Home Alone: Can America Play the Superpower Role?
Daniels, Robert V.
1 F YOU LISTEN closely, you can hear a hollow ring to all the triumphalist talk about America's superpower monopoly since the end of the cold war. True, it is a position without precedent for...
...58 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...
...2) in-county as stated on Form 3541: average no...
...Rogue states," said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright three years ago, "are there with the sole purpose of destroying . . . the international system...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3,849...
...America's leading export, after wheat and airplanes, is mass culture, a commodity that policy-making elites practically everywhere else find revolting...
...At the time of the two world wars and during the cold war, the two paradigms more or less converged around their common presumption of American moral superiority...
...And on basic indicators of social health— crime, life expectancy, child poverty—the United States now lags perceptibly among industrialized countries, thanks above all to its failure to address problems of inequality in the modern economy...
...Technologically, the future is at risk because American students don't want to study hard subjects...
...Although this national mission was at first conceived of in religious terms, as time went on it became progressively secularized into crusades for democracy and now for what passes as the free market...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 173...
...The United States cannot indefinitely function as a world policeman nor even as a "reluctant sheriff," as Richard Haas put it in his recent book of that title, nor can it use its power to impose American "interests" without stimulating wide reactions against American hegemony...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 152...
...Joshua Muravchik, for example, titled his exculpatory history of American political warfare during the cold-war era Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny...
...Percent paid and/or requested circulation (15c/15g x 100): average no...
...Hegemony and its Limits All this confidence notwithstanding, there are internal limits to America's exercise of global hegemony that the superpower triumphalists fail to appreciate...
...But the nation's political leadership cannot agree on what to do with this power, and the American public may not be willing or able to sustain it...
...The rogue-nation panic reflects the 1812 paradigm at work in American thinking...
...There are, as in education, niche exceptions for the devoted few, but the media intake of most Americans dilutes their understanding of world affairs even more, and their interest evaporates accordingly...
...Americans, as their political leaders read them, are unwilling to back any overseas projection of the nation's power that might involve combat fatalities...
...It is "national," aiming first of all to protect the United States...
...The difference now is that the nation is not merely maneuvering in a multipower environment, but swings the clout of a superpower, whichever paradigm it heeds...
...4. Issue frequency: quarterly...
...Not for nothing did the national anthem derive from that war: "Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just...
...The 1812 sense of a struggle for survival fused with the Great Awakening spirit of saving the world from the devil...
...They block payment of the country's back dues owed the UN, though they are eager to commit infinitely larger sums to the maintenance of national military power...
...The nation's chronic and growing trade deficit depends on foreign financing and compounds the de-industrialization of America that has been going on for the last two decades...
...f. total free distribution (sum of I5d and 15e): average no...
...actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 139...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,540...
...4) other classes mailed through the USPS: average no...
...Americans are still encouraged in the smug selfimage that they lead the world in all the things that American tradition (however inconsistently) holds dear—democracy and prosperity, spirituality and morality, science and technology...
...h. copies not distributed: average no...
...3. Filing date: October 1, 2000...
...Although the American economy appears at the moment beyond challenge, with a commanding position in world business and in international financial institutions, a longer term view gives concern...
...American tradition, already overstrained by the great international tests of the past century, finds it hard to accommodate the country's new, overweening, but nevertheless exposed position...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,316...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...Changes in the interests and attitudes of the American public are undercutting all the main elements in the country's superior power—military, economic, and technological...
...Yet the 1812ers talk tough: Rice's complaint about Kosovo was that "the administration . . . was not, at the start, committed to the decisive use of force...
...Owner: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025...
...Rightly or wrongly, that war went down in American history as the quintessential struggle of an infant democracy to preserve its liberty and assert its identity against a threatening world of evil powers...
...Economic and political interests neatly dovetail...
...On the newer goals set by the revolution of the 1960s, notably tolerance for ethnic pluralism and the equality of women, the United States took the lead, but once again Europe has largely caught up...
