The Books of My Life: The Limits of Power

The United States, born out of a revolt against monarchical and parliamentary "tyranny"-- taxation without representation--has long had a collective sense of its own uniqueness, its own chosenness, and its own destiny. For many Americans the United States, the first new nation according to Seymour Martin Lipset, was a light unto a world dominated by tyrannies of various kinds including monarchical, imperial, and theocratic. For most Americans the United States was a shining example unto a world in chains, a city on a hill that showed that it was possible to throw off the chains of political, economic, and religious oppression that bound them and start anew in a wilderness that, of course, wasn't really a wilderness.

Paradoxically, the new United States of America, a self proclaimed empire of liberty, a state born out of the need for freedom from tyranny, was also an empire and hence, at least potentially, tyrannical. It was an empire born out of geographical imperialism. It was an empire that spread from its east coast hearths into indigenous lands beyond the Appalachians, into the equally imperial French lands beyond the Appalachians, Spanish lands to its south and to its west, and Mexican lands to its east and southwest throughout the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. It was an empire that spread in a variety of  ways including by treaty, by robbery, by flim flammery, by purchase, much of it coerced, and by military might. It was a new empire that warned other older empires in its Monroe Doctrine (an imperial doctrine that parallels the near beyond of imperial Russia) that it and it alone guaranteed the "freedom" of the Americas from the tyranny of imperialism, a doctrine which, at the time that it was proclaimed was an act of hubris, self-righteousness, and self-satisfaction, a treaty that only became a reality when President Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary to it, a corollary added after the United States had become the dominant political, economic, and cultural imperial hegemon in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine also made the US the cop on the American block a role the US has played ever since in Latin America and the Caribbean  where it has "intervened" on a number of occasions to "lend a helping hand" to those "poor backward nations" that just don't look like or act like chosen America.

As an empire born out of the British empire and fed by the same ideologies of uniqueness, chosenness, and mission of the mother country and impacted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by modernity including bureaucratisation, industrialisation, rationalisation and the bureaucratisation and the industrialisation of the military, the United States would eventually come to mirror the very European imperial great powers they hoped to liberate themselves from. In the late nineteenth century the United States, after its war with Spain, spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, the latter in response, in part, to another rising empire, the empire of Japan. As the empire of liberty spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, an empire that had political, economic, cultural, and military dimensions, American elites made sure that those who lived in the Spanish lands into which the empire of liberty spread didn't have the same liberties and freedoms that those citizens of god's chosen had. The empire of liberty was, after all, an empire of Anglo-Saxon liberty, a major reason why the United States wanted, at times, usually in periods in which there were tensions between the British and the Americans, to annex British North America and Canada to it but not the Spanish and Portuguese regions of the Americas beyond a few islands of "strategic" naval importance in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The Great War and World War II drew the United States increasingly into the global affairs of other European empires. The empire of liberty helped liberate Europe from supposed Prussian militarist tyranny in World War I and it helped liberate Europe and the Pacific from Nazi and Japanese tyranny in World War II. After the war it helped Western Europe and Japan recover and rebuild, helping turn Western Europe and Japan into political, economic, and cultural mirrors of itself in the process. This American helping hand would have long term consequences for America's economy. After World War II the empire of liberty, which was always an empire just like any other empires of the past despite the exceptionalism rhetoric, was an empire, along with other empire "less agreeable" empire, the USSR, helped decide not only the fate of nations and states--shades of the Congress of Vienna--but, as one of the cops on the world block and eventually the dominant cop on the global block, world cops that helped ensure that the world the empires created behaved itself in the way that the great powers thought it should. If the countries of the world didn't obey their “beneficent" parents they were, of course, taken to the wood shed by Big Daddy Smith America and Little Uncle Jones, the USSR

The post-World War II era saw the empire of liberty confront another "tyrannical" empire that trampled on the political, economic, and religious freedoms of its people and which threatened, according to true believing ideologues and manipulative demagogues the freedoms of Americans. As is always the case with great power interactions the Cold War, as the sometimes cold and sometimes hot conflict between the US and the USSR was called, was a tit for tat war. It was a war in which each side in that struggle mirrored, to some extent, the other. Both the US and USSR, for instance, were modern bureaucratic states that were, as a consequence, oligarchic, they were both states that had expanded into frontiers, they were both states with notions of their own uniqueness, chosenness, and mission to the world, and they were both states with military-industrial complexes that fed the Cold War each was fighting. When the American imperial Smith's, for instance, united its Atlantic allies or clients into a military alliance the imperial Jones's of the USSR had to follow suit creating in the process an alliance of its own in Eastern and Middle Europe. This is not to say that there weren't important differences between the two great powers who now fancied themselves superpowers (a notion of empire, I suppose, suitable for the comic book age), for there were important differences between the two. The USSR, for instance, was a more unipolar centralised bureaucratic state while the US, though dominated by its economic bureaucracy, had a political bureaucracy that once upon a time, at least on occasion, had a degree of autonomy,  and, on occasion, usually periods of domestic crisis, asserted this autonomy.

