Victory. Triumph. Even mere Success. These words have not often been associated with American foreign policy. In recent years especially, the tale of American foreign policy has been told as one of folly, error, hubris, scandal, impeachable offenses. The advance of military technology had in any case occasioned the deconstruction of the old and simple concept of victory. The advent of nuclear weapons added various academic, economic, and mathematical concepts to the examination of strategy; and if truth is the first casualty of war, then victory was the first casualty of “deterrence.” It was thoroughly dinned into us that ours was an age that had made winning a dangerous concept, for if things ever got out of hand there could be no winners at all, only losers. It was never too clear how we would escape this fate. Presumably, the great conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western world would be resolved by “accommodation,” or by “coexistence,” or by “peaceful competition,” or “detente,” or “convergence,” but certainly not by winning—at least not by the United States’s winning.
Each intervening decade made its own contribution to what began as resignation and ended with defeatism. In the 50’s, there was a bitter political debate over the conduct of the Korean war. Its real and symbolic highpoint was President Harry Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur as commander of our forces there, and the issue was precisely whether victory, rather than stalemate, was feasible, or even desirable. The 1960’s brought their own overseas reverses, in Cuba and of course in Vietnam. In the 1970’s, the country froze in response to the Arab oil boycott of 1973; and the Vietnam war finally reached its denouement in 1975 with Communists gaining power in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In short order, the Soviets established themselves in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Aden, Nicaragua. The decade ended with the Iran hostage debacle, the second wind of “Eurocommunism,” and somber predictions that a resurgent Islam would expel Western influence from the Middle East, that a Russo-Indian axis would dismember Pakistan after the consolidation of the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan, that the Soviets through their Cuban and Nicaraguan surrogates would probably end up as the dominant military power in Central America.
Then came the 80’s, the Reagan years. As they wore on, it seemed to everyone’s amazement that the strategic position of the United States in the world, instead of continuing to deteriorate in line with those somber predictions, was getting better all the time. Toward the end of the decade, the decomposition in the intellectual and moral authority of Communism and the retreat of Soviet power became undeniable.
To be sure, there were still grounds for skepticism. At first it just seemed too pat—those hundreds of right hands raised in unison as the plenums voted themselves into oblivion. Yet at some point, perhaps only in the past few months, even those of us who had been the most skeptical looked closely at the Soviet Union of the late 1980’s and saw the United States of the late 70’s. Now it was they who seemed confused, disconcerted, disoriented, without direction. It was they who were turning on their own past, on their entire secular creed; they were even saying they had gotten over their inordinate fear of capitalism. On the international scene, they were the ones who would show up at the negotiating table and yield on all the remaining points. It took a while to catch on to this for, as one writer noted, the State Department had become so proficient in making concessions that it did not know how to receive them. It seemed a cinematographer’s trick—the visages of Eduard Shevardnadze and Cyrus Vance gradually became a single white-haired blur, foreshadowing an even stranger metamorphosis: Mikhail Gorbachev awoke one morning from a troubled sleep and found that he had been transformed into Jimmy Carter.
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What kind of magic was this? Anyone who had read assessments of the United States at the end of the decade would be hard-pressed to explain why it was the Soviet Union which was reaching the end of its tether. After all, one theme of the 1988 presidential campaign was that we were in trouble at home because of “imperial overstretch,” a notion derived from Paul Kennedy’s best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Moreover, if the 1970’s had been dominated by failures overseas, the 80’s were widely considered a time of failures at home: impending federal bankruptcy, unhampered personal greed, rampant philistinism (as championed by Senator Jesse Helms), homelessness, AIDS, despair, and the Iran-contra affair, known epithetically as “the worst political scandal since Watergate.”
Here, then, was a society so unfit for a victory than when victory came, it had to be dismissed as an illusion. According to Time magazine, for example, there had never even been any real conflict with the Communist world, and because we had conjured up the cold war out of our own paranoid imaginings, the only victory was over our own social psychosis. In the past, the successful end of a great struggle could at the least be seen as justifying the sacrifices it had required. But in this case, past sacrifices were mocked, derided, swept aside as irrelevant, even counterproductive. If any good had come of them, it was only that the rise of Gorbachev would give us the opportunity to care properly for the cold war’s real victims here at home.
In short, there was an adamant refusal to believe that the United States was now ahead because it deserved to be ahead. Though victory has a thousand fathers, the moral superiority of the United States could not be one of them. “While an all-night party celebrating democracy is being uncorked around the world,” wrote a New York Times critic in an all too typical comment, “the vast inequities of our own democracy leave some Americans wondering whether they deserve to be invited.”
Then what had been the decisive factor in this festive development? Capitalism? But even if so, the United States, as many liberals saw it, could not be given credit because it could no longer be held up as an exemplar of the capitalist spirit; in fact, we had become a bad example. The productive superiority of capitalism was embodied not by us but by the Germans and, especially, the Japanese, the real “Protestants” of today, who worked harder, saved more, and who were behaving more and more like the Elect.
