‘орумы јрктогеи (Geopolitik): јтлантизм и евразийство: The Empire of Wrong: United States and the Manifest Destiny Doctrine

13480: By vonKreitor on ¬торник, Ќо€брь 13, 2001 - 06:19:

MANIFEST DESTINY Anders Stephanson FALLING INTO THE WORLD 19141990 The First World War put a brutal end to any residual ideas of civilizational imperialism or peaceful laissezfaire capitalism without borders. The colonial moment had in fact already peaked by the time Roosevelt created the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, though it would take another half century before liberation struggles and decolonization recast domination into other forms. By 1903, too, the aging Herbert Spencer had become a disillusioned man. The rationality of capitalism had turned in unforeseen directions, developing into everstronger states with glittering new military machines. Strangely, international capitalism was becoming an arena of militarism and intensifying conflict among Great Powers, not at all the predicted destiny of growing interdependence, peace, and harmony. Spencer did not live to see the ensuing denouement, the implosion and explosion of "civilization" in generalized war. From then on, the "West" could no longer be imagined in quite the same manner, nor international capitalism. This new state of affairs required, or should have required, reconsideration of the American place in the world. A serious but abortive attempt in that vein was indeed made, by Woodrow Wilson. American foreign relations ever since have been marked, one way or another, by his attempt to accomplish the dual task of bringing the United States into the world while maintaining purity and distance. In these final remarks, therefore, I shall consider Wilson's project and then, very sketchily, follow the vicissitudes of American "destiny" during the twentieth century against that background ending with a reflection on the period after the Second World War when the United States began to think of itself as leader of the free world. 2 Before his presidency, Wilson had showed no signs of reforming zeal in foreign affairs. He had supported the war against Spain, but had had next to nothing to say about it or international politics generally. A single memorandum, some scattered remarks revealing nothing so much as a strong desire to be safely in the middle, an inkling that the experience of war had opened up possibilities for better national government at home: rather a meager sum total for a wellknown scholar of political systems. But Wilson's orientation was actually parochial, his views those of a markedly puritanical man, stirred intellectually, it seemed, chiefly by the problems of comparative administration, like Calvin indeed a man who believed administration on behalf of the Divine (and the "people" in Wilson's case) was the Christian duty par excellence: not much there, one would have thought, by way of raw material for a worldhistorical figure. If anything stood out, it was his fixation on order and his stubborn belief that humankind was essentially reasonable, by which he imagined that, given the proper chance, people would always settle differences through discussion and negotiation. People (and nations) who were unreasonable and failed to abide by openly agreed rules were thus outlaws (and, by implication, sinners). This is how, later on, he came to read Bolshevism: an illegitimate minority in a disorderly, dissolved society, a "poison" and an "infection." His historical perspective was otherwise the conventional one for a man of his background: the United States was uniquely blessed; war and revolution were bad and unhealthy, organic, orderly progress was conversely good and healthy; civilization and enlightenment, the "democratic empire," would one day rule the world; the United States, with some modifications, offered the best example, and its history was a key to understanding universal history; the civilized, meanwhile, should govern inferiors; (contradictorily) human beings are inherently good and will do the right thing if allowed their just liberty and orderly selfgovernment; and certain individuals and nations are bound to lead because they have been privy to, or are embodiments of, the deeper providential purposes of history. Christianity was for him more than the cornerstone of civilization it appeared to be for Roosevelt; it was an alwayspresent existential fact, pervading his language and dominating his outlook. After all, he was the son of a formidable Presbyterian minister. Wilson's messianic passages about the League of Nations read like a throwback to an earlier era of blood and redemption, the language of transcendence. He was not merely being prophetic. He was being apocalyptic in a seventeenthcentury manner. It would be overly hasty, however, to reiterate the simple contrast between Roosevelt the realist and Wilson the idealist. It illuminates little. Teddy Roosevelt would certainly have done a much better job at Versailles with the same program; Wilson, as John Maynard Keynes said afterward, was singularly "incompetent" for a statesman "in the agilities of the council chamber." Technical skill aside, though, Wilson was not averse to