...It seems that the national psyche cannot manage without a substitute for the cold war...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,234...
...People still seem to regard their military as citizen draftees rather than professionals paid to risk their lives...
...Under the pull of the 1812 assumptions, fortified by America's new power, the Republicans now incline toward global unilateralism— no one dare try to tell us what to do, while we tell everyone else what to do...
...2) paid in-county subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...Interest is dulled by deficient educational background about the world...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 13,100...
...These sentiments verge on what the late Senator J. William Fulbright, in his book by that title, called "the arrogance of power...
...But it is not enough just to press for more military spending and a more vigorous doctrine of intervention, as these authors do...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,611...
...7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025...
...This was the so-called Second Great Awakening, the religious revival of the 1820s and 1830s that affirmed evangelical rectitude and stimulated American missionary activity all over the world...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,292...
...Looking to a "Pax Americana" based on "the humane idea born in the American experiment," Muravchik writes, "we would stand triumphant...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...The alleged "rogues" are all weak, mostly Muslim countries that have piqued the United States by successful acts of defiance in the past, so they must be treated as enemies to the death...
...actual no...
...In The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Donald R. Hickey culled some contemporary expressions of this spirit: "We have stood the contest, singlehanded, against the conqueror of Europe," boasted Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, and Representative Charles J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania declaimed, "Who is not proud to feel himself an American—our wrongs revenged— our rights recognized...
...The question of whether NMD would work, or by any stretch of the imagination justify its probable cost, any more than its ancestor the Strategic Defense Initiative-Star Wars is not as important as the political and economic interests that are served in attempting it anyway...
...Survival and Triumph A good way to understand Americans' uncertainties as they confront their new world role is to recall two formative events in the early history of the American republic that set up paradigms bundles of assumptions and reflexes— illuminating much in Americans' thinking ever since...
...actual no...
...copies (net press run): average no...
...It is, after all, a project for "defense," to ward off threats from the "rogue nations" who have conveniently popped up to take the place of the Soviet menace...
...reluctance to rotate the military command of NATO and give the French the second crack at it following General Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 462...
...The future holds unpredictable hazards, as the world comes to see that the American superpower has neither the political will nor the psychological stamina to sustain the role it has been cast in...
...Pop culture based on AMERICA AS SUPERPOWER sensory overexcitement displaces educational accomplishment...
...Editor: Mitchell Cohen, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...Sean Kay of Ohio Wesleyan University, writing in Problems of Post -Communism ("What Is a Strategic Partnership...
...actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,784...
...The inclusion of women in all roles in the armed forces has made the commitment of troops in real battle even more problematic...
...This is the model for American selfrighteousness and moralistic intervention in international affairs, "America's self-assigned role in the world, the...
...actual no...
...of issues published annually: four...
...c. total paid and/or requested circulation [sum of 15b (I), (2), (3), and (4)]: average no...
...Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None...
...Even more pointedly, William Shawcross (in Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict) cites the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili's justification of NATO action outside Western Europe: "This is no longer a world where you limit yourself to vital interests...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 34...
...Worse, in this age of competition for technological superiority, the United States suffers from what can only be called mental backwardness...
...These paradigms, deriving from 1812 and the Great Awakening respectively, are not to be confused with the familiar realist-idealist debate in American policy making...
...If there is change underway in this respect, it is only toward newer or revived forms of mysticism: people know more about astrology than about astronomy...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 518...
...They are tired of conciliating allies and putting up with treaty restrictions on America's ability to defend itself...
...They don't define "national interest," because, to put it crassly, the national interest boils down to making the world safe for the multinational corporations...
...The American superpower has, in effect, ruled out the employment of its own military to exert this power, unless the use of force can be sanitized by technological quick fixes...
...d. free distribution by mail (samples, complimentary, and other free) (1) outside-county as stated on Form 3541: average no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,575...
...Indeed, an early blunder in cold-war alliance politics was the U.S...
