With American bombs falling on yet another Middle Eastern country as this piece goes to press, one can’t but help but be discouraged by the quandary our country has once again gotten itself into. Given how many times we have gone down this route it seems almost pointless to argue against the many obvious drawbacks of resorting to bombing to solve all our problems there.
Indeed, at this juncture it is The Onion that provides the best analysis when it cheekily reported a few weeks ago that President Obama had vowed to “split ISIS into dozens of extremist splinter groups.”
This time it is Syria, of course, but differentiating this aerial campaign from the one launched against the same group in Iraq a few weeks ago or from any of the other Middle Eastern campaigns the United States has embarked upon in the last decade-and-a-half verges upon the absurd. At the end of the day, whatever happens, the latest crop of Near Eastern villains du jour will be annihilated but none of the fundamental factors at work in creating the Middle East’s deep and profound dysfunction will be resolved in any meaningful way.
Sunni and Shiite Arabs will still deeply distrust one another. Saudi Arabia and Iran will vie for regional influence. Israel will receive America’s unstinting support, while the Palestinians will remain stateless and disempowered. Despots will be propped up because they are seen as better than radicalized, anti-American populists, and the economic corruption that comes along with oil wealth will further enslave the region and deepen America’s commitment to it. At best, all our country will be to do is throw a couple of expensive Band-Aids on the sucking chest wound that is the region and hope for the best.
A giant with feet of clay
If this sounds profoundly depressing, it should. America has wasted trillions in a military effort to control a region that simply will not conform to our preferences and expectations for it. Like water seeking to reach an outlet to the sea, our every effort to dam up the Middle East’s deep and widespread popular discontent with the status quo has become akin to King Canute commanding the sea to go out. It is farcical to suggest that it can even be done, yet we do so anyway because our elites largely cannot imagine a situation wherein the focusing of American power cannot accomplish something great and good. We are strong, and so of course we should be able to bend the region and its people to our will — that we cannot is deeply frustrating.
This sense of humiliating impotence isn’t just limited to affairs beyond our shores, either. As our million-dollar bombs get dropped by billion-dollar aircraft, one can’t help but draw connections between our feckless actions in the Middle East and our stagnant situation at home. Anemic job growth, growing economic inequality, seemingly unsolvable problems like rampant gun violence and decaying infrastructure — everywhere, America seems bogged down by burdens and problems that seem just beyond its grasp to solve. We are Gulliver, tied down by an army of Lilliputians.
Some of this is normal; after all, no country can manage every problem efficiently and effectively all the time. Some of this is self-inflicted, as any student of our politics must surely admit. Yet for a country as rich and powerful as the U.S., the fact that we are being given the run around by militants in Toyotas while our own children remain hungry can’t be anything but dispiriting. This is the country that put a man on the Moon, saved the “Free World” in the Second World War, and along the way invented the very definition of what it meant to be modern for so much of the rest of the world. So, what happened? Why can’t America do things anymore?
Hard work vs. the prosperity gospel
We’ve been in a similar situation before, of course. In the years leading up to and following the fall of Saigon to the forces of Communism the U.S. suffered a string of setbacks and disasters that would have knocked any other nation out cold. Then, as now, our troubles abroad were compounded by deep divisions at home — indeed, they were actually a lot worse. Cities burned amid rioting. Political tensions were set aflame as Jim Crow fell and equal opportunity beckoned. Everywhere one looked social change was overturning longstanding cultural norms while economic malaise sapped the country’s strength.
As all this chaos and failure darkened America’s doorways, two approaches emerged that attempted to explain these setbacks and offer solutions to them. The first approach was perhaps best personified by two individuals who seem like bookends to his era of despair: Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Although both represented very different parts of the ideological spectrum, the Nixon-Carter branch of post-war political thought was nonetheless one rooted in a form of realistic pragmatism that offered no easy way out.