the brazen use of power. He intervened in Latin America, Mexico above all, far more than the imperial Roosevelt. Nor can Wilson's reform of international power politics, the "new world order" to use his term, be reduced to sheer idealism. He had hoped, in fact, that the United States would be able to dictate this program to exhausted participants at the end of the war. His millenarian rhetoric was also tempered philosophically by an admiration for the gradualist conservatism of Edmund Burke. Yet Wilson's new world order was certainly a regenerative, liberal one, and it was to be led, in no uncertain terms, by the United States. Here he really did differ profoundly from Roosevelt, who was inclined, in Croly's neoHamiltonian terms, to see no "essential incompatibility" between the United States and the other powers within Western civilization. Young and vigorous, the American nation would perhaps one day become the New Rome, the latest or even last incarnation of the continuous movement of this civilization; it was not, as it would be for Wilson, a New Israel, a nation elect, messianically destined to give law and order to the world in the form of collective security. Wilson's remains the most quintessentially American attempt, the purest and most puritanical attempt, to recast international relations in the twentieth century; and this may also be the reason it is still very much with us. Our interest, then, lies in the nature of this Wilsonian liberalism with its combination of Christian destiny and collective security; and in the disputes over the meaning of "true Americanism." The overwhelming majority view in 1914 was that the United States should stay out of the war. Wilson shared this position but was unusual in his conviction, stated forthrightly by 1916, that the international system would have to be reformed completely under American leadership afterward. Though Anglophilic, he wanted the United States to appear impeccably neutral so as to be able to play the role of the arbiter and get the belligerents to peace negotiations based on the premise of no gains. Roosevelt, on the other hand, argued (vociferously) for immediate military "preparedness" with a view to intervene. The war had rocked to the core his conception of the world. His response was to blame Germany, whose conduct against neutral, civilized Belgium he found reprehensible beyond belief. Imperial Germany had clearly regressed to the despotic stage, and the manifest duty of the United States was therefore to do all in its might to crush the Kaiser. For righteousness, as Roosevelt had once lectured Carl Schurz, always took precedence over peace. To be neutral between right and wrong was to be wrong. Above all, one was not to be timid in the face of wrong. Roosevelt hated timidity and so he came to hate Wilson, whom he considered the quintessence of timidity. But, then again, the Rough Rider died in early 1919, before Wilson's final, herculean crusade for the new League of Nations, a crusade that would physically cripple the President. If Roosevelt got nowhere with the issue of military preparedness, Wilson was not successful as a neutral peacemaker. Meanwhile, American insistence on freedom of trade put increasing strain on relations with Germany. Britain, as master of the seas, was the chief beneficiary of commerce; Germany responded with submarine warfare, inevitably sinking U.S. shipping. The issue was not resolved. In 1917, Germany removed it altogether by announcing unrestricted submarine warfare on the assumption that the United States would not, in case of war, be able to mobilize quickly enough to be a factor. This was a bad error. The United States went to war, mobilized, and its forces eventually tipped the scales. The decision to enter was facilitated by the liberal February Revolution in Russia which toppled the tsarist regime and thus made way (in the American view) for a "democratic" front against autocratic, imperial Germany and AustriaHungary. What had looked like the usual European slaughterhouse in 191.4 had gradually stood forth, in Wilson's view, as a battle for democracy as well as for a completely new kind of international relations, to be based on collective security instead of balanceofpower politics. Wilson was of course quite justified in indicting the system that had produced, or at least allowed, the most egregious display of butchery in history. A very nasty surprise, however, would soon give his project a great deal more urgency: the advent of Bolshevism in Russia, October 1917. For not only did Lenin's regime take Russia out of the war, it set forth a rigorously revolutionary critique of, and threat to, the system Wilson wanted to reform. Collective security, henceforth, was to be the antidote both to "the irresponsible politics of the old world" and to Bolshevism, its monstrous stepchild. The new system would thus replace secret diplomacy with open agreements; feature selfdetermination as opposed to territorial wheeling and dealing; guarantee the independent status of small states; open up the world economically and dismantle exclusive spheres of influence; function on a basis of moral norms and the common interest in