Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Overview

Andrew Bacevich is a leading American public intellectual, writing in the fields of culture and politics with particular attention to war and America’s role in the world. Twilight of the American Century is a collection of his selected essays written since 9/11. In these essays, Bacevich critically examines the U.S. response to the events of September 2001, as they have played out in the years since, radically affecting the way Americans see themselves and their nation’s place in the world.

Bacevich is the author of nearly a dozen books and contributes to a wide variety of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Commonweal, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers. Prior to becoming an academic, he was a professional soldier. His experience as an Army officer informs his abiding concern regarding the misuse of American military power and the shortcomings of the U.S. military system. As a historian, he has tried to see the past differently, thereby making it usable to the present.

Bacevich combines the perspective of a scholar with the background of a practitioner. His views defy neat categorization as either liberal or conservative. He belongs to no “school.” His voice and his views are distinctive, provocative, and refreshing. Those with a focus on political and cultural developments and who have a critical interest in America's role in the world will be keenly interested in this book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268104863
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	11/15/2018
Pages:	504
Sales rank:	822,468
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University and the author of numerous books, including America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Read an Excerpt

As long as the Cold War persisted and, with it, the perceived imperative of confronting international communism, America First remained an emblem of American irresponsibility, a reminder of a narrowly averted catastrophe. When the fall of the Soviet Union triggered a brief flurry of speculation that the United States might claim a “peace dividend” and tend to its own garden, elite opinion wasted no time in denouncing that prospect. With history’s future trajectory now readily apparent—the collapse of communism having cleared up any remaining confusion in that regard—it was incumbent on the United States to implement that future. U.S. leadership was therefore more important than ever, a line of thought giving rise to what the writer R. R. Reno has aptly termed “utopian globalism.”

Three large expectations informed this post–Cold war paradigm. According to the first, corporate capitalism of the type pioneered in the United States, exploiting advanced technology and implemented globally, held the potential of creating wealth on a once unimaginable scale. According to the second, the possession of vast military might—displayed for all to see in the 1990–91 Gulf War—endowed the United States with an unprecedented ability to establish (and enforce) the terms of world order. And according to the third, the White House, no longer merely the official residence of the country’s chief executive, was now to serve as a de facto global command post, the commander in chief’s mandate extending to the far corners of the earth.

In policy circles, it was taken as a given that American power—wielded by the president and informed by the collective wisdom of the political, military, and corporate elite—was sufficient for the task ahead. Although a few outsiders questioned that assumption, such concerns never gained traction. The careful weighing of means and ends suggested timidity. It also risked indulging popular inclinations toward isolationism, kept under tight rein ever since the America First campaign met its demise at the hands of the imperial Japanese navy and Adolf Hitler.

Again and again during the 1990s, U.S. officials warned against the dangers of backsliding. The United States was “the indispensable nation,” they declared, a quasi-theological claim pressed into service as a basis for statecraft. After 9/11, policymakers saw the attacks not as a warning about the consequences of overreach but as a rationale for redoubling U.S. efforts to fulfill the imperatives of utopian globalism. Thus, in 2005, in the midst of stalemated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush summoned the spirit of Wilson and assured his fellow citizens that “the expansion of freedom in all the world” had become “the calling of our time.”

A decade later, with both of those wars still simmering and other emergencies erupting regularly, despite vast expenditures of blood and treasure, Trump denounced the entire post–Cold War project as a fraud. During his presidential campaign, he vowed to “make America great again” and recover the jobs lost to globalization. He pledged to avoid needless armed conflicts and to win promptly any that could not be avoided.

Yet although he rejected the first two components of utopian globalism, he affirmed the third. As president, he and he alone would set things right. Once in office, he pledged to use his authority to the fullest, protecting ordinary Americans from further assault by the forces of globalization and ending the misuse of military power. Instead of embracing globalism, Trump promised to put “America first.”

