumption that the global distribution of power created by the end of the Cold War in 1989 will exist forever and a day invite a comparable outcome. Repairing itself at home will require the United States to acknowledge that its brief turn as sole superpower has not only ended but that its passing finds the country facing difficulties that in 1989 were unimaginable.

As an alternative to a failed strategy of militarized hegemony, the United States should move toward a posture of sustainable self-sufficiency. As a basis of strategy, sustainable self-sufficiency will maximize U.S. freedom of action. It will acknowledge the changing nature and distribution of global power. And it will take into account the lurking prospect of environmental cataclysm.

A strategy of sustainable self-sufficiency prioritizes real and immediate threats over distant and hypothetical ones. It focuses on things that directly endanger the well-being of the American people. It posits that proximity, whether temporal or geographic, correlates with importance.

U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East should henceforth de-emphasize military presence in favor of diplomatic engagement, working to solve problems rather than exacerbating them.

Threats to Canadian territorial sovereignty as the Arctic melts, for example, matter more to the United States than any danger Russia may pose to Ukraine.9 The Mexican government’s inability to secure its borders and deal with drug cartels poses a greater danger to Americans than does Saudi Arabia’s rivalry with Iran or Israel’s difficulties with Hamas or Hezbollah.10

A military establishment charged with doing less will be able to get by with less. Cutting the Pentagon’s budget will free up money for those agencies charged with providing immediate day-to-day protection to the American people. Examples include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Each of these plays an essential and underappreciated role in enabling Americans to flourish and enjoy freedom where they live.

Other requirements should include the ability of government at all levels to anticipate and respond to climate-exacerbated natural disasters, both at home and throughout the NASZ. For political elites keen for the United States to lead, here is a great opportunity: America can lead the world in demonstrating the benefits of genuine preparedness.

A strategy of sustainable self-sufficiency means shrinking the navy in favor of a larger and more capable coast guard.13 It means terminating plans to field a costly arsenal of new planet-destroying nuclear weapons in favor of expanding the production of planet-friendly renewable energy. Instead of spending billions of dollars to develop a next-generation strategic bomber—estimated cost $550 million per aircraft—it means modernizing and expanding the aging air fleet the Forest Service relies on to fight fires of ever-increasing scope and intensity.14 Rather than relentlessly pursuing a way of life based on consumption and waste, it means taking seriously a collective obligation to bequeath a livable planet to future generations.