agreement; and confront potential transgressors with concerted power. And on that note the war ended on November 11, 1918, Germany capitulating in the belief that the peace would follow Wilsonian precepts. But the ensuing Treaty of Versailles of 1919 deviated in many ways from these principles; it suffered, indeed, from being neither crushingly punitive nor Wilsonian. It did, however, include as its centerpiece his proposal for a League of Nations. He had pitched it, not accidentally, as a "covenant." It was to be, in his words, "a combination of the world for arbitration and discussion," a It wholesale moral clearinghouse." Since the criterion of self governing rationality would determine who was to be allowed membership, Russia obviously did not qualify; and Germany would be on "probation." It was a universalist organization that was not universal. In the fall of 1919, Wilson launched an epic campaign across the United States to get the treaty ratified. He was appealing not to the Senate but the public and thus wanted to invest his international reform with a specifically American meaning. So he resorted to the format, by now familiar, of a Protestant exhortation to fulfill the obligations that divine destiny so plainly had put before the American nation: УThe isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because, by the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power, we have become a determining factor in the history of man kind. And after you have become a determining factor you cannot remain isolated, whether you want to or not. Isolation ended by the processes of history, not by the processes of our independent choice, and the processes of history merely f fulfilled the prediction of the men who founded our republic.Ф Yet, as always, there was in fact a choice, the negative choice of turning away from one's obligation to "spiritual leadership" and denying that one had become "a determining factor" in world history. The United States was special, Wilson asserted, because it had "seen visions that other nations have not seen." Thus, prophetically, it had always been "destined to set a responsible example to all the world of what free Government is and can do for the maintenance of right standards, both national and international." Its mission, then, was "to be the mediator of peace," to be Уthe light of the world,Ф and "to lead the world in the assertion of the rights of peoples and the rights of free nations." (And since Wilson imagined himself the embodiment of America, all this was really a mirror image of how he saw his own personal role in history.) Turning away from one's deeper mission, in short, was to leave the rudderless masses of the world to their disorderly and darkish fate in the wake of the frightful war, when in fact they were yearning for American direction. The stakes were high, "the v whole freedom of the world" and "the moral force of right" depending on "the choice of America." The moment for redemption, then, was at hand, for the nation was "in the presence of the realization of the destiny which we have awaited," its "manifest destiny." It stands to reason that choosing apostasy at such a critical juncture would not go unpunished. There would then come a moment when, in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world. By deliberately focusing on apocalyptic language and narrative form, I have distorted by omission the actual content of Wilson's message, which contained much pertinent and often persuasive argument about the workings of the treaty and the League. This should be remembered. What I want to show, however, is the importance of his millenarian commitment to the prophetic role of the United States. Unlike other nations, as he asserted, America "marches with its eyes not only forward but with its eyes lifted to the distances of history, to the great events which are slowly culminating, in the Providence of God, in the lifting of civilization to new levels and new achievements." Beyond his attachment to the mission of "America," what of his new world order of reason? It deserves a comment or two. First, an antihistoricist notion of universal right such as Wilson's eliminates the geopolitical or spatial component of international politics: what is true is true everywhere at any given time. Interest and policy orientation have nothing to do, in theory, with history or geographical configuration. In this, Wilson differed radically from Roosevelt, who was extremely sensitive to spatial policy "flows," especially naval ones, and, sometimes, to the "situatedness" of norms as well. More important, however, an order or organization supposed to embody the absolute principles of Right, the universal interests of humankind, tends to render any opposition to it inhuman or criminal. Wars to eradicate deviance from Right dehumanize the enemy. It is partly against this background that one must see the extraordinary fury of domestic repression, public and private, legal and extralegal, that took place in the United States once the country had entered the war: loyalty programs, savagery against "hyphenated" Americans and perceived dissenters from the American way of life, even lynchings. Radical movements were destroyed. Criticism of the war became illegal, and numerous people were imprisoned. Neither the experience of the Second World War nor even of the McCarthyist 195os compares to the repression of domestic dissent during World War I. Wilson himself sensed no contradiction here in his odes to democracy and the popular voice, just as he saw no contradiction in arguing for public diplomacy while conducting it completely by himself, and just as he saw no contradiction in denouncing "imperialism" and intervention in the affairs of other nations while sending armies into Mexico and revolutionary Russia. 