From this line of thinking comes the idea that the world was a hard, difficult place requiring hard, difficult choices to be made both at home and abroad. This forced America to grow up by understanding it could only manage problems, not fix them easily or cheaply. As such sacrifice was part and parcel of this philosophy, so was the idea of limits: America could not, in fact, do it all because it was not an all-powerful actor like the protagonists of legend and myth. That was propaganda, and the reality was that the U.S. — like any normal country — had its limits and it had to take care not to exceed them. Though the views of Nixon and his successors Ford and Carter differed greatly on what limited actions we should take both at home and abroad, none really doubted that prudence or limitation were the order of the day.
Opposed to this line of thinking were those who took away a very different lesson from these post-war debacles. To them, the issue was not that America had run up against its own limits, but that those limits had been self-imposed by a weak-kneed political class that wanted to permanently hobble America for its own partisan interests. If only these limitations and the people enforcing them were done away with, they felt, then America could succeed where before it had failed. Will, therefore, was what was lacking, not the actual power or knowledge required to solve problems as America encountered them both at home and abroad.
Wildly idealistic, this view melded several simple-minded ideas percolating in the American zeitgeist since the Second World War into a cohesive belief system that was insanely popular. It promised aggressive action abroad against the enemies of freedom, as America defined the term, with a policy of deregulation and tax-cutting at home that would free Americans to create wealth as never before. It made no mention of hard work or sacrifice, and effectively promised that the U.S. could have its cake and eat it, too — all with no money down and certainly with no hard questions asked.
The primary purveyor of this flimflam was Ronald Reagan, whose career as a B-level Hollywood actor had prepared him to sunnily and convincingly play a leading role in bringing the American people to this new sunny-side-up civic religion. As the historian Rick Perlstein points out so nimbly in his latest history of American conservatism, Reagan was able to capture the discontent that the worldview offered up by the Nixon-Carter axis created and turn it into electoral gold. Only, instead of offering hard truths, Reagan offered platitudes that turned the real lessons of the 1960s and 1970s — the world was a hard place, America was not all powerful, and we have pressing problems at home — on their head. According to Reagan’s logic, it was the experts on limits and limitations — the “blame America first” crowd — and not America itself that was at fault. If only Americans would come back to the true faith as revealed by Reagan and his patriotic faithful, then success would follow.
That such an appeal would be popular is obvious in hindsight. After all, no out-of-shape individual wants to be told that only hard work and discipline will make him slimmer and healthier, and in a country where get-rich-quick schemes, diet fads and self-help hogwash are each billion-dollar industries, it was foreordained that the patriotic equivalent of the prosperity gospel would inevitably win out.
As Perlstein concludes in his latest book, when America was finally on its knees and facing an opportunity to face its flaws and learn hard lessons from this honest reflection, it forsook the opportunity to grow up by turning to an actor-turned politician who peddled a fairytale about a country blessed by divine providence.
“People want to believe,” Perlstein writes, and “Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.”
Rinse and repeat
The culmination of the Reagan style of thinking that placed childlike faith in America above everything else came in the administration of George W. Bush, and the catastrophes that resulted from that diversion into the farthest reaches of fantasyland are still very much with us today. Like Johnson and the other post-war believers in American exceptionalism that led us into the morass of Vietnam, the Bush administration saw America as a country that could do anything it put its mind to, no matter what kind of messy reality got in the way. The costs that come with those kinds of beliefs, mostly delayed for future generations to pay, eventually caught up with us, forcing Americans to take up more pragmatic leadership aimed to manage, if not actually solve, real problems as opposed to engaging in fantastical crusades.
Leaders that offer just that kind of leadership, however, are rarely inspiring. They are broccoli when we’re hungry for sugary cereal, and like children who cannot understand why they should eat their vegetables Americans today, like Americans in the late 1970s, are unhappy with the idea that there are limits we must face up to and confront.
Like a toddler throwing a tantrum, we’ve become angry yet again at the adult we elected to clean up after the messes our childish thinking created in the first place. This is the country that after putting a man on the Moon invented fast food and no-money-down adjustable rate mortgages, after all, and when times get tough Americans nowadays turn to Teflon.