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"In watching the flow of events over the past
decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental
has happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that made
Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from
a different perspective.
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had
convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand. "The triumph of the
West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident… in the total
exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."
Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first
decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of
sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western
way of war has run its course.
For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting
democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous
essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.
Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition's
course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great
powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments
of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were
the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison
gas, and atomic bombs — the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an
edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and
organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection
and war plans.
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain,
Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in
the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military
tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument
of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance
its utility.
Grand Illusions
That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told
a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new
heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything,
inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly
exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the
winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left
not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his
essay, faith in war's problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as
1945, among several great powers — thanks to war, now great in name only —
that faith disappeared altogether.
Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend.
One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second
World War stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created
as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the
1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security
(and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In
the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, "peace" was a codeword. The
essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or
potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the
two nations — not yet intimate allies — stood apart from the rest of the
Western world.
So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites
in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no
contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the
temptation to put that power to work. "Peace through strength" easily enough
becomes "peace through war." Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For
Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and
then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam,
Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.
A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation
Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush's war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly,
cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves
that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated — even eclipsed —
the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and
Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.
For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive.
Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided
little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse,
triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.
On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a
Greater Israel — disregarding Washington's objections — set out to assert
permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet "facts on the
ground" created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance
Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly
growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor
assimilate.
In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991
likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the
eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional
stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical
reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an
unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington
now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim.
Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its
writ.
During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own
variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and
U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli
settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked
(or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger
at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they
regarded as neo-colonial infidels.
Stuck
No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed
unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel's near abroad, its tanks,
fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks,
fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.
So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not
translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects
for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly
battered and beaten, the "terrorists" (a catch-all term applied to anyone
resisting Israeli or American authority) weren't intimidated, remained
unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.
Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982
intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during
Operation Restore Hope, the West's gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon
possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or
restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment,
and failure.
And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the
IDF's glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy
rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of
dirty wars — unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding
problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada
(2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious
2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.
Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates
emerged as a looming threat — a "demographic bomb," Benjamin Netanyahu called
it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed
pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as
the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into
submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a
majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be
Arab.
Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless
succeeded in duplicating the IDF's experience. Moments of glory remained, but
they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington's efforts to transform
(or "liberate") the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan
and Iraq, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as
U.S. forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli
trademark. Thanks to "shock and awe," Kabul fell, followed less than a year and
a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in
2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:
"We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked
systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing
unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information
availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the
breadth and depth of the battlespace… Combined, these capabilities of the
future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision,
and result in decision superiority."
The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice:
"decision superiority." At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush
administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.
Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns
advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American
troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions
that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.
Winless
If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from
their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today's
enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying
lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated
their equivalent of Israel's "demographic bomb" — a "fiscal bomb." Ingrained
habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of
long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on
endless wars exacerbated that threat.
By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without
giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted.
High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning — at least as a
Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not
lose. In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright
defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.
As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to
defeat the enemy, but to "protect the people," consistent with the latest
doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with
warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down
their arms.
A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan
War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this
American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed,
"military solutions" do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, "we can't
kill our way out of" the fix we're in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy
on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.
The Unasked Question
What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military
history?
In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of
ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples
and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.
With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically
motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain
marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably
gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can
believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels
anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world.
To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.
It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms
with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so,
accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. That
they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for example,
shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and
influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance.
Meanwhile, the People's Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from
an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of
"dollar diplomacy."
The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited
choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history
of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and
security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the
international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist
project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk?
Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time
remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust
in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame
them?
In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel's demographic or geographic
constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of
action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status
quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial
complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those
who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives
to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy.
For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be
pursued.
And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and
insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of
backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means
coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli
bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they
deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to
national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that
General Petraeus's appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan
constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.
Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: "What's
the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't
use it?" Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What's
the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn't actually
work?
Washington's refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption
and dishonesty permeating our politics.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at
Boston University. His new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent
War, has just been published. Listen to the latest TomCast audio interview to
hear him discuss the book by clicking here or, to download to an iPod, here.