3 In 1899, Henry Cabot Lodge led the fight in the Senate to get McKinley's peace treaty with Spain ratified. A mere third of the Senate, he warned, should not be allowed to "repudiate the President and his action before the whole world." On a matter of such importance, it would be tantamount to "the humiliation of the United States in the eyes of mankind" and mark the American people as "incapable of great affairs, or of taking rank where we belong, as one of the greatest of the great worldpowers." This, of course, was long before he became Woodrow Wilson's nemesis by leading the fight in the Senate against ratification of the peace treaty of 1919 and so of American entry into the League of Nations. And thus the United States as a "determining force in history" retreated from the center stage of world politics, leaving the League to its sorry fate. Wilson's new world order, essentially, had been a nineteenthcentury liberal attempt to implant in international relations a normative structure and a machinery for peaceful resolution of conflict, or at least the beginnings of such a system. It was hampered, therefore, by the same contradiction as liberal political theory in general: it assumed that if one channeled conflict between interests into a reasonable domain of norms and laws on the one hand, and allowed the autonomous processes of economic rationality free play on the other, then politics in the sense of antagonistic conflict would disappear. The political theory of liberalism is in that sense a theory of depoliticization, which is why it always ends up using illiberal, political means or criminalization when the irreconcilable returns. Eminently liberal and American though it was (as he quite rightly emphasized), Wilson's formidable attempt to liberalize the world order was thus rejected by his own country, the most liberal power. What ensued was an abdication from geopolitical responsibility coupled with inverse expansion of the economic and cultural presence of the United States in the world. The isolationist "normalcy" of the Republican 192os was in that sense neither that isolationist nor that normal. Calvin Coolidge, nevertheless, expressed the spirit of his age by noting that Americans "have been, and propose to be, more and more American," by which he meant more and more businesslike. The essence of American "destiny," insofar as there was one, could only lie here. His successor, Herbert Hoover, a man of great internationalist credentials, concretized Coolidge's dictum by pointing out that, far from being destined for imperialism, Americans were busily constructing "a new economic system, a new social system, a new political system." In a different language, revolutionary new forms of capital accumulation were being invented, but the direction was inward. The United States would be an example to be emulated, not a Wilsonian regenerator. It was Hoover's singular misfortune, however, to have to preside over the greatest single economic collapse ever suffered by the United States. Not even the ensuing New Deal could turn the exemplary nation into much of an example. Indeed, it would take a Japanese attack on the excellent harbor in Hawaii that God, as we have seen, had so obviously made for the American purpose of Pacific expansion to bring the United States finally out of the Depression and also irrevocably into the world. Was this the Fall, the corruption of the United States by a corrupted world, or the beginning of the final redemption of that world? The destinarian question of entanglement and separation would remain unresolved. 4 It is doubtful if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had any real hopes of redeeming Wilson's pledge to the "final freedom of the peoples of the world," but he certainly thought a beginning had to be made. Roosevelt followed the career of his distant relative Theodore to an almost comical degree, though he did so as a Democrat, starting out under Wilson to boot. Intellectually, he did not compare to these two figures of influence; but his political talent was peerless. His basic ideas about the postwar world and the American role in it are not easily discerned: Roosevelt was the most voluble yet enigmatic of American presidents. Like almost all of them he spoke of "destiny," but I doubt he thought twice about its deeper meaning. At his best he combined, not always logically, a deeply rooted Wilsonian disposition with Theodore's geopolitical nuance. Thus his new version of Wilson's League (that would have to be redeemed) included Theodore's