...democratizing mission," according to Tony Smith in America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century, or simply the "Wilsonian vision of saving the world," in McDougall's words...
...2000 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U. S. C. 3685) I. Publication title: Dissent...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,502...
...actual no...
...The other early experience that shaped Americans' outlook on the world had a very different direction...
...The cocoon of miracle technology that Americans spin about themselves will presumably suffice to shield them from the rogue devils, allowing the leaders of both parties to display maximum toughness toward outsiders without risking the blood of a single American soldier...
...Foreign travel may be up, but foreign language study is in critical decline...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 58...
...Yet until the current presidential campaign prompted extension of projected missile defense coverage to America's skeptical allies, the scheme has been couched in strictly American terms...
...As the sole superpower, the United States presumes that it is exercising global leadership...
...actual no...
...actual no...
...The contradiction between self-indulgence and global power is nowhere clearer than in the new American attitude toward military action...
...For all the talk of allies and cooperation, Americans refuse to accept full reciprocity of responsibilities and obligations...
...Extent and nature of circulation: a. total no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,575...
...actual no...
...Why one of these pipsqueak adversaries would attempt a suicidal nuclear missile attack on the United States, if it ever could, has never been figured out...
...NATO expansion was similarly driven—American arms and planes could be sold to the new member countries in Eastern Europe, paid for ultimately by American taxpayers...
...There is a new cleavage between the two paradigms about the outside world, corresponding to the national division in the 1930s when the two major parties were polarized between the isolationist camp on one side and the interventionists on the other...
...3) other classes mailed through the USPS: average no...
...As exemplified by George W. Bush's foreign policy adviser Condoleeza Rice in the January-February Foreign Affairs, they want to put an end to Wilsonian idealism and set the "national interest" ahead of any "humanitarian interest" or "international community...
...Here is the basis for the philosophy of isolationism: "the original tradition that all subsequent ones purported to serve: Liberty at home," as Walter A. DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 53 AMERICA AS SUPERPOWER McDougall recently put it in Promised Land, Crusader State...
...i. total (sum of l5g and 15h: average no...
...There is a vicious, three-way interaction between education, popular interests, and the media...
...Whether they are aligned with the 1812 paradigm or the Great Awakening paradigm, Americans have a hard time putting themselves in other nations' shoes...
...Outside of corporate economics, talk of the "national interest" reflects not world leadership but a determination to use America's superpower status to wall the nation off from the world...
...The Gulf War, tightly censored by the military even though the superiority of the American-led alliance made the defeat of Saddam Hussein a walkaway, stands as the last real military conflict in which the United States engaged voluntarily...
...Television images prompt demands for America to do something about every inter-ethnic outbreak around the globe (a latter-day reflex of the Great Awakening paradigm), but at the same time they have brought home to a comfortable and risk-averse populace the horror of warfare even on the smallest scale...
...America has become a nation of complacent, even mindless, self-indulgence...
...True, it is a position without precedent for any government since the days of the Roman Empire...
...Alliances are suspect, in the spirit of George Washington's Farewell Address, particularly if the United States is not in command...
...Superpower is not total power, the triumphalists notwithstanding, and it will not last forever, if only because of the potential among other major countries (not just the alleged "rogues") to combine their demographic weight with military know-how and conclude countervailing alliances...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 2,073...
...3) sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: average no...
...One of these was the War of 1812, the "second war of independence," as it came to be known...
...actual no...
...According to Henry Luce, the nation would build "an international moral order...
...It goes without saying that American troops can never be allowed to operate under foreign command...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,300...
...e. free distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): average no...
...Religious fundamentalism and the superstitiousness abetted by mass media entertainment stand in the way of scientific thinking...
...8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: same as above...
...actual no...
...The problem is not material but psychological...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 98.03...
...In the youth revolt against the authority of experts and educators, Europe led the way in the uprisings of 1968, but the movement has pushed much furDISSENT I Fall 2000 n 55 AMERICA AS SUPERPOWER ther in America, with disturbing consequences for the nation's educational system and its competitiveness in the knowledge market...
