Harvard University Press Blog

JFK's Inaugural Address and Catch-22

The year of 1961 was bookended by two iconic and enduring moments for American letters: John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, on January 20th, and the November publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. In an essay for A New Literary History of America, which you can read in full below, Charles Taylor pits these visions of America’s place in the world against one another, contrasting Kennedy’s call to service with Heller’s take on the risks of obedience. The Presidential Inaugural Address is a unique genre, and with Barack Obama’s second but a few days away, now seems an apt time to look back.

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In Joe Dante’s 1993 comedy Matinee, it’s 1962, and we’re in a picture-perfect American living room. A little boy in a cowboy hat kills time before Sunday dinner watching Art Linkletter’s quiz show People Are Funny when a bulletin interrupts saying President Kennedy will speak live from the White House on a matter of “the greatest national urgency.” The president informs his audience that Soviet missiles are being installed in Cuba, some containing nuclear warheads capable of reaching the United States. He has the look of a man delivering a death sentence. “They’re gonna bomb us?” asks the little boy. “No,” says his older brother, trying to comfort him, though he plainly doesn’t believe it himself. They’ve spent the afternoon at a shlocky Vincent Price matinee, where the older boy has delighted in his little brother’s fright. There’s no delight now. And then, as if on cue, comes the real chiller moment. Kennedy’s face fills the screen. “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war,” he says, “but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

Nothing diminishes the terror of that moment: what Norman Mailer, writing a few months later, called “a bright mad psychic voice which leaps to give the order that presses a button.” The grim determined stature of a man carrying out the worst burden of his office crumbles when you parse those words. Harking forward six years to the U.S. Army major who justified the destruction of the Vietnamese village Ben Tre, Kennedy is saying that if necessary he’ll destroy the republic in order to save it.

Kennedy’s presidency has always been celebrated for its spirit of hope and youthful vigor and renewed commitment to public service. But Kennedy’s words on that Sunday evening in October (or, to be precise, the words of Theodore Sorensen, who wrote many of his speeches as well as Profiles in Courage, for which Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize) are the fulfillment of what he so famously promised twenty-two months earlier, on January 20, 1961, in his Inaugural Address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

In that speech, Kennedy reminded his audience that his generation of Americans had been “tempered by war.” Published at the end of that year, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 suggested how. “Now the trumpet summons us again,” Kennedy said, in language more apocalyptic than stirring, “to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” “Will you join in that historic effort?” Kennedy asked. And twelve months later, Heller’s hero Yossarian answered: Fuck no.

The novel’s title refers to its most logical piece of nonlogic: crazy men cannot be sent on flying missions. But because only a crazy man would go on such a dangerous mission, the fact that he doesn’t want to is a sign of his sanity, and therefore, he’s clear to fly.

Limiting the Horror of War

From our modern vantage, warfare of the past often appears barbaric. The close quarters of combat and high death counts, all conducted at the whim of rulers, can strike us as monstrously inhumane. And yet, as James Whitman argues in The Verdict of Battle, pitched battles of the past were far more effective at containing their violence than today’s sprawling wars of idealism. In the article and video below, Whitman details the evolution of warfare, and highlights some lessons of the past.

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Pitched battles are gruesome events. Consider the description of the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 given by Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross: “The poor wounded men... were ghastly pale... They begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death-struggle...” When we read such accounts it is difficult to imagine that anybody could regard a pitched battle with anything but horror.

Nevertheless for many centuries our ancestors thought of pitched battles as a good thing—in fact, a blessing for society. A pitched battle may be nightmarish for the soldiers who fight it, but it is a contained way of settling an international dispute. If a conflict can be decided by a day of concentrated killing on the battlefield, then violence can be prevented from spilling over to the rest of society. In fact, for many centuries staging a battle was deemed to be a perfectly acceptable, and highly desirable, legal procedure. In the Middle Ages, pitched battles were regarded as “judgments of God,” lawful ways of calling upon the Almighty to decide an international dispute. In the eighteenth century, they were regarded as settlement procedures, fought under a “tacit contract of chance.” Eighteenth-century battles were a kind of lawful wager, by which the warring sovereigns agreed to allow their conflict to be settled by the “chance of arms.”