idea of a concert of Great Powers exertinja r)eaceful influence and viQilantlv SUDervis ing their respective regions. I lie massive antiil ascist alliance of the Second World War would be transformed, when the criminal aggressors had been vanquished, into a stable order of cooperation and mutual interest, headed by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, perhaps also a reconstituted China. This did not come to pass. In victory, Britain collapsed. China, a Great Power in theory only, became embroiled in civil war and revolution. The remaining twogigantic continental powers, one heavily damaged, the other actually revitalized by the warmoved by default onto center stage, equipped with very little experience in taking charge of Great Power politics. Fundamental divergencies of ideology and socioeconomic system came to the fore. Within two years after Roosevelt had died and the war 120 MANIFEST DESTINY ended, a wholly different and unintended kind of order, or antiorder, had replaced the wartime alliance: the cold war. Henceforth, the United States would come to style itself as "leader of the free world," locked in mortal struggle with the forces of Communist evil. This act of positioning harped back, not unnaturally, to earlier themes of election and preordained mission. Once again American destiny seemed manifest. In my final remarks I shall sketch that coldwar projection of the United States in the world until the moment when its contours begin to fade and the mission loses meaning. Convention has it that the cold war was identical with the entire postwar epoch up to the disintegration of the Soviet empire around 19go. The origins of this equation are readily understandable. It was felt, quite rightly, that the U.S.U.S.S.R. relationship dominated international politics during the period. As that system then dissolved, the nearest available catchphrase was eagerly seized upon and thus "the end of the cold war" became an instant clich& Yet, as some may remember, Richard Nixon announced the end of the cold war on his visit to Moscow in 1972, and so, similarly, had others before him. Indeed, the NixonBrezhnev policy of d6tente fits ill with the connotations of a cold war. If in fact that term is to mean anything it is surely to designate an antagonistic conflict typical of war but without actual, open hostilities: an armed truce of "neither peace nor war." How did this come about? Negotiations between the victors about the postwar arrangements in Europe faltered almost immediately and finally broke down at the end Of 1947. Subsequently, both sides moved to secure what they already controlled, the United States through the introduction of the Marshall Plan and NATO, the Soviet Union through the imposition of its own much more rigid and repressive system throughout Eastern Europe. Mutual demonology ensued, for both powers promulgated, and considered themselves to embody, universal ideologies of right. This added intensity and scope to the conflict, coding it in terms of capitalism versus Communism, or, in the preferred Western war, freedom versus totalitarianism. Diplomatic dialogue, normal relations, probing negotiation, and resolution of issues of mutual interest pretty much ceased. This is what made the cold war a cold war. Falling into the World, i9i4i99o 123 Yet it did remain cold. Geopolitical and military realities served to keep the struggle preeminently in the realm of ideology. The rivalry generated an arms race of mindboggling waste and destructiveness, and it fueled numerous deadly conflicts in the Third World; but never once did it escalate into open hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. By 1951, after the Korean War had developed into a stalemate, the line of demarcation between the two sides in fact became fairly stable, while the need to secure this territorialization amplified doctrinal purity on both sides of the fence. Launching savage attacks on the other, however, while pluming oneself in virtue, indicated no urgent desire to do anything actually unsettling. The two sides "found it convenient," if I may steal a phrase from Trollope, "to establish a mutual bond of inveterate hatred." The American position was encapsulated in the concept of containment," though it came to be far more militarized and global in scope than George F. Kerman, its originator, had had in mind. Like O'Sullivan, he was indeed initially unaware of having coined any such "historic" concept: others made it so. The assumption, in any event, was that the fanatical Soviet Union was inherently driven to world conquest, that the United States alone could contain it, and that once contained the Soviet Union would crumble, for, like all cancerous totalitarianisms, it needed to expand in order to survive. The actual result (if not the intention) of this analysis was a complete unwillingness to engage in any real diplomacy with the Soviet side, unless absolutely necesary. Diplomacy became a dirty word. Though based on a fallacy, containment became an eminent success. The fallacy was the premise that the Soviet Union needed to expand. In fact, it probably needed the opposite, the relative isolation that actually