The Short-Term Crusaders

Sir D. W. Brogan, the British political scientist, once noted that Americans are notoriously short-term crusaders. That explains a great deal of what is – and is not — on the current American agenda. The U.S. is now in a Presidential election campaign that is focused almost entirely on domestic issues. While policy wonks debate the Euro, China, exchange rates, and all that, most Americans are enervated only by domestic economic and social issues.
This should not be surprising. For decades the U.S. has vacillated between interventionism and isolationism. This puzzles Europeans because they frequently misunderstand both the “short term” and the “crusaders” parts of Brogan’s epigram. These days as the U.S. winds down its involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Europeans remain bewildered at why the U.S. got involved in the first place. The Marxian explanations about seeking oil or markets are wrong. Many of the places in which the U.S. has intervened have little economic value. After years of involvement in Vietnam, for example, the U.S. has essentially helped to create a low wage manufacturing center that is draining U.S. trade dollars and jobs.
The reality is that Americans believe in their “exceptionalism.” The country is supposed to be the beacon on the hill, and it intervenes to protect freedom and right the geopolitical balance. While cynical Europeans sit tight unwilling or unable to act, the U.S. takes action, even in places that are in Europe’s back yard, like the former Yugoslavia.
But after a while, Americans lose interest. To be sure, Americans, like most nations, don’t like to see their soldiers get killed. That’s why the U.S. military is placing a growing emphasis on air power, drones, robots, and such — Americans believe it’s fine to fight a war as long as nobody we know gets hurt. But even more fundamentally, Americans don’t like ambiguity. Whatever the undertaking, once we’ve been at it a couple of years, let’s win or get out. Let’s get it over with.
That’s essentially what’s happening in the crescent that runs from Iraq through Pakistan to Afghanistan. The job of nation building is not done by any measure, but Americans want out. President Obama had to promise his base he would depart, and now it is happening.
Capturing and killing Osama Ben Laden provided the White House with the symbolic victory needed to begin phasing troops out of Afghainistan.. Americans felt they had closure after 9/11, and they also felt the external threat was diminishing. In reality, the denouement in Afghanistan is as unclear there as it was in Iraq, and Vietnam, and Korea.
That may not really matter. The most American of solution was put forward in Vietnam, when Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, said, “Let’s declare victory and go home.” The U.S. is now doing precisely that in the Near East.
Indeed, the U.S. is winding down most of its international involvement. as it does intermittently. There is a new emphasis on multilateral diplomacy rather than bold U.S. action. In Libya, for example, American leaders spun a scenario in which the UK and France appeared to take the lead. In a press conference in Paris, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton talked about the U.S. providing “assistance” to the British and French, yet the core of the attack on Libya, more than 100 cruise missiles, came from the U.S.
Downplaying the U.S. role in the Libyan campaign may well have been done as much for domestic consumption as for geopolitical reasons A CBS News poll taken near the end of 2011 found that 77 percent of respondents endorsed pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, while only 17 percent disapproved. Those approving included 63 percent of Republican respondents. Moreover, 67 percent of respondents said they did not think the war was worth its cost in money or in lost lives.
Recognizing the new era, in January, the U.S. Department of Defense released a new “strategic guidance” document in which it discussed sharp reductions in military spending and indicated that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” In short, the post-9/11 era of intervention is over.
In his book “The Frugal Superpower,” published in two years ago analyst Michael Mandelbaum argued that the contraction of the U.S. economy required greater austerity in foreign policy and less intervention around the world. But American leaders must retreat carefully. They must pull back without suggesting the U.S. is losing its leadership role in the world. In his highly influential book, “The World America Made, Robert Kagan argues that “the most important feature of todays’s world – great spread of democracy, theprosperity, the prolonged great-power peace – have depended directly and indirectly on power and influenced exercised by the United States.” Particularly in an election year, the last thing President Obama wants to suggest is that the U.S. is less influential or less “exceptional.” The new mantra is: We are strong enough to do a lot of important things…we just don’t want to.
The U.S. can turn inward not because of any character failing or inferiority to more cosmopolitan Europeans. It turns inward because it can. Big countries like the U.S., China, Brazil, can think only about themselves, whereas most other countries can’t. If you’re Dutch, after you finish reading Elseviers Weekblad and De Telegraaf, you have to read Time, or The Economist, or Der Spiegel, or Le Monde, because there isn’t much else to read in Dutch. Once you’ve seen the few Dutch language films made in recent months, you’ve got to go to foreign films. The only way Dutch television can be on 24/7 is to import hours and hours of programming. If you want to go to a nice place by the sea in the summer or to ski in the winter, you probably need to go abroad. And if you can expect to go abroad, you know it makes sense to other languages. If you’re Italian or French, you have more domestic choices, but still the skiing is better in Switzerland and there’s not enough domestic television production to fill all those hours on all those channels without Kojack reruns.
By contrast, you can lead a very full life in the U.S. without ever leaving the country or learning another language: Ski in Colorado, go to the beach in Miami or San Diego, vacation in Las Vegas or see the Grand Canyon. See some of the scores of Hollywood movies or hundreds of English language television shows. Read the thousands of books published in the U.S. Go to one of the 3500 colleges and universities. And if you do go abroad, well everybody speaks English don’t they?
Until surprisingly recently, the U.S. economy was largely self-contained. The country produced pretty much everything an American would want to buy, and imports were limited. Yes the U.S. imports a lot of oil, but most of it has come from Canada and Mexico, and the U.S. itself is one of the world’s largest oil producers, so why think about other places.
In the last few decades, however, the world has been intruding on the economy, and as a result, outsourcing, and job losses, and trade balances are beginning to generate concerns..
It economics and politics, as in investing and military adventures, at the moment going abroad no longer seems like such a good idea. Thus, the U.S. is uninterested in the rest of the world…for the moment. Another adventure will surely arise. The short termism will be satiated and the crusader impulses will be revived. Influential neo-conservatives insist the U.S. is not only a beacon, but one that is obliged to project its power in order to advance its values elsewhere in the world. . Already some of them are saying there will inevitably be conflict with China. Others see Africa as needing the U.S. There is continuing disgust with European dithering and inaction. China is only interested in trade, and Russia is a has been. So U.S. sees itself as the global source of good works. The arrest of several Americans in Egypt revealed a low key effort to promote democracy there.
So the current inward focus is as likely to be brief as it was to be inevitable.