A well-functioning democracy depends upon a wide area of agreement between the political elite and the average voter. American democracy functioned very effectively from about 1933 through 1965, and continued to function at least adequately for at least a quarter-century after that. That applied particularly to foreign policy. Presidents defined, and the bulk of the public accepted, an enormous, unprecedented role in the world for the United States. Threatened by the Vietnam War, that consensus re-emerged with somewhat different ground rules in its wake. During the last quarter century it has completely fallen apart, and the United States may losing the world role that enjoyed for the last two-thirds or so of the twentieth century.
I showed in No End Save Victory how Franklin Roosevelt convinced the American people that they had to prepare for and fight the Second World War. He saw that war on the horizon by 1937 at the latest and probably a few years earlier, but he discovered that the country was not willing to face up to that possibility. The fall of France in the spring of 1940 changed everything. The nation accepted his analysis that a German victory over Great Britain--widely anticipated in the summer of 1940, and a possibility to be reckoned with for at least eighteen months after that--would put the western hemisphere at risk. The Germans had leapfrogged from Germany into Norway before invading France, and they could use their air power to mount similar operations into Iceland, Greenland, and then Labrador or Newfoundland. Japan also took advantage of Germany's victory over France and Holland to threaten their Far Eastern possessions, and in September 1940 Germany, Japan and Italy signed an alliance against the United States. In response Congress agreed to double the size of the Navy by 1944, increase military aircraft production by orders of magnitude, and pass a peacetime draft. Those measures eventually enabled the United States and its allies to launch decisive offensives against Germany and Japan in the middle of 1944 and end the war a year later. Meanwhile, Roosevelt also sold Congress and the American people on the idea of the United Nations.
Harry Truman initially presided over wartime demobilization and focused on domestic affairs, but in 1947 he persuaded the nation to make a costly investment in the future of Europe with aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan. Still, the defense budget fell fairly steadily during his first term. Events in late 1949 and 1950 transformed the situation. First, the USSR exploded an atomic bomb. Then North Korea attacked South Korea--a move that the entire world assumed had been directed by Stalin. (It had in fact been approved by him, although it was Kim Il-Sung's idea.) Governments in both Western Europe and the United States immediately concluded that Stalin might make a similar attack in Europe at any moment, and the US began mobilizing for a possible new conflict on the scale of the Second World War. The country accepted that this was necessary, and as the Korean War dragged on, the most numerous dissenters asked whether an immediate atomic attack on the USSR would be best. The big war did not come, but the same view of the Soviet threat persisted into the early 1960s. Eisenhower shifted the defense budget away from ground and naval forces and towards a greater reliance on nuclear weapons of all kinds, but also expanded US commitments around the world. In 1960 neither Kennedy nor Nixon questioned any of these assumptions.
The Vietnam War soured visible parts of the Boom generation on intervention around the world, and led in 1973 to the end of the military draft. I have written here before that I believe that to have been a catastrophe--not for foreign policy reasons, but because the drafted military was a great force for unity among our population and did a remarkable job of training uneducated Americans of all kinds for modern life. The war also persuaded administrations from Ford through Clinton that ground wars had to be avoided or wound up very quickly. Yet Reagan apparently had the nation behind him when he revived the rhetoric and some of the strategy of the tensest parts of the Cold War, and he was vindicated, of course, by the collapse of Communism under Bush I.
After the fall of Communism the military downplayed possible war with other great powers and much of the military was significantly downsized--but every President from Bush through Obama endorsed the idea that the United States was now the only superpower and had a unique responsibility to shape events around the world. Until 2001, foreign policy generally remained a secondary issue. After 9/11, however, George W. Bush called upon the nation to embark upon a new crusade comparable in scope and duration to the Second World War to defeat terror and eliminate hostile regimes around the world. Barack Obama toned down the rhetoric but did not abandon his assumptions, temporarily withdrawing all American troops from Iraq but increasing the effort in Afghanistan. But by the time that Bush left office in the midst of a financial collapse, the public had lost interest in this new mission--and in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency as the first candidate bluntly to challenge all the assumptions of post-1945 American foreign policy.
Partly because Trump continued to rely on establishment figures in leading national security roles for some time, he did not pull away from major involvements overseas until the very end of his term, when he began, but did not complete, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He did however repudiate or undermine Obama's most important diplomatic initiatives--the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of relations with Cuba. Trump has now run the Republican party for eight years, however, and House Republicans have now blocked aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for its life as a nation. The national security establishment still believes in defending free nations against aggression, including both Ukraine and Taiwan (whose status as a nation is less clear), but that establishment, led by the president, has abandoned the hard work of persuading the country that it is right. Like our journalistic and academic establishments, our foreign policy establishment believes so deeply in its own righteousness that it treats any opposition as the opposition's fault.
Yes, our eight decades of presumed responsibility for what happens all over the world has led us into terribly destructive, divisive mistakes, and we have often betrayed principles such as national sovereignty that we claimed to stand for. But it did allow most of the industrialized world to thrive in peace. It also gave the nation something it desperately needs: the sense of a common mission to which we can all contribute. The end of that role will mark the end of an heroic era in US history.
2 comments:
FDR’s foreign policy was remarkably idealistic. In addition to persuading his domestic constituency to prepare for WWII, he worked to persuade his would-be allies abroad to commit to ending colonialism and to establish the UN.
The creation of a huge intelligence community and military-industrial complex laid the foundation for a deeply corrupt and incompetent foreign policy, which has reached extremes in Ukraine and Israel that may well be exceeded by a war with China. Ukraine is far from a free people seeking independence — billions were spent creating “color revolutions” hostile to Russia and American political elites made a hobby out of profiting from the poverty and corruption of the poorest, most corrupt country in Europe. The foreign policy establishment working thru the institutions of government has provoked a war with Russia that has prompted the latter to revive its military capabilities at scale while collapsing the economy of Germany.
In Israel, the U.S. is backing a genocide, setting its tattered moral credibility afire.
Agreeing with above comment and having read other articles by increasingly cynical, dispirited souls it could even be seen that from day 1 of our country and before that, that the elite manipulated the narrative to get into power, a Canada type solution might have done well enough, and from there expanded their power grab into the Americas and further. The Founding might have been the original sin as it broke from tradition and home creating something entirelly its own. Like early Christianity was purely jewish subsect but became something else and conquered Europe and beyond. America has likely hit its peak in global domination. Similar to all other great expansionist powers who grew, became corrupt, then receded, America will also decline into a more natural harmony with the world as it becomes organically integrated into the whole over time, having developed its landmass and absorbed immigrants and stabilized its ethnic composition and stopped its economic, technological and cultural dynamism. The old world is bouncing back into balance with American progress and the whole will in the end be more like the permanent competition between France, England and Germany over many centuries.
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