followed, in order to survive as long as it did. But containment paved the way for the enormously powerful United States to expand its influence on a global scale and effectively establish hegemony over the world of industrial capitalism. This expansion was far more important than any relations with the eastern sphere. To push the American public into such an immense and unprecedented commitment, however, was no mean feat. Even though the United States after the war produced half of all manufactured goods in the world, it was still R,ii,j '41'_t'~, 124 MANIFEST DESTINY essentially an economy and a class structure anchored in domestic pursuits. The roots of the foreignpolicy elite in the ruling classes overall remained shallow (and still do). Washington was in that regard a regime anomalously engaged in a global conflict but without firm footing in the domestic structure. Eventually that footing would become materially more secure through the emergence of a militaryindustrial complex devoted to perpetual growth (and hence also to the idea of a perpetual threat). But at the outset it was necessary to simplify matters for Congress and the public. The Soviet Union was thus identified with Nazi expansionism by means of the category of totalitarianism. This deliberately scary vision culminated in a familiar exhortation to choose righteousness in the face of historical fate. A satanic force, dedicated to the overthrow of every sound and proven American principle, was abroad in the world, most frighteningly even at home through its fifth columns. To refrain from doing one's utmost to extinguish this evil was tantamount to sin and would end in selfdestruction. The choice was plain. Only the United States could perform the given task. Would it rise to the occasion and do its appointed duty? And so forth. I am abstracting a series of rhetorical moves here, not providing an inventory of arguments. Many other factors, geopolitical and economic, came into play. But the operative framework in which they all fit is the story of American exceptionalism, with its missionary implications. In no way could this task now be perceived as simply building something shining on the proverbial Puritan hill for the benefit of others to imitate; the moment for active regeneration had arrived. So the United States became "the leader of the free world," mobilizing and directing the forces of freedom against what Ronald Reagan would later call the Empire of Evil. That this Manichaean vision of good and evil in perpetual combat resonated among the public was not only because of the persuasiveness of the totalitarian story but also because of an underlying, new sense of vulnerability that had originated with Pearl Harbor. The atmosphere of fear thickened immeasurably when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic device in 1949 at the very same time as China "fell" to Communism. In reality, however, Falling into the World, 19.r4i99o 125 the United States remained largely impervious to devastation until the late 1950s The total, openended American effort recognized no shades of gray and no limits. just as Protestantism had recognized no limits in the struggle against the satanic power of the Papacy, so the United States, occasional claims to the contrary, recognized none now except those of expediency. This was to be an epic struggle without restraint. Battle could, in principle, take place anyway, anywhere and anytime. And since the world was either white or black, every battle everywhere was by definition a victory for either one or the other. "If history has taught us anything," as Harry S. Truman opined, "it is that aggression anywhere is a threat to peace everywhere in the world." Every area was thus meaningful and important, every area worth fighting for. It is instructive to compare this with earlier moments of expansion. In the 184os, the spatial destination of destiny was clearly continental, a westward, horizontal movement; and the agent involved was the United States, separate and alone. In the 1890s the destination was diffusely conceived as a sphere of barbarism where the gradual struggle for civilization and race might occur on the way toward a final victory that was not that urgent; destiny was imagined more in historical than spatial terms; and the agent, though still the United States, was often seen in combination with other Anglophones, even the "West" in general. In the cold war, however, every space could in principle be defined with instantaneous and razorsharp distinction either as our side or theirs, or as an arena not yet won where destiny would be fought out right now; and the United States was the global agent of freedom in lethal combat everywhere with a single, terrifying antagonist. As critics pointed out at the time, there was a lack of discrimination in this last perspective. Everything was not in fact equally important, and gains for one were not necessarily losses for the other. That fact would eventually be revealed with great clarity in the punishing jungles of Vietnam. Vietnam would also destroy another part of the strategic map, the "domino theory." It held that if one area fell to Communism a succession of