To deal with perceived Soviet geographical, political, economic, and cultural ambitions the United States adopted a strategy of containment and deterrence, strategies indebted, to some extent, to the writings of American social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr if in a more manichean and simplistically vulgar way than Niebuhr often intended. The US used a variety of strategies, including the threat of nuclear attack, economic aid or bribery, and covert operations, strategies also used by the Soviets, of course, to contain the Soviet empire and deter it from further expansion. As the Cold War thawed with the death of Stalin, the United States and the USSR added detente, a live and let live policy, to their arsenal of interactions with the USSR but always with an eye on gaining some advantage over the enemy other, something Nixon and Kissinger were able to initiate particularly thanks to their opening to Communist China.

The US, though its demagogues generally refused to admit this over the years, was always the dominant of the post WWII superpowers and hence had major advantages in the Cold War. It was economically, technologically, and militarily superior to the more technologically backward USSR. By the post-Stalin 1950s, in fact, technology was playing an increasingly important role in the war of words of the Cold War even if for many the struggle was more of a morality play than anything else. By the 1950s the superpower contest was increasingly being fought out on consumption terrain, something symbolised by the kitchen debate between American vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, a debate in which Nixon touted the  technological and hence economic superiority of America thanks to its technologically “sophisticated" consumer society. By doing this Nixon helped create a variant of the Cold War, a variant in which the notion of the freedom to consume consumer goods increasingly became freedom itself. The Cold War, at least on one level, had become a war in which the plentiful consumer society of the United States was counterpointed to its opposite, the austere and rationing USSR, geerally eliding, of course, the fact that the USSR had been devastated materially and physically by World War II. Demagoguery on the March.

Historian Andrew Basievich, in his The Limits to Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), makes much of the conflation of freedom and the freedom to consume in post-World War II America. For Basievich this linkage in the wake of crises associated with guns and butter Vietnam era America, the oil crises of the 1970s--both of which brought inflation--America's transformation from a creditor nation to a debtor nation and its policy of increasing military spending while cutting taxes, maintaining the welfare state, and building up the military--a delirium Bacevich traces to the faux conservative Reagan era--gave birth  to a profligate America living beyond its means thanks to its lines of credit. At the same time as a profligate America came into being, argues Bacevich, Americans too began living beyond their means thanks to their individual lines of credit and their credit cards, credit cards that became increasingly easy to obtain in the wake of the Reagan era deregulation of financial institutions of various stripes.

This ideological linking of freedom with consumption, in turn, argues Basievich, gave rise to a second crises in post-1960s and post-oil crises America, namely, the necessity for politicians of all stripes, if they wanted to get elected, re-elected, and attain or maintain power, to play the we will give you what you want card again and again in order to get elected or re-elected and hence acquire or maintain power. This makes it increasingly difficult, according to Basievich, for politicians to deal rationally and realistically with the ever increasing debts and deficits of a US living off the credit of others And this, in turn, has, says Basievich, led to an increasingly delusional, dissembling, and corrupt American political culture.

Closely linked to an America living beyond its means crisis are two other crises, claims Bacievich, a political crisis and, by extension, a military crisis. In the wake of World War II, claims Bacevich, the United States morphed into a military-industrial-national security state dominated by an imperial presidency that linked economic and political oligarchs in a number of ways. Many corporations, for instance, though Basevich doesn't really explore this, increasingly relied on research subsidies and government contract subsidies for military weapons creating a socialist welfare state in which wealth was redistributed from taxpayers to wealthy American corporations in the name of national security. It was a national security state that increasingly claimed that any enemy of the US was an enemy of freedom including the freedom to consume.

In an American dominated by consumption practises and ideologies, argues Bacevich, the imperial presidency increasingly, and even more increasingly after 9/11, used its military might to assure, by "convincement" or coercion, that the American way of life and the American way of consumption continued despite threats to the empire of consumption out there in the wider world. As a consequence the Cold War doctrine of containment and deterrence withered away to be replaced in the War on Terror and its dogma of the preemptive first strike. Take them out before they can take you out became the mantra of the warhawks of the war on terror ensconced in the pleasant confines of the imperial presidency and who, of course, rarely, if ever, took part in the battles of the war for "freedom". This led to an attack on Iraq that was justified by a tissue of lies because the warhawks wanted Saddam Husssein gone. Accompanying this policy change were related declines in the American willingness to engage in diplomacy, a decline in American consultation with its allies, and an increase in the arrogance and hubris of America's unelected policy"experts" that advised the American imperial president, an arrogance grounded ultimately in the American civil religion.