Trump’s appropriation of that loaded phrase, which formed a central theme of his campaign and his inaugural address, was an affront to political correctness. Yet it was much more. At least implicitly, Trump was suggesting that the anti-interventionists who opposed Roosevelt had been right after all. By extension, he was declaring obsolete the lessons of World War II and the tradition of American statecraft derived from them.

The policy implications seemed clear. In a single stroke, the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, Trump’s inaugural “radically redefined the American national interest as understood since World War II.” Instead of exercising global leadership, the United States was now opting for “insularity and smallness.” Another columnist, William Kristol, lamented that hearing “an American president proclaim ‘America First’” was “profoundly depressing and vulgar.”

That Trump himself is not only vulgar but also narcissistic and dishonest is no doubt the case. Yet fears that his embrace of “America first” will lead the United States to turn its back on the world have already proved groundless. Ordering punitive air strikes against a regime that murders its own citizens while posing no threat to the United States, as Trump did in Syria, is not isolationism. Nor is sending more U.S. troops to fight the campaign in Afghanistan, the very epitome of the endless wars that Trump once disparaged. And whatever one makes of Trump’s backing of the Sunnis in their regional struggle with the Shiites, his vow to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, his threats against North Korea, and his evolving views on trade and the viability of NATO, they do not suggest disengagement.

What they do suggest is something much worse: an ill-informed, impulsive, and capricious approach to foreign policy. In fact, if “policy” implies a predictable pattern of behavior, U.S. foreign policy ceased to exist when Trump took office. The United States now acts or refrains from action according to presidential whim. Trump’s critics have misread their man. Those who worry about the ghost of Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and America First backer, taking up residence in the Oval Office can rest easy. The real problem is that Trump is making his own decisions, and he thinks he has things under control.

Yet more important, unlike Trump himself, Trump’s critics have misread the moment. However oblivious he was to the finer points of diplomacy, candidate Trump correctly intuited that establishment views about the United States’ proper role in the world had not worked. In the eyes of ordinary citizens, policies conceived under the direction of George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice or Susan Rice no longer command automatic assent. America über alles has proved to be a bust—hence, the appeal of “America first” as an alternative. That the phrase itself causes conniptions among elites in both political parties only adds to its allure in the eyes of the Trump supporters whom the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton dismissed during the campaign as “deplorable.”

Whatever the consequences of Trump’s own fumbling, that allure is likely to persist. So, too, will the opportunity awaiting any would-be political leader with the gumption to articulate a foreign policy that promises to achieve the aim of the original America First movement: to ensure the safety and well-being of the United States without engaging in needless wars. The challenge is to do what Trump himself is almost certainly incapable of doing, converting “America first” from a slogan burdened with an ugly history—including the taint of anti-Semitism—into a concrete program of enlightened action. To put it another way, the challenge is to save “America first” from Trump.

(excerpted from chapter 18)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets

1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz (2013)

2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer (2017)

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: The Decline of Liberalism (2017)

4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014)

5. Tom Clancy, Military Man (2014)

6. Robert Kagan: The Duplicity of the Ideologues (2014)

7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012)

8. Henry Luce: The Elusive American Century (2012)

9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011)

10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011)

11. Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez: Fault Lines (2008)

12. Tommy Franks: A Modern Major General (2004)

13. Henry Adams: Selling Our Souls (2011)

14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010)

15. Randolph Bourne: The Man in the Black Cape (2009)

16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009)

17. Reinhold Niebuhr: Illusions of Managing History (2007)

Part 2. History and Myth

18. Saving ‘America First’ (2017)

19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017)

20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017)

21. American Imperium (2016)

22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015)

23. Always and Everywhere (2013)

24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013)

25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012)

26. The End of (Military) History? (2010)

27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006)

28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006)

29. The Folly of Albion (2005)

30. World War IV (2005)

Part 3. War and Empire

31. Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries (2015)

32. A War of Ambition (2014)

33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013)