...actual no...
...Though ever since Nuremberg it has been a vigorous advocate for international justice, the American government rejects any jurisdiction over its own military forces on the part of international judicial bodies...
...ask what you can do for your country...
...2. Publication No.: 158-080...
...Then came the Somalia debacle and the Post-Somalia Syndrome, when television images of a few American bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu soured the American public on armed intervention anywhere...
...This resurrection of Ronald Reagan's celestial dream has been seized upon by the Republicans, with encouragement from the military contractors, to embarrass the Democrats...
...The adherents of the secularized Great Awakening cannot comprehend the resentment abroad of America's presumption of moral superiority, though the United States would never accept corresponding missions of religious or political uplift in reverse—note only its rejection of Marxism...
...They carp at support for international peacekeeping operations—though this is one way to play the superpower while minimizing the risk of American casualties...
...entry into World War II: "America must be the dominant power of the twentieth century...
...g. total distribution (sum of 15c and 15f): average no...
...Today, we protect our interests when they are threatened in order to shape the environment to ensure that what develops is in accord with our goals, using American military forces in situations when lesser interests are threatened so they don't grow...
...achieving by our model and our influence the visionary goal stamped by the founding fathers on the seal of the United 54 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 States: novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages...
...However, under the stress of presidential campaigning, everyone has been drawn further toward the 1812 principle of military power as the guarantee of security for a self-satisfied America...
...Shortly after that, the Stanley Foundation's UN Issues Conference warned, "Increasing US tendencies toward exceptionalism and unilateral action are reducing the effectiveness of multilateral organization...
...Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After...
...NMD is a perfect embodiment of the 1812 paradigm...
...Short of momentary crises and sensations, the media shy away from what the public lacks interest in—scan the front page of any small-town daily to see this...
...The Democrats, for their part, remain more sensitive to Great Awakening missions and the politics of balance—let's work together to resolve the world's problems, as long as you acknowledge our leading role...
...5. No...
...Kagan and Kristol quote the future defense secretary James Forrestal at the moment of U.S...
...One needs to consider Americans' post–cold war "battle fatigue," as Stanley Hoffmann calls it in World Disorders: "fatigue with battles, fatigue both with unilateral interventions and with multilateral agencies and operations not controlled by the US...
...actual no...
...34 inst...
...Even at the college level, American students are notorious for their ignorance of basic geography and history...
...Americans are obsessed with immediate gratification and this year's bottom line...
...Condoleeza Rice worries, preposterously, that "fundamentalist Islam" would try to undo the whole American-dominated "international system based on markets and democracy...
...actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...These trends are not marks of a superpower...
...The extraordinarily cautious management of NATO intervention in Kosovo, so that no American would get scratched in combat, proves the point...
...According to the Great Awakening outlook, by contrast, the outside world is not so much a threat as a calling, an opportunity to save the benighted foreigners by exporting the American Way...
...The fact that NMD would upset arms control treaties with Russia, antagonize China, and strain relations with America's European allies matters not to the 1812ers...
...net savings have vanished, private debt continues to mount, and tax-cutting demands defy a still formidable public debt...
...Whatever may be thought about trends in American education in the last half-century, the system has failed to equip the bulk of its students to be citizens of a superpower...
...The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal tax purposes has not changed during the preceding twelve months...
...In his Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, Ole R. Holsti reports, "The most consistent finding [is that] Americans are poorly informed about most aspects of international affairs...
...The 1812 devotees of military security cannot grasp how America's preponderance of power could appear to Russia or China not defensive but potentially offensive...
...Issue date for circulation data below: Summer 2000...
...Leaders of the Second Great Awakening," says Robert William Fogel in his new study of American reformism, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, "preached that the American mission was to build God's kingdom on earth...
...Publisher: Michael Waiver, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025...
...Star Wars II All the contradictions in America's stance toward the outside world come together in the so-called National Missile Defense (NMD) or "Star Wars II...
