On Misreading Victory

WN: There is great wisdom in the article highlighted. “Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh when will they ever learn?”–Peter, Paul and Mary

excerpts:

Thirty years ago this month, President George H.W. Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver his first State of the Union Address, the first post-Cold War observance of this annual ritual. Just weeks before, the Berlin Wall had fallen. That event, the president declared, “marks the beginning of a new era in the world’s affairs.” The Cold War, that “long twilight struggle” (as President John F. Kennedy so famously described it), had just come to an abrupt end. A new day was dawning. President Bush seized the opportunity to explain just what that dawning signified.

“There are singular moments in history, dates that divide all that goes before from all that comes after,” the president said. The end of World War II had been just such a moment. In the decades that followed, 1945 provided “the common frame of reference, the compass points of the postwar era we’ve relied upon to understand ourselves.” Yet the hopeful developments of the year just concluded — Bush referred to them collectively as “the Revolution of ’89” — had initiated “a new era in the world’s affairs.”

While many things were certain to change, the president felt sure that one element of continuity would persist: the United States would determine history’s onward course. “America, not just the nation but an idea,” he emphasized, is and was sure to remain “alive in the minds of people everywhere.”

“As this new world takes shape, America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom — today, tomorrow, and into the next century. Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world — our new world.”

…

In his remarks to Congress, [President George H. W. Bush] was asserting a prerogative that his predecessors had long ago appropriated: interpreting the zeitgeist in such a way as to merge past, present, and future into a seamless, self-congratulatory, and reassuring narrative of American power. He was describing history precisely as Americans — or at least privileged Americans — wished to see it. He was, in other words, speaking a language in which he was fluent: the idiom of the ruling class.

As the year 1990 began, duty — destiny, even — was summoning members of that ruling class to lead not just this country, but the planet itself and not just for a decade or two, or even for an “era,” but forever and a day. In January 1990, the way ahead for the last superpower on planet Earth — the Soviet Union would officially implode in 1991 but its fate already seemed obvious enough — was clear indeed.

So, How’d We Do?

…

In appearance or configuration, the post-Cold War military differed little from what it had looked like between the 1950s and 1989. Yet the armed forces of the United States now took on a radically different, far more ambitious mission: to impose order and spread American values globally, while eliminating obstacles deemed to impede those efforts. During the Cold War, policymakers had placed a premium on holding U.S. forces in readiness. Now, the idea was to put “the troops” to work. Power projection became the name of the game.Just a month prior to his State of the Union Address, President Bush himself had given this approach a test run, ordering U.S. forces to intervene in Panama, overthrow the existing government there, and install in its place one expected to be more compliant. The president now neatly summarized the outcome of that action in three crisp sentences. “One year ago,” he announced, “the people of Panama lived in fear, under the thumb of a dictator. Today democracy is restored; Panama is free. Operation Just Cause has achieved its objective.”

Mission accomplished: end of story. Here, it seemed, was a template for further application globally.

As it happened, however, Operation Just Cause proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Intervention in Panama did inaugurate a period of unprecedented American military activism. In the years that followed, U.S. forces invaded, occupied, bombed, or raided an astonishing array of countries. Rarely, however, was the outcome as tidy as it had been in Panama, where the fighting lasted a mere five days. Untidy and protracted conflicts proved more typical of the post-Cold War U.S. experience, with the Afghanistan War, a futile undertaking now in its 19th year, a notable example. The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places.

The “Rise” of China: . . .

A Resurgence of Religious Extremism: . . .

The Assault on Nature: . . .

Some things were sacrosanct. As he put it on another occasion, “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”

So while President Bush was not an outright climate-change denier, he temporized. Talk took precedence over action. He thereby set a pattern to which his successors would adhere, at least until the Trump years. To thwart communism during the Cold War, Americans might have been willing to “pay any price, bear any burden.” Not so when it came to climate change. The Cold War itself had seemingly exhausted the nation’s capacity for collective sacrifice. So, on several fronts, the assault on nature continues and is even gaining greater momentum.

Please click on: On Misreading Victory