For their part, certain conservatives also had a problem with attributing superior moral standing to the United States, which, they had been saying for many years, was doomed by its corrupt secular ways. Moreover, the Right had a special difficulty in moving out too smartly to claim credit for the coming Soviet debacle. For partly to shore up Gorbachev, partly to sober up those who had been toasting the end of Communism, the American press once again started to notice the old Russian demons of nationalism and bigotry, supposedly exorcised years ago by enlightened Soviet rule.
One prominent Soviet scientist, writing in the Washington Post, coined the term “monarcho-Nazis” to describe those in the Soviet Union given to “deep reverence for the autocratic czarist Russian empire and ferocious hatred of Jews.” This kind of thing came to be characterized by the media as a Soviet “conservative movement,” thus reinforcing the use of the word “conservative” as the all-purpose adjective for anything bad; Ligachev, a neo-Stalinist, a real Communist, was also a “conservative.” No wonder that many American conservatives were hesitant to say or do anything that might open them to the charge of helping to turn the Soviet Union into a gigantic Lebanon, nostalgic for Bolshevik rule.
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In all of this, there was little or no acknowledgment of the role played by the application of American and allied power during the past four decades in bringing about its proclaimed objective of forcing changes upon the Soviet Union that would make it less dangerous to the world. Yet in 1947, George F. Kennan, using the pseudonym X, wrote a famous article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which has turned out to be eerily prophetic, both in its analysis of the Soviet system and in its forecast of how a policy of Western resistance to Soviet expansion would work.
In that article, Kennan saw Soviet expansion as the product of essentially irreconcilable internal contradictions, irreconcilable because their resolution would change the regime fundamentally. He advocated a Western response—containment—which he defined as “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” And now suppose, he continued, “that the Western world finds the strength and resourcefulness to contain Soviet power over a period of ten to fifteen years. What does that spell for Russia iteself?” His answer was that our counterpressures would “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet either in the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” For he believed that Soviet power bore within itself “the seed of its own decay.” He understood that “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” Kennan imagined this might take fifteen years; it took forty instead.
But if Kennan’s analysis foreshadowed Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russia, it also foreshadowed Ronald Reagan’s America. Kennan thought that the issue would turn on whether the United States could convince the world that it
has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. . . . The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States . . . the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions. . . . The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will experience a certain gratitude to Providence for providing the American people with this implacable challenge.
Providence, of course, disappeared from view in subsequent years, and did not reenter public discourse until Reagan began to give it the credit for placing the American continent between the two great oceans, helping to create a new breed of man, the American. Reagan invoked the biblical lesson that the rise and fall of nations is God’s verdict on their moral worth; today, accordingly, the City on the Hill has brought the Evil Empire to book.
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Yet with the passage of time there came into being an older Kennan who developed a new application for the theme of the X article. To this older Kennan, the seeds of decay were now sprouting in the United States. Writing again in Foreign Affairs on the 40th anniversary of his renowned piece, he declared:
There is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs early containment. . . . The first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves: our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster, our apparent inability to reduce a devastating budgetary deficit, our comparable inability to control the immigration into our midst of great masses of people of wholly different cultural and political traditions. . . . If we are going to talk about containment in the context of today, then I think we can no longer apply that term just to the Soviet Union.
Still, for all this kind of talk, and in spite of all the gloomy prognostications of America’s decline into a second-rate power, the plain truth is that right now, and for the foreseeable future, the real barriers to a further enlargement of American influence in the world are few indeed. In part the result of a strategic retreat by our principal enemy, the weakened resistance to further American influence reflects even more the collapse of any real organizing principle for such resistance. There is no useful variant of anti-Americanism in the world today. The Soviets used to work very hard at promoting anti-Americanism: they would, for example, incite people to burn down American libraries overseas, understanding that even a Godfearing Arab mob could act in the Soviet strategic interest. But no one any longer seems to care much about organizing anti-Americanism on this grand strategic scale.
No doubt the search for a new variant of opposition to America will continue, even if it means transferring one’s commitment from the Revolution to the Environment or to the Earth or even to the Universe. Still, were the assignment to plan for the containment of America along such lines given to George Kennan himself, he would be hard-pressed to counsel the world on how we might be toppled. At best, he would advise his clients to sit tight and let us do ourselves in over the proverbial “long run.”
This does not, however, answer the question of the ends to which an unresistable spread of American influence should now be directed. In our history, our thinking about the world has been summed up in some slogan or other-"Manifest Destiny,” “making the world safe for democracy,” “the American Century,” “Pax Americana,” “containment.” Slogans, catchwords, to be sure, but also more than that. They were guides to action, and they certainly managed to focus enormous amounts of energy on the nation’s historic development. Sooner or later, someone is going to coin the slogan for our own time, but even without a new phrase for the age, we can start to think about some tasks worth undertaking.