Bacievich has written an interesting, enlightening, and well argued introduction to post-WWII and post-9/11 American imperial policy. I appreciated Bacevich's neo-Nieburhianism. The Limits of Power is not only an empirical analysis of the American consumer and national secutiry state but a neo-Nieburhian jeremiad against the use of the military as a big stick to to help maintain the American consumer oriented way of life. Bacevich urges America to return to a more Niebuhrian containment and deterrence strategy, one that opts for diplomacy over military force but, at the same time, is conscious that military force might have to be used when necessary but in a way consistent with the doctrine of just war. I appreciated his exploration of the nationalist religious faith that undergirds the American sense of being special, of being unique, of being exceptional, and of being called by god, nature, or history to spread the gospel of Americanism to the rest of the world. I appreciated the fact that he was not afraid to point out the obvious hypocrisies of the US including forcing austerity on others but not on itself and its specious justification for dropping nuclear bombs of Japanese civilians during World War II, the it will end the war quicker rationalisation. I appreciated Bacevich noting that the US, after 9/11, discovered that Central Asia was, or so it claimed, essential to American security. I only wish that he had also noted that by redefining Central Asian nations, many of them formerly part of the USSR, as essential to American security and the continuation of the American way of life, the US simultaneously used this as a means to try to box its old enemy, Russia. This get Russia policy, by the way, whether by overt and covert means, has also been at play in the Ukraine, Russia's near beyond, since the disintegration of the USSR and fed into a number of other tensions between the US and Russia. I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of the process by which the freedom to consume was incorporated into American notions of liberty and freedom. I appreciated him asking readers to think about whether the freedom of nations and individuals to be profligate is a freedom too far. Finally, I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of how the US morphed from a creditor nation to debtor nation and the consequences of this affluenza without, apparently, a vaccine to help to fight it or at least contain it. Whether the US can continue to subsidise the profligate American way of life while running in the red is a question that needs to be asked and addressed. On the other hand, I suppose the US can keep on borrowing in order to subsidise the American way of life as long as someone is willing to lend it monies at interest. 

There are a few issues I had with Bacevich's book. Bacievich could, for instance, have put American profligacy and its cultural and ideological scaffolding, individualist narcissism, in the broader context of the rise of modernity and postmodernity. He could have explored American exceptionalism more broadly and comparatively. The American civil religion, after all, is a lot like other forms of exceptionalism around the globe, including that of Canada and New Zealand, with their ethnocentric notions of superiority. When allied with imperialism, these forms of ethnocentrism can be hazardous to human health as the history of empires since Ancient Sumeria show. While Bacievich rightly notes that the American civil or civic faith is a religion with its own universalised articles of faith and its own transcendent catechism to which "real" and "true" Americans are expected to conform, he doesn't really deal with the fact that a fetishised modern capitalism has been central to the American public faith for some time. I wish Bacevich had explored in greater detail how the narcissistic American consumer society links up not only with the imperial presidency but with the American corporate welfare state, a welfare state that invariably promotes weapons production and wars. I wish Bacevich had explored how the impact of deindustrialisation and globalisation with its cheap products made by cheap labour in semi-peripheral countries helped transform America from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. In many ways the cheaper consumer goods that flowed into the US from semi-peripheral states allowed the American middle class and working class to continue consuming despite stagnation in wages and a decline in wages and benefits in a postmodern America now dominated by the poor paying and even poorer available benefits service or retail sector. Needless to say, the increasing importation of consumer goods from sermi-peripheral countries into the US and the decline of manufacturing in the United States hasn't done much for America's trade imbalance. I should note before I go that these criticism may be a bit unfair since The Limits to Power ia a short book of just over two hundred pages which is aimed at a more common denominator than academia but they need to be said.

Whither America? Bacevich hopes for a transformation that allows America and Americans to reflect on the disease of affluenza that afflicts it and them and to reflect on the arrogance that afflicts America and Americans as it did other empires before it. Such reflections, he hopes, will push America and Americans to adopt more responsible and rational monetary policies and to tamp down on the arrogance and parochialism associated with the American civil religion and hence American foreign policy. Cultural transformations, however, often require an economic, political, cultural, demographic,or geographic crisis in order to stimulate change and even then culture is often resistant to change as cultural anthropologists have known for nearly a century. Perhaps a coming debt and deficit crises will make America and Americans more reflexive, more humble, less arrogant, less bullying, more good citizens of the world, and more financially responsible. On the other hand, if the recession of 2008, also driven by hubris, the hubris of many in the investment bank industry that had convinced themselves that they had conquered risk through the innovation of hybrid derivatives (the social and cultural construction of reality), is a guide, the hope that America and Americans will adopt more rational domestic and foreign policies is, to paraphrase Rupert Giles, probably doomed. After all, the 2008 bust, bad as it was, did not come close to effecting a cure for American affluenza because the federal government doled out American taxpayer monies to bail out the too big to fail investment banks who had made bad investments, something that should in itself make us question the faith many have in the rationality of human beings. After a period of woe is us and woe is me America and Americans returned to their happy faced merry consuming ways, just as George Walker Bush had urged them to do after 9/11, and put the re-regulation of the hubris filled profligate investment banks on hold. No more Glass-Steagall for us, I guess. Sorry Oliver, only gruel for you.