adjacent ones were bound to follow; so it could not be allowed to fall. Vietnam did indeed "fall" but without domino effect. Instead, Vietnam found itself at war with the People's Republic of China, its purported Communist master. The real lesson of the many lessons of Vietnam will then perhaps have been a greater suspicion of simple historical lessons. Vietnam and the incendiary return of race through the civil rights movement combined to cause a legitimacy crisis in the United States comparable in depth only to that of the Civil War. The realities of Vietnam and the ghetto turned the messianic shibboleths of coldwar ideology into absurdities. Even something called the American Way of Life was put into question. Yet it is well to remember that a central theme of the critique was liberal, even destinarian: the "perversion" of true Americanism. Its radical potential had already been exhausted when the last American helicopter took off from the roof of the Saigon embassy in April 1975. 5 In 1963, just as the United States began to expand vastly the intervention in Vietnam, it established a more stable and manageable relationship with the Soviet adversary. The mutual interest that had always existed after the division of Europe had been reinforced by the emergence of nuclear arsenals capable of destroying either one or both in a matter of thirty minutes. The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 illuminated this fact with frightening lucidity. MAD, "mutually assured destruction," expressed the new rationality in brilliant Pentagonese. It made sense, therefore, to tone down the irreconcilable differences of ideology and instead let the inherent Great Power logic of "conflictual cooperation" come to the fore, a development first symbolized in the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and later reaching full force in the moment of detente. Fueling lethal conflict at a relatively safe distance in the Third World, and mostly at its expense, did not seriously threaten to undo this new geopolitical arrangement. Great Power recognition made sense, then, within the world of geopolitics and the refined logic of nuclear balances, but it was never anchored very deeply in American politics. Managing global rivalry for mutual benefit continued to be a relatively autonomous activity, personified by the constantly airborne Henry Kissinger. Thus the geopolitical shift corresponded to no basic change in the selfconcept of the United States. And Kissinger aside, even the engineers of Realpolitik still imagined the United States as the specially anointed leader of something called the free world, though technically the crusade was to be replaced by intelligent management. There was, in short, a disjunction between geopolitical "realities" and the inwardlooking orientation of American politics generally, producing an ideological gap of great potential difficulty for the maintenance of detente. One could ill afford extensive disturbances. By 1980, several such disturbances had occurred, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The triumphant election of Ronald Reagan that year was a precise indication of how thin was the ideological acceptance of geopolitical realism and how wide was the receptivity to the themes I have discussed in this book. With great gusto and to much public acclaim, Reagan reasserted the true American Way in the world, using language strongly reminiscent of Jackson and O'Sullivan. His early jeremiads depicted a nation fallen temporarily on hard times because of atheism, welfare liberalism, government meddling, appeasement of Communism, and other deviations from the original and timeless faith. This catalogue of ills was always followed by the promise of regeneration, by a fervent evocation of the United States as a model fated to be revered, as one nation under God again, reaffirming the covenantal Constitution, specially blessed and once more believing in itself and the true American values. It was not an accident that Reagan launched his political career in 1964 with a speech entitled "A Time for Choosing"; nor that it ended with a rousing call for true courage in the "rendezvous with destiny." Indeed, he seemed to believe in a whole inventory of historical cliches: "that America was set apart in a special way, that it was put here between the oceans to be found by a certain kind of people," that it was chosen by higher authority to be "a beacon of hope to the rest of the world," that "the dream of America" was "the last best hope of man on earth." And so every American faced duties and obligations: УFor with the privilege of living in this kindly, pleasant, greening land called America, this land of generous spirit and great ideals, there is also a destiny and a duty, a duty to preserve and hold in sacred trust mankind's ageold aspirations of peace and freedom and a better life for generations to come.