...Managing Editor: Maxine Phillips, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025...
...6. Annual subscription price: $22 individual...
...In Americans' post–cold war triumphalism, the combined 1812 and Great Awakening paradigms have generated a new outburst of national hubris...
...The Two Paradigms Against this backdrop of a deteriorating power base at home, the end of the cold war has opened up the old divisions in the nation's political psyche...
...Last April, the House of Representatives was barely dissuaded from defunding American forces in Kosovo...
...The present danger," wrote Robert Kagan and William Kristol in Foreign Affairs early this year, "is that the US . . . will shrink its responsibilities," thereby "frittering away the opportunity to strengthen and extend an international order uniquely favorable to the US...
...ROBERT V. DANIELS, professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont, is author of Russia: The Roots of Confrontation and The End of the Communist Revolution...
...Even more to the point, as the Washington Post showed (June 4, 2000), NMD has been vigorously promoted by the same industrial interests that would get the lion's share of the contracts to build the system...
...What was once the world's AMERICA AS SUPERPOWER most revolutionary country, in the early nineteenth century, had become a century later the most counterrevolutionary...
...On the other hand, when a superpower begins behaving as if it were a beleaguered outpost with the world against it, its suspicions are likely to become a selffulfilling prophecy...
...And it is "missile," that is, a resort to technological superiority to substitute for the two oceans in guaranteeing America's security against the evil forces "out there" who plot to do the United States in, notwithstanding its overwhelming preemptive and retaliatory power...
...In the 1812 view, the outside world is a perpetual threat, not only to the country's values but to its very existence...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 210...
...So the Democrats are left to waffle between competing with Republican militarism and defending a rational view of the world...
...The spirit of 1812 encourages Americans not to make sacrifices unless they are directly threatened...
...Date: September 6, 2000...
...rOR THIS deficiency of knowledge and attitude, American education is the culprit...
...This fear of fighting comes on top of demographic changes in modern industrial societies where, as Edward Luttwak in particular has pointed out, families are no longer large enough to accept the risk of their sons' getting killed...
...contact: Michael Waiver, 212-316-3120...
...To be sure, at the pinnacle of graduate training in elite universities, education and research are still second to none, but the base of the pyramid is porous and shaky...
...Designedly so...
...The 1812ers have always harbored a deep antipathy toward the UN and any semblance of international authority to which the United States might be subject...
...To protect its political right flank, the Clinton administration has felt driven to follow suit with its own version of the scheme, regardless of doubts about its cost and effectiveness...
...America seems to be driven by a psychology of chagrin, coupled with the "threat exaggeration" analyzed by Robert H. Johnson (Improbable Dangers: U.S...
...Seeking security behind the nuclear shield, the 1812ers went so far last year as to 56 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 reject the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, confident that America could keep the technological lead in arms...
...Publication name: Dissent...
...We have come a long way from John Kennedy's "pay any price...
...For generations they have governed popular responsiveness to competing political appeals, and they still give Americans two almost opposite ways of looking at their international environment...
...They are deeply embedded attitudes, largely beyond consciousness of their origins...
...At the governmental level there is little resistance to such pressures, given the political need to appear to stand tough DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 57 AMERICA AS SUPERPOWER against foreign enemies...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 13,100...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the Fall 2000 issue of this publication...
...MayJune 2000), speaks of "two competing national grand strategies, primacy and balancing...
...Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Maxine Phillips, Managing Editor...
...actual no...
...b. paid and/or requested circulation (1) paid/requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor...
...In fact, by most measurable indicators of political and material progress, Western Europe has caught up, as has Japan, while Scandinavia has forged ahead...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 97.79...
...If nuclear attack by a rogue state were a real danger, it would be logical to develop a broad international response...
...Engineering schools fill half their ranks with foreign students, and high-tech business is desperate to import the skills it needs— adding a brain imbalance to the nation's chronic trade imbalance...
Vol. 47 • September 2000 • No. 4
