From 1929 to 1989, Americans lived in a state of almost perpetual crisis—the Great Depression, World War II, and then forty-four long years of contention with international communism. When the U.S.S.R. finally fell apart, the resulting silence was, it seems, more than America could bear.
George H.W. Bush and his gang of “realists” conducted wars of choice to entertain the masses and, not so incidentally, burnish the Republican brand. Bill Clinton reined in the dogs of war but aggressively pursued NATO expansion in Eastern Europe—guilt-tripping liberals seeking absolution for the sins of Yalta1—plus endless sanctions in the Middle East, intending to prove that liberals could be just as tough as conservatives.
The 9/11 attacks let the “regime change” genie out of the bottle with a vengeance. For a few brief, heady years George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld sought to construct a new-fangled American empire that would span the globe. In a slow and less than certain process, President Obama has worked, most of the time, to walk back this hubris, despite engaging in his own low-budget regime change in Libya, which left a sour taste in his mouth and discouraged him from trying the same stunt in Syria, despite paying lip service to the idea.
But now, with Vladimir Putin playing the bad boy in Ukraine, and ISIS swaggering in the Middle East, the president has essentially surrendered to the war lovers. It is a sad commentary on the state of the American people that two brutal murders can convince a nation of 300 million that it is in mortal danger. There is no elected official in Washington with any stature who is willing to talk sense to this nonsense. We have gone through three regime changes, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and they have all failed, and yet the consensus is that now we must have a fourth. We have to have a war. Peace is just too goddamn scary.
Afterwords
Fortunately, there are a few discordant voices out in the hinterlands. Stephen Walt gives a quick but useful overview of post-Cold War, pre-9/11 America, when the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to allow for a boundless expansion of American righteousness. Andrew Sullivan counts the multitudinous falsities hidden in Obama’s claims for the necessity of American intervention in Iraq and Syria. Steve Chapman explains why Obama’s new war won’t work any better than any of the old ones.
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FDR’s real sin at Yalta was not in agreeing to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, which was unavoidable, but in believing that Stalin would prove in any way manageable once the threats of German and Japanese aggression had been removed. ↩︎