Ф And this destiny and duty to the world meant above all vigorous prosecution of the cold war. Reagan came into the White House claiming expressly that he would not resurrect the cold war for the obvious reason that, as far as he was concerned, it had never ended. His intention, then, was merely to carry it out with proper determination and energy. He proceeded to act accordingly through a staggering military buildup and extremely chilly rhetoric. Even "Armageddon" made an apocalyptic appearance, if not prominently, in his vision of a showdown with the Soviet Union. Yet the very brevity of his attack on the "Evil Empire," the so called Second Cold War, demonstrates nothing so much as the difficulties in reassembling the fundaments of the old system proper. As a way of using the federal budget for massive countercyclical spending to get out of a recession, his program made some sense (perversely, since he denounced the very idea of such a governmental role); similarly, it had meaning as part of his therapeutic move to restore popular confidence in the historical preeminence of the United States, the exceptional power second to none. Geopolitically, in the real as opposed to rhetorical world outside, the United States had little to win by it. And, typically, when the Soviet Union eventually responded by way of an ingenious policy of restraint and responsibility, Reagan swerved and became quite chummy. He could then argue, and his epigones now do, that it was he who pushed the hated Soviet system over the edge by luring it into a race it could not keep up; and, therefore, that he triggered one of the greatest geopolitical advances in American history and fulfilled what was written in the stars. The Soviet demise, however, derived chiefly from longstanding domestic problems. Western consumer culture, if anything, had more to do with it than military hardware and virile belligerence. The United States, meanwhile, has found itself without a central, defining adversary and so a bit lost, just as the Soviet Union initially had intended in the mid1980s. Simple concepts superimposed on simple divisions and simple enemies no longer suffice as basic ideological props of American geopolitics. It is hard to imagine oneself "leader of the free world" when zones of gray are everywhere and there is no clear line between the free and the unfree. Deterritorialized capitalism, at the same time, is finally creating the world of fierce global competition without boundaries that Marx and nineteenth century liberals alike once envisaged, thus deepening the disjunction between national politics and international economics. It is hard to talk of destiny when it seems to be determined by nothing so much as the impersonal logic of capital accumulation on a global scale. Meanwhile, Mahan was no doubt right. The purely utilitarian deity of the stock market does not mobilize people or confer political legitimacy on regimes, especially not at a moment when proliferating subidentities at home are making the meaning of "American" less and less obvious. Whither then the notion of mission and transcendence? So I end by noting that never in U.S. history have prophetic destiny and mission been in such doubt. The instinctual return to Wilson is symptomatic of this. In the absence of simple enemies, his is the most identifiably American program available for those who wish the nation to play a cooperative yet leading role in the world. Law, ethics, discussion, "free enterprise" across borders, Western democracy: these are the key props of late twentiethcentury Wilsonianism, Americanism writ large in the name of humanity, as always hiding who really is involved and what really is at stake. Poised against it is another, more insidious form of prophetic Americanism. Inwardlooking, it is the evocation of Jacksonian rapacity in the name of God and the "freedom" to exploit. The rhetoric is phantasmal and powerful, the political effect ferocious. Yet we are perhaps on the verge of some new and diffuse epoch where such projections will have limited moments in the sun because all that matters in the end is the perpetual present, a virtual reality empty of value, a postmodern world where destiny cannot be manifest and certainly not managed. When transcendence itself becomes nothing more than a commodity, the "sublime moral empire" of William Henry Channing's imagination must finally be dead. What will then be the fate, I wonder, of Melville's "Israel of our time," the "political Messiah" who would "bear the ark of the liberties of the world"?

13489: By ‘елькишер Ѕеобахтер on ¬торник, Ќо€брь 13, 2001 - 12:02:

Ѕлагодарные пражане именовли свой главный вокзал в честь ¬удро ¬ильсона, так как он там торжественно объ€вил войну по завоеванию либерализмом всего мира: THE WORLD MUST BE SECURED FOR DEMOCRACY!

13562: By  олька, переведи на русский! on „етверг, Ќо€брь 15, 2001 - 03:01:

“ошнит уже от английского...

13574: By „итатель on „етверг, Ќо€брь 15, 2001 - 08:33:

ћеждународный комитет  расного  реста намерен изменить свою символику. „етверг, 15 Ќо€бр€ 2001 года, 08:10  –ј’ —»ћ¬ќЋќ¬ јгентство –≈…“≈– передает, что в эмблеме больше не будет использоватьс€ крест и полумес€ц. ѕредставители международной организации за€вили, что символика должна устраивать все нации. ћежду тем, дл€ некоторых из них присутствие в эмблеме креста или полумес€ца неприемлемо. ќсновой дл€ нынешней символики организации стал флаг Ўвейцарии, где зарождалс€ комитет  расного креста.