Andrew J. Bacevich, who’s been described as “the single most respected radical critic of U.S. foreign policy,” is the editor of a new collection of essays examining the period of American global preeminence that followed World War II. The collection, which features contributions from a number of leading historians, calls into question the still-common notion that the United States functioned as a benevolent leader, exporting rights and policing conflict. The nature of its leadership aside, in his own contributions to the book Bacevich passionately argues that the era of American hegemony is over. In the brief excerpt and video posted below, he explains the motivation behind The Short American Century: A Postmortem.
-----
The argument here is not to invert the American Century, fingering the United States with responsibility for every recurrence of war, famine, pestilence, and persecution that crops up on our deeply troubled planet. Nor is the argument that the United States, no longer the “almighty superpower” of yore, has entered a period of irreversible “decline,” pointing ineluctably to retreat, withdrawal, passivity, and irrelevance. Rather, the argument, amply sustained by the essays collected in this volume, is this: To further indulge old illusions of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history will not only impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves but may well pose a positive danger to both. Faced with a reality that includes, within the last decade alone,
- an inability to anticipate, whether the events of 9/11, the consequences of invading Iraq, or revolutionary upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world;
- an inability to control, with wars begun in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with various and sundry financial scandals, economic crises, and natural disasters, exposing the limits of American influence, power, and perspicacity;
- an inability to afford, as manifested by a badly overstretched military, trillion dollar annual deficits, increasingly unaffordable entitlement programs, and rapidly escalating foreign debt;
- an inability to respond, demonstrated by the dysfunction pervading the American political system, especially at the national level, whether in Congress, at senior levels of the executive branch, or in the bureaucracy; and
- an inability to comprehend what God intends or the human heart desires, with little to indicate that the wonders of the information age, however dazzling, the impact of globalization, however far-reaching, or the forces of corporate capitalism, however relentless, will provide answers to such elusive questions,
Americans today would do well to temper any claims or expectations of completing the world’s redemption. In light of such sobering facts, which Americans ignore at their peril, it no longer makes sense to pretend that the United States is promoting a special message in pursuit of a special mission. Like every other country that confronts circumstances of vast complexity and pervasive uncertainty, the United States is merely attempting to cope. Prudence and common sense should oblige Americans to admit as much.
[...]
The insistence that the American Century perdures—that it does convey truths of ongoing relevance—goes beyond nostalgia to signify something akin to a collective flight from reality. To insist that the perpetuation of the American Century (along with its corollary American Exceptionalism) offers a template for national policy is to indulge in escapism, inviting Americans to enter an alternative universe of their own invention.
Escapism makes for good box office but bad politics. Only by jettisoning the American Century and the illusions to which it gives rise will the self-knowledge and self-understanding that Americans urgently require become a possibility. Whether Americans will grasp the opportunity that beckons is another matter.
