The Decline of Power

By the late 1970s adverse experience sufficient to illuminate the utterly novel historical situation of the United States in the late twentieth century was in hand. Undoubtedly, it had the biggest heap of weapons of any country. Without question, they were the most varied, sophisticated and effective in the world at their job of killing people and blowing things up. The question was what the United States could accomplish with this capacity. Certainly, if a conventional foe lacking nuclear arms arrayed itself in battle against the United States, it could be handily defeated. That was the mistake that Saddam Hussein made in 1990 when he sent his army out into the Kuwaiti desert, where it was pulverized from the air. But few wars in fact conformed to this conventional pattern any longer. Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important--wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless "quagmires," owing to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)

Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there--the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a postimperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals. Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force--and the fool of history.

In this larger context the repeated constitutional crises of the last half-century assume an altered aspect. The conventional understanding is that an excess of power abroad brings abuses at home. The classic citation is Rome, whose imperial forces, led by Julius Caesar, returning from foreign conquest, crossed the river Rubicon into the homeland and put an end to the republic. (Thus both the proponents of American empire and its detractors can cite Rome.) But that has not been the American story. Rome and would-be Rome are not the same. Empire and the fantasy of empire are not the same. It is rather the repeatedly failed bid for imperial sway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss--of China, of the atomic monopoly, among other developments--that precipitated the McCarthyite assault on liberty at home. It was persistent failure in the Vietnam War, already a decade old and deeply unpopular, that led an embattled, isolated, nearly demented Richard Nixon to draw up his enemies list, illegally spy on his domestic opposition, obstruct justice when his misdeeds became known, ramble drunkenly in the Oval Office about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an assault on the entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is today an unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq War or to extricate himself from it, who has launched his absolutist assault on the Constitution. Power corrupts, says the old saw. But is power the right word to use in the face of so much failure? The sometimes suggested alternate--that weakness corrupts--seems equally appropriate. In a manner of speaking perhaps both saws are true, for in terms of military might the United States is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity to get things done with that might, it so often proves weak--even, at times, impotent, as McCarthy said. The pattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.

What the true greatness--or true power--of the United States is or can be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in pressing need of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power--military, economic, political, moral--would need searching reconsideration. Those true powers--especially the economic--also have an "imperial" aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of military domination of the globe that has addled so many American brains for more than half a century and also shunning the panic-stricken fears of impotence that have accompanied the inevitable frustration of these delusions, the debate would take realistic stock of the nation's very considerable yet limited resources and ask what is being done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done. Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States into a stretched definition of "empire," but it would look nothing like Britain or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States rededicated to its constitutional traditions and embarked on a cooperative course with other nations would find that it possesses untapped reserves of political power, though it will take time for American prestige to recover from Bush's squandering of it.

Restoring Illusion

Until very recently those authentic questions went substantially unexplored outside scholarly journals, and the country instead busied itself repairing the imperial illusions so rudely dashed by the Vietnam War. Suppressing the lessons of the Chinese Revolution had been easy, since the United States had not fought in China. Getting over the lessons of Vietnam took longer. Many segments of American society, none more than the military, had learned them deeply and vowed "never again." (The poignancy of the generals' recent outspoken statement against the conduct of the war in Iraq lies precisely in the officers' chagrin that they did indeed let it happen again.) The lessons were formulated in military terms in the so-called Powell doctrine, requiring that before military action proceeded there must be a clear military--not political--objective, that there must be a commitment to the use of overwhelming force and that there must be an "exit strategy." Nevertheless, in other quarters the lessons were named