 

To modern lawyers, such attitudes seem incomprehensible and repellant. We cannot accept the idea that international disputes could be resolved by deliberately staging a mass killing on a battlefield. The modern law of war is humanitarian law. It is founded on the proposition that war is a curse, and that conflicts should be resolved through peaceful means, with war used only as a desperate last resort.

The Permanent Militarization of America

The popularization of the term “military-industrial complex” is commonly traced to Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 address upon leaving the presidency. Despite our knowledge of the term’s roots therein, argues Aaron B. O’Connell, few people remember the actual content of Eisenhower’s message. O’Connell, the author of Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps, reminds us in an NYT opinion piece that what Eisenhower cautioned against was a permanent militarization of America, an unyielding state of preparation for and engagement in war that threatened to become a dominant feature of modern American life.

Despite Eisenhower’s warning, that’s essentially where we’ve arrived, led by civilians and politicians who project and protect the sanctity of American military institutions. From O’Connell’s piece:

From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Of course, veterans should be thanked for serving their country, as should police officers, emergency workers and teachers. But no institution — particularly one financed by the taxpayers — should be immune from thoughtful criticism.

“That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible,” he continues, “and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.”

As O’Connell explains in Underdogs, the Marines in particular have excelled at catapulting themselves to these heights of popular esteem. They’ve managed to become a force in American culture, he argues, largely by way of their own culture of force. O’Connell, himself a Marine reserve officer and assistant professor of history at the US Naval Academy, recently spoke with us about the book, and the concept of militarization:

  

The (MBA) Program Era

A few years back we published Mark McGurl’s award-winning reconsideration of American literature, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. The book outlines how the growth in popularity of creative writing programs has shaped American fiction. Contra those who bemoan the uniformity that they think MFA-style training has brought to American writing, McGurl argues that American literary culture of this era has been rich, deep, and often brilliant, but that the generating force of higher education plays a constitutive role we have to understand:

We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University and a few others to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 350 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is our literary history.

So, okay. Terrific book, a joy to read, you should check it out. Today, though, let’s imagine taking that structural lens and applying it to another ubiquitous graduate program that seems from the outside to inculcate a particular perspective on the world: the Master of Business Administration. This year we’ve all been privy to what a cynic could call the MBA industry’s greatest-ever bit of guerilla marketing, the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, surely the most celebrated MBA in the world today.

The rightful focus on the economy throughout this campaign has given us ample exposure to MBA thinking. And what’s been fascinating to many observers is the way in which that thinking is being repurposed, with Romney making the case that the skills and knowledge required to run a business are the very same as those required to govern a country. Current polls give nearly even odds that we’ll get the chance to see if he’s right.

But why wait? Let’s take that McGurl-style approach and imagine a book on the MBA program era. What would it teach us about this mode of training and its uses? Maybe it would help us think about the ramifications of imagining everything as a market to exploit, which may, in turn, help us understand a perspective in which thirty thousand dead in Syria can be considered an “opportunity,” as Governor Romney described the situation in this week’s foreign policy debate:

Well, let's step back and talk about what's happening in Syria and how important it is. First of all, 30,000 people being killed by their government is a humanitarian disaster. Secondly, Syria is an opportunity for us because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now.

The thing with markets is timing, right? Buy low, sell high. We see the politics of that mindset in the Governor’s comments on the need to swiftly arm Syrian opposition forces, despite America’s (long) history of training and equipping foreign rebels who’d later employ those capabilities against the U.S. and its interests.

