From After the Apocalypse (Andrew Bacevich, 2021) pp142-5
The managers of the American Empire have placed a large bet in assuming that no feasible alternative exists to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. 1 Yet even if this assumption holds true and not everyone agrees that it will-the hemorrhaging of red ink is indicative of imperial mismanagement and misplaced priorities.’ If nothing else, cumulative debt warps the allocation of resources. Today, for example, merely servicing the national debt costs the United States $600 billion per year, a sum roughly fifteen times larger than the amount appropriated annually to fund medical research by the National Institutes of Health.
Would smaller debt service obligations have resulted in an NIH better prepared to respond to the coronavirus pandemic? We will never know. Even so, the disparity between the sum going to creditors and the sum going to public health speaks volumes about national priorities. During the decades that followed the Cold War, runaway costs did not deter the Congress from spending whatever it took to prop up the Pax Americana. Anticipating future dangers that might directly threaten the well-being of the American people figured as a lesser consideration.
As for rule #3, it became increasingly difficult after 9/11 to make the case that the American Empire was making life better for the average citizen. Critics on the far left and anti-interventionist right dared to suggest that the forever-wars version of global leadership might be a scam perpetrated by elites at the expense of ordinary citizens. Leading figures in Washington denounced that charge as vile slander, their rebuttal relying on vaporous rhetoric that steered clear of uncomfortable facts. Hard-pressed to demonstrate how the pursuit of global leadership was benefiting Joe or Joanie Six-Pack, they resorted to obfuscation. In short, they deceived.
As the Apocalypse of 2020 fell across the nation like some particularly loathsome smog, political deception became a major topic of conversation. President Donald Trump’s penchant for misstatements, exaggerations, and bald-faced lies became a national scandal-and rightly so. Long prior to his arrival on the national political scene, however, ostensibly more reputable figures routinely perpetrated their own untruths about America’s role in the world. This, too, amounted to lying, with implications as least as grave as Trump’s idiotic prognostications about the coronavirus disappearing with the arrival of warm weather or his promotion of bogus cures.
Examples are legion, but here is one by a then serving secretary of state. “At the State Department,” she said,
we work in an international landscape defined by half a century of exceptional American global leadership, leadership from both parties, rooted in our most precious values, that put the common good first and rall[ied] the world around a vision of a more peaceful and prosperous future. Securing and sustaining that leadership for the next half century is the organizing principle behind everything I do. That’s because our global leadership holds the key not only to our prosperity and security at home but to the kind of world that is increasingly interconnected and complex.
The previous half century to which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was referring had included the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the overthrow and assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem; secret bombing campaigns targeting Laos and Cambodia, countries with which the United States was not at war; tacit alliances with Mao Zedong’s China and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq among other unsavory regimes; and support for Afghan “freedom fighters” destined in time to launch a devastating terrorist attack against the American homeland. Bungled and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed in short order. None of these qualified for mention in Clinton’s description of “exceptional American global leadership … rooted in our most precious values.”
Secretary Clinton was perpetrating a fraud hardly less grotesque than any of Donald Trump’s. Nor was she either the first of the last to engage in this deception. In her presentation at the Center for American Progress on October 12, 2011, Clinton was speaking in the reassuring patois of American Exceptional-ism. She was telling a group of Washington insiders precisely what they wanted and expected to hear. Not surprisingly, they responded to her presentation with warm applause.
Do attendees at events sponsored by that think tank or any of a dozen other comparable Washington institutions genuinely believe such sentiments? Did Soviet apparatchiks during the latter years of the Cold War genuinely believe the tripe about the wonders of Marxism-Leninism peddled by party leaders? Or does sustaining the pretense of belief serve other purposes, such as preserving privilege or safeguarding the status quo? Such questions are not easily answered.
This much is certain, however: In Washington, refusal to abide by the expected rhetorical conventions of American global leadership offers sufficient grounds for being effectively silenced. Critics of empire like Noam Chomsky on the left and Patrick Buchanan on the right offer examples. Each may be allowed his say and each may even attract large audiences. But in this instance, audience does not translate into influence. To question American Exceptionalism and oppose the American Empire is to become persona non grata wherever members of the foreign policy establishment congregate. That describes Chomsky and Buchanan’s fate.
It also helps explain the establishment’s antipathy toward Donald Trump both as a candidate and as president.
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