As we set about doing this, it will be useful to recall that in the past we have demonstrated considerable skill in turning changes in the world’s balance of power to our own benefit. The independence of the country itself was aided by an astute manipulation of the rivalry between France and Britain. Playing on the same scale, Thomas Jefferson was able to double the size of the country in the one fell swoop of the Louisiana Purchase. Thus did the young United States, which had once had European powers camped on its borders, manage to push all of them out of the way.
In the 20th century, we did not foment the internecine warfare in Europe, and we certainly had nothing whatever to do with creating the crazed ideas which brought the continent to ruin. That was all the Europeans’ own doing. But in the process of moving into that particular power vacuum, we also decisively promoted useful ideas for the reconstitution of Europe. The results are now plain to see. The Eastern half of the continent has slowly disintegrated. Its representative institution, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—” their” common market-has properly been called one of the conspicuous failures in the history of human endeavor. The Western half, under our auspices, has done more than remain in one piece. It has developed a way to supersede old and destructive rivalries, so that it is now possible for Hungary or Czechoslovakia to sign on to “Europe” in the form of its new federative institutions without needing to calculate the advantages of joining the “Central Powers” or the “Entente.” The old European concepts do not work. The new confederal, constitutional, America-tested concepts do.
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The simple conclusion here is that there is something for Americans to gain from observing the political rearrangement of Europe, because we ourselves need reminding of what we know how to do. It would be ironic if, after deep involvement in the theory, practice, and encouragement of European integration, we were to find ourselves lagging behind. There are opportunities aplenty, and they bear thinking about if only for the sheer challenge of speculation.
One such grand opportunity is the one closest to hand, namely, the reconstitution of what used to be called British North America. For, of all the artificial divisions that exist in the world, the one between Canadians and ourselves is the least natural, the one least grounded in genuinely divisive forces. It is a division which, so far as one can see, is of no practical benefit to anyone anywhere, though it continues to provide some people somewhere with emotional comfort.
The concept of what we can call—borrowing some terms from both places-a United Dominion of North America is an old, quite unexceptionable, idea. It goes back at least to the First Continental Congress of 1774, so named because the British colonies in Canada seemed our natural allies in a struggle against a common overbearing sovereign. Then, everything argued for a single successor polity, and there is not very much which argues against it now. There are, as we know, inheritances of bad feelings, but we in the New World, who disdain the irrational quarrelsomeness of the Old, should recognize that those inheritances are scarcely comparable to the obstacles already on the road to elimination in Europe.
Have we not been reading that the new Germany will be the world’s next great powerhouse, and that the post-1992 new Europe will be more powerful still? Yet a reunified North America would have implications at least as large, would certainly free enormous energies, and, simultaneously, would create the single most influential polity in the world for a long time to come.
It is neither sentimental nor outlandish to contemplate this. In the recent past, those of us who live in North America have been told about a fabulously productive Asia which is pressing in across the Pacific. Even more recently, we have been alerted that an increasingly assertive European Community is arising across the Atlantic. It is only natural, then, to pay attention to our own continent, to how we who live on it can get the most out of it. And if someone wants to enlarge the geopolitical concept, to draw into it what used to be British Australasia, what, in the coming decades, really argues against that, too? This past March 6, the Air Force retired its SR-71 reconnaissance airplane because it had become “obsolete.” The plane capped its career by flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. in sixty-eight minutes. True, it carried only a two-man crew, and true, the distance from Los Angeles to Sydney is much larger than that; but these are details for the aeronautical engineers.
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None of this is really an argument about what is actually practicable, but is rather a dispute about the state of our soul, our evaluation of the worth of our society. In a recent article, the Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote about the 1950’s, and the ways he thinks they deceived us: “The decade fostered a new consensus of what we thought we could be. It created a sense of manifest destiny—a vision of a new society and global order—that constantly disappoints us because it grows ever more remote from reality.”
What is most interesting about this observation is that there is no evidence for it; almost hourly, if anything, our common sense confirms that it is totally wrong. “Our present discontents and confusions,” as Samuelson calls them, spring not at all from unrealistic expectations developed in the 1950’s, but from the flight from reality that took hold in the 1970’s. Indeed, the programs laid out in the 50’s for the countering of Communism, the revival of Europe, and the worldwide spread of democracy and capitalism have stood up remarkably well. Does anyone even remember the New International Economic Order proclaimed in the 1970’s as the alternative to the “cold war”?
But, of course, to move in a confident direction we will have to begin admitting to ourselves not only that we have won but that we deserved to win, that we are emerging from this victory not in a weakened but in a strengthened condition, and that greater things still are in store if only we have the boldness to reach for them.