Now, there are obviously contradictions here, which perhaps a book like The (MBA) Program Era could help us to understand. Like, for instance, why the MBA candidate is the one so unsatisfied with the efficacy of economic sanctions. Or why seemingly every politician is so blind to the humanitarian tragedy of those sanctions, as if the economy exists as an entity apart from the lives within it. Even if countries were businesses, as this conception of sanctions encourages us to imagine, shouldn’t businesspeople understand that squeezing a business hurts the workers well before it hurts the owners, and so sanctions hurt the people well before they affect the leaders? Surely the CEOs of American Fortune 500s—doing so well themselves after the crisis while not rehiring the workers who’d been downsized—could explain that.

We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Harvard Business School, Wharton, Sloan and a few others to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 4,000 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is becoming our leadership history.

"The Most Crippling Sanctions in the History of Sanctions"

“Look, imagine had we let the Republican Congress work out the sanctions. You think there's any possibility the entire world would have joined us, Russia and China, all of our allies? These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period. Period.” That was Vice President Joe Biden’s response when Congressman Paul Ryan criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Iran during last week’s VP debate. From there the two men sparred over which party’s approach would more “peacefully” resolve the threat posed by Iranian nuclear efforts, apparently each taking for granted that the sanctions themselves are nonviolent.

If we take Biden at his word and accept that these sanctions are the strongest ever imposed, Americans should be neither encouraged nor permitted to imagine them as peaceful. Not after witnessing the U.S.-orchestrated sanctions on Iraq from 1990 until 2003, recognized as the most devastating in history, and now judged by some to have verged on genocidal. Joy Gordon presents that view in Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, a chilling study of how the U.S. steered the UN Security Council towards the creation and perpetuation of a sweeping humanitarian tragedy.

The following excerpt from Invisible War details how the world developed a sense of sanctions as innocuous, a view that encouraged complacency and indifference despite mounting evidence of the injustice of punishing a nation’s people for the transgressions of their leaders. The passage also presents then-Senator Biden arguing for continued reliance on the Iraq sanctions, in an exchange much like that of last week’s debate.

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The Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define genocide as including “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such . . . [by d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Some have argued that the U.S. role in shaping the sanctions on Iraq turned an act of international governance into a genocidal enterprise; that U.S. officials deliberately and knowingly brought about the indiscriminate destruction of life as well as destroying the means to sustain life in Iraq.

The possibility that economic sanctions could be a human rights violation, or even a form of genocide, was not something that anyone imagined when the sanctions were first imposed on Iraq in 1990. Sieges and blockades in time of war, such as the siege of Leningrad, caused terrible loss of life. But economic sanctions, as a form of political pressure outside the context of war, had not. If nations of comparable size imposed sanctions on each other, as was the case with the United States and the Soviet Union, then the impact was little more than symbolic. If the United States sanctioned a small nation, such as Cuba, then the targeted nation could shift its trade to the Soviet bloc. Consequently, economic sanctions during the Cold War were never devastating. In fact, they were viewed as a “middle route”: they were seen as nonviolent, in contrast to military intervention, but also as having more of a bite than diplomatic efforts. As of the late 1980s there was little concern about the ethics or humanitarian impact of sanctions. For the most part, those who wrote about sanctions were concerned with whether they were likely to succeed in getting the target state to change its policies, or with the difficulty of keeping sanctions in place when the members of an alliance were losing trade opportunities.

Not only were sanctions seen as innocuous, but the case of South Africa made them seem quite attractive. The Black South African population itself—the population most likely to be harmed by economic sanctions—called for sanctions against South Africa as an act of international solidarity. The sanctions imposed on South Africa were effective for a combination of reasons. They were accompanied by international diplomacy and social isolation of the apartheid regime within the international community. In addition to the international pressure, there was growing domestic opposition from labor, students, and political organizations, which emerged as forces within South Africa’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. One commentator noted that the “hurting stalemate” resulted in moderates from both sides negotiating with each other, and there were also reformist elites that emerged within the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. In any event, there was little ground to claim that the sanctions were hurting an innocent population against its will. In the end the apartheid regime gave way to democracy and sanctions were viewed as having an important and effective role in accomplishing this.