34. How We Became Israel (2012)

35. Breaking Washington’s Rules (2011)

36. Why read Clausewitz …. (2006)

37. Living Room War (2005)

38. Bush’s Grand Strategy (2002)

39. New Rome, New Jerusalem (Summer 2002)

40. Permanent War for Permanent Peace (November 2001)

Part 4. Politics and Culture

41. Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago (2017)

42. Not the ‘Age of Trump’ (2017)

43. The Failure of American Liberalism (2016)

44. An Ode to Ike and Adlai (2016)

45. War and Culture, American Style (2016)

46. Under God (2015)

47. Thoughts on a Graduation Weekend (2014)

48. One Percent Republic (2013)

49. Counterculture Conservatism (2013)

50. Ballpark Liturgy (2011)

51. The Great Divide (2008)

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book is very unique in both its scope and in the positions that Bacevich takes on these very important issues impacting the United States and its relations with the outside world."

Philip E. Muehlenbeck

[Bacevich’s] writing transcends easy categorization. . . . The title suggests that the book will join the ranks of many recent works documenting the decline of American hegemony.

Law and Religion Forum

"Andrew Bacevich is one of contemporary America's most prolific and courageous academic public intellectuals. His is a prophetic voice, often almost alone in the wilderness of contemporary political affairs. Bacevich combines an historian's sensibility with the polemicist's edge to produce deep yet pithy takes on our contemporary scene. Twilight of the American Century brings together in one volume some of Bacevich's most timely and timeless reflections on American domestic and foreign policy."

Michael Desch

"Since he left the US Army and thrust himself into the world of polemical journalism, Andrew Bacevich has distinguished himself with his toughness of mind, forcefulness of expression, and clear-eyed realism. All are displayed in this muscular volume of collected works—along with a bonus: an enlightening and touching autobiographical essay that lays bare much of the origin of his thinking."

Robert W. Merry

"Andrew Bacevich is one of contemporary America's most prolific and courageous academic public intellectuals. His is a prophetic voice, often almost alone in the wilderness of contemporary political affairs. Bacevich combines a historian's sensibility with the polemicist's edge to produce deep yet pithy takes on our contemporary scene. Twilight of the American Century brings together in one volume some of Bacevich's most timely and timeless reflections on American domestic and foreign policy." —Michael Desch, University of Notre Dame

"Andrew Bacevich is one of the sanest, most articulate, and most courageous voices in American public life today. A true conservative, he is a powerful critic of imperialism in the tradition of Christopher Lasch and William Appleman Williams—both of whom he discusses compellingly in this indispensable book. Twilight of the American Century reveals the wide range and undiminished vitality of his thought." —Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, Rutgers University

"Since he left the US Army and thrust himself into the world of polemical journalism, Andrew Bacevich has distinguished himself with his toughness of mind, forcefulness of expression, and clear-eyed realism. All are displayed in this muscular volume of collected works—along with a bonus: an enlightening and touching autobiographical essay that lays bare much of the origin of his thinking." —Robert W. Merry, author of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

"In his new collection, Twilight of the American Century, Andrew Bacevich . . . an unsurpassed chronicler of America’s misadventures in the Middle East, turns his eye to Washington’s self-anointed elite. . . . Bacevich is at his best when he focuses on how America sees itself and how that distorted self-image affects its relations with the rest of the world." —The Nation

"The histories of empires and the histories of war are generally written by the winner to put themselves in a positive light. It has been difficult for the U.S. empire to maintain their facade of goodness for their endeavors after World War II, and even more significantly after 9/11. In Twilight of the American Century, a selection of his own collected writings, Andrew J. Bacevich reveals the contradictions between what is said about U.S. actions—either as anticipation or as definition—and the results of such actions. In essence, the rationalizations, the hubris, and the arrogance do not match up with the lack of accomplishments, the latter themselves ill-defined." —The Palestine Chronicle

“My recommendation is that if you have even the slightest feeling that things are amiss in American foreign affairs, or if you are simply earnest about testing the validity of your own beliefs, whatever they are, you should read this book. If you think that everything is fine with the nation and its policy course, then you should buy it today and read it cover-to-cover.” —Realism and Policy

“I read everything written by Andrew Bacevich with a maniacal obsession. His work provides a glimmer of hope for a return to realist sanity in American foreign policy. . . . Bacevich speaks the truths many Americans, and all their leaders, refuse to face.” —University Bookman

“[Bacevich’s] writing transcends easy categorization. . . . The title suggests that the book will join the ranks of many recent works documenting the decline of American hegemony.” —Law and Religion Forum

“After more than 20 years of active service as a U.S. Army officer, Andrew J. Bacevich taught history and international relations at Boston University, where he is now an emeritus professor. His new book, Twilight of the American Century, examines the ambitions and failures of America’s foreign policy.” —The American Scholar

“Twilight of the American Century is a profoundly intellectual, provocative work. It will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of both Democrats and Republicans. The book is a tough-minded call for liberals and conservatives to come together to ‘repair our democracy’ in the post-Vietnam War, post-Cold War, post-9/11 era.” —The VVA Veteran

From the Publisher

I read everything written by Andrew Bacevich with a maniacal obsession. His work provides a glimmer of hope for a return to realist sanity in American foreign policy. . . . Bacevich speaks the truths many Americans, and all their leaders, refuse to face.

University Bookman

"Bacevich is a prolific writer and academic, and policy-oriented scholars in diplomatic history, international relations, and security studies are well aware of the books he has published since 9/11. He speaks with the authority of an experienced practitioner as well as and academic theorist. But this collection will alert even experts in those fields to numerous essays, commentaries, op-eds, and blog posts he has produced over the past 15 years."

Walter McDougall

"In his new collection, Twilight of the American Century, Andrew Bacevich . . . an unsurpassed chronicler of America’s misadventures in the Middle East, turns his eye to Washington’s self-anointed elite. . . . Bacevich is at his best when he focuses on how America sees itself and how that distorted self-image affects its relations with the rest of the world."

The Nation

"Andrew Bacevich is one of the sanest, most articulate, and most courageous voices in American public life today. A true conservative, he is a powerful critic of imperialism in the tradition of Christopher Lasch and Wiliam Appleman Williams—both of whom he discusses compellingly in this indispensable book. Twilight of the American Century reveals the wide range and undiminished vitality of his thought."

Jackson Lears

Twilight of the American Century is a profoundly intellectual, provocative work. It will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of both Democrats and Republicans. The book is a tough-minded call for liberals and conservatives to come together to ‘repair our democracy’ in the post-Vietnam War, post-Cold War, post-9/11 era.

The VVA Veteran

"Twilight of the American Century is a bracingly honest, transpartisan reflection on the limits of American power. It will challenge you to rethink the prevailing historical narrative, the (failed) bipartisan establishment consensus, and America’s role in the world."

Katrina vanden Heuvel

My recommendation is that if you have even the slightest feeling that things are amiss in American foreign affairs, or if you are simply earnest about testing the validity of your own beliefs, whatever they are, you should read this book. If you think that everything is fine with the nation and its policy course, then you should buy it today and read it cover-to-cover.

Realism and Policy

"The histories of empires and the histories of war are generally written by the winner to put themselves in a positive light. It has been difficult for the U.S. empire to maintain their facade of goodness for their endeavors after World War II, and even more significantly after 9/11. In Twilight of the American Century, a selection of his own collected writings, Andrew J. Bacevich reveals the contradictions between what is said about U.S. actions—either as anticipation or as definition—and the results of such actions. In essence, the rationalizations, the hubris, and the arrogance do not match up with the lack of accomplishments, the latter themselves ill-defined."

The Palestine Chronicle

After more than 20 years of active service as a U.S. Army officer, Andrew J. Bacevich taught history and international relations at Boston University, where he is now an emeritus professor. His new book, Twilight of the American Century, examines the ambitions and failures of America’s foreign policy.

The American Scholar