But the sanctions regime imposed on South Africa was anomalous in every regard: typically there is little support from the population that is harmed, and sanctions rarely induce the targeted state to change its practices. On the contrary, the more typical response is a “rally ’round the flag” effect in which the population supports the state in the face of what is seen as aggression by a foreign power. Furthermore, the most optimistic studies of sanctions in the twentieth century found that sanctions influence the target nation only about one-third of the time. Critics have argued that even this number includes cases that are overdetermined, and that if we look only at the number of cases where sanctions are clearly the determinative factor in changing a state’s policies, sanctions were clearly effective in only about 5 percent of the cases in the twentieth century.

Disputed Islands and the Logic of Strategy

When the Japanese government announced earlier this month that it had purchased three islands from a private Japanese citizen, it set in motion a row with China that’s yet to fully subside. The islands are part of a string known in Japan as the Senkaku and in China as the Diaoyu, the status of which was left unclear after WWII. Many in China took the Japanese government’s purchase of the islands as a nationalist provocation, and responded with raucous protests that had at least tacit approval from the Chinese government, if not encouragement. The dispute has also flared at sea, where both countries have had ships poised near the islands.

The protests in China, which had included the vandalizing of Japanese-owned businesses, appear finally to be subsiding. Renewed calm would come as a relief to those who note the widespread economic harm that would result from any prolonged dispute between the deeply interdependent China and Japan, Asia’s two largest economies. In fact, there is speculation that concern over its softening economy inspired the Chinese government finally to tamp down the protests. Even still, with both countries experiencing political transition, and the launching this week of China’s first aircraft carrier, observers note that an end to the protests shouldn’t be taken to signal an end to the conflict.

To military strategist and historian Edward Luttwak, China’s clumsy handling of disputes like this comes as no surprise. In Luttwak’s telling, the obvious indiscretion of allowing citizens to vandalize businesses owned by one of the country’s largest trading partners would be but another example of what he calls “Chinese autism.” That’s the term Luttwak uses to describe China’s low level of awareness of the effects its actions have on other countries.

In his new book, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, he argues that the inexorable rise many forecast for China will actually be undercut by this inability of its leaders to think strategically. Essentially, China is attempting to grow its military might in step with its economic power, a double-pronged advance that Luttwak says belies the logic of strategy. He explains further:

 

One of the most important ramifications of China’s trouble with strategic logic, according to Luttwak, is the manner in which it steers other Asian nations towards alliance with the U.S. Certainly something for the world to watch.

Lincoln's Hundred Days

150 years ago, on September 22nd, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued preliminary notice of his intention to declare the freedom of slaves held in states then in rebellion. Tense weeks of deliberation passed before he made good, delivering the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863. Louis P. Masur’s new book, Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union, tells the full story of that eventful interlude. We recently asked Masur a few questions to help us better understand the churning context in which the Proclamation evolved.

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Q. How did you come to write about this pivotal period?

What unifies my work is an interest in specific moments and texts. I’ve written books about the events of a year, a single photograph, and a seminal record album. Writing a short general history of the war refocused my attention on the period and paved the way for a more specialized study of the war’s greatest achievement. I realized that most accounts of emancipation skip quickly from the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the final decree and I wanted to understand that period more completely. For those who lived through those times, the hundred days, as the clock wound down to the Day of Jubilee, were fraught with excitement and fear, hope and confusion. I wanted to recapture the contingency and uncertainty of that time and, in doing so, shed new light on Lincoln and the Proclamation.

Q. What did Lincoln, his cabinet, and outside observers see as precedent for the Emancipation Proclamation? To what degree was it viewed as a break with the founding documents?

Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave and leading abolitionist, thought the decree bore comparison only to the Declaration of Independence. “The fourth of July was great,” declared Douglass, “but the first of January...is incomparably greater.” We have lost that sense of the momentousness of the Emancipation Proclamation and it is my hope that Lincoln’s Hundred Days helps us to recover and celebrate its significance. While some opponents of the Proclamation at the time saw it as a gross violation of the Constitution, many others saw it as a fulfillment of the founder’s vision that brought the Constitution into alignment with the Declaration’s assertion of human equality.

Q. Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation just weeks before the 1862 midterm elections. How political was his timing? Did he correctly anticipate voters’ reaction? How did he in turn respond to election results?

Lincoln was always deliberate and his slowness infuriated his critics. But once he acted, he did not look back. Lincoln had always been antislavery; now he took direct action to end the institution in areas of the Confederacy still in rebellion. He knew he would a pay a price politically, and he did. The Republicans suffered setbacks in the fall elections. But he did not retreat, contrary to the hopes of some and fears of others. Indeed, after the elections, he told a group of visiting Kentuckians “he would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.”

Q. You marshal a number of voices—those of diarists, politicians, soldiers writing home—to bring immediacy to the events you discuss. Do you have a favorite observer?

It’s hard for me not be enamored of Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish exile and minor State Department official, who kept a diary that is scathing, idiosyncratic, and original. It was a tell-all in an age that valued propriety and decorum. And he had no qualms about sharing it with others; he published the first volume at the end of 1862. One reviewer called him “venomous.” A senator compared him to a whale in a tank. I quote him time and again not because I agree with him, but because he wrote with passion and honesty in a voice that rings across time.

America's Long War for Oil

June’s Journal of American History is a special issue on “Oil in American History” featuring nearly two dozen essays on the theme, all of which are currently available full-text online. Below, we’ve posted a short excerpt from Toby Craig Jones’s contribution to the issue, an article entitled “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East.” Jones, whose Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia we published in 2010, is at work on a book about America’s oil wars.

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Capturing oil and oil fields and establishing direct or imperial control over oil has not been part of the United States’ strategic logic for war. But protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil has been. This is a critical distinction. The period between 1990 and the end of the long war in Iraq marks only the latest stage of American militarism in the Gulf. If oil and American oil policy—rather than the behavior of Saddam Hussein, the politics of the war on terrorism, or a handful of other political factors—are kept in focus, then one can argue that this period constitutes not a series of wars, but a single long war, one in which pursuing regional security and protecting oil and American-friendly oil producers has been the principal strategic rationale. That the permanent shadow of war has settled over the Persian Gulf in the last three decades is largely the direct outcome of the ways that oil has been tied to American national security and the ways that American policy makers linked security to militarization.

It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the United States and its history of militarism and military engagement in the Gulf region have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow, the network of oil producers has remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have been served. But three decades of war belie this argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or peace. Even in the periods between wars in the region the violence carried out by regimes against their own subjects makes clear that peace is not always peaceful. The cost has been high for the United States and especially for people who live in the Middle East. In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty, environmental disaster, torture, and wretched living conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The politics of war have primarily served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported violence to deflect internal challenges to their authority. And international political rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also helped facilitate insecurity and disorder in the Middle East.

The region’s autocrats have also remained in power. As citizens began to challenge ruling regimes in early 2011 in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman—three of the closest allies of the United States in the region—it became clear that those governments are all too willing to turn the weapons of war, purchased mostly from the United States, on their subjects. It is also clear that those regimes are hardly stable and that they are and will remain perennially vulnerable to domestic and regional shocks, which poses a real dilemma for U.S. policy. In addition to factoring in the human toll of wars and the moral dilemmas they raise, Americans trying to determine the true price of oil in the United States must take into account the financial cost of maintaining a massive military presence in the Gulf region. Roger Stern estimates that between 1976 and 2007 the total cost of maintaining the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf was about $7 trillion, and that figure does not include the costs of the 2003 Iraq War.

The increasing willingness of the United States to use force and violence to shore up the flow of oil to global markets has not been a sign of American strength but rather of its limits. Popular political discourse in the United States often posits Americans and their government as unwitting victims of an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction or as dupes of duplicitous oil producers. It would certainly be wise to break this addiction to oil, but to do so requires coming to terms with the history of that addiction and the multiple costs it entails. But it is hardly clear that any such reconsideration is happening. Instead, the United States appears set to continue along a familiar path. Having crafted a set of relationships with oil and unstable oil producers and having linked the fate of those relationships to American national security virtually ensures that while the United States is wrapping up the most recent oil war, its military and political strategists are already preparing for the next one.

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Visit the companion website for the “Oil in American History” issue of the Journal of American History.

African Victory in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, when it seemed that all of Africa was destined to come under European colonial rule, Ethiopia succeeded in thwarting European conquest and preserving its own independence. The pivotal event in its resistance to Italian colonial advance from Eritrea was the Battle of Adwa, in which an army of black Africans under the leadership of Emperor Menelik decisively defeated the Italians. The Battle of Adwa, which marked the first time in the modern era that a non-European power had defeated a European power without the aid of a European ally, is considered one of the most important events in modern African history. In The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, historian Raymond Jonas makes the case for the broader global historical significance of the conflict. 

There are a number of complex reasons for Italian failure at Adwa. Italian leadership had assumed, wrongly but not without credibility, that it could play on factional conflict within Ethiopia. As a result the Italians were unprepared for the unity Menelik was able to inspire, and thus the Italians drastically underestimated the size of the Ethiopian army, and the firepower at its disposal. But Menelik’s forces didn’t merely outnumber the Italians; the Emperor also outmaneuvered them, in what Jonas describes as one of the great military campaigns of modern history.

Inevitably, Ethiopian victory was interpreted in racial terms, for not only had an African army defeated a European army, but a black army had defeated a white army. In the Jim Crow United States and elsewhere around the globe, Adwa gave the lie to the inevitability of European domination—both political and racial. We recently spoke with Jonas about the worldwide implications of what happened at Adwa in 1896. A bit of video from our conversation:

 

Presidential Politics and the Third Testament of the American Bible

In last night’s debate between the Republican candidates for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney brushed off the controversy surrounding a Texas pastor’s suggestion that as a Mormon he was a member of a cult. “I’ve heard worse,” he said of the pastor’s comments, before explaining why he found the remarks to be “a very dangerous and enormous departure from the principles of our Constitution”:

What I actually found that was most troubling in what the reverend said in the introduction was he said, in choosing our nominee, we should inspect his religion. And someone who’s a good moral person is not someone who we should select; instead, we should choose someone who subscribes to our religious belief.

That—that idea that we should choose people, based upon their religion, for public office is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion; that this would be a nation that recognized and respected other faiths, where there’s a plurality of faiths, where there was tolerance for other people and faiths. That’s bedrock principle.

(A full transcript of the debate can be found here.)

Despite Romney’s objection to its presence, religion is actually playing a very visible role in these campaigns. One take on that role came earlier this week in the form of a Los Angeles Times op-ed from Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, former military officer, and noted critic of American empire. In the piece, Bacevich highlights the reality that all mainstream presidential candidates, regardless of party affiliation, share a view of American exceptionalism that is rooted in a belief in God’s intentions for the country.

Bacevich quotes a recent speech in which Romney exclaimed that “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,” and that the United States is a nation with “a unique destiny and role in the world.” To Bacevich, Romney’s comments were both striking and unexceptionable in their reflection of a position widely held by those seeking higher office. Where, Bacevich asks, are candidates learning of these higher plans for their country? From his piece:

The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God's instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land. For anyone aspiring to high office, professing fealty to this Third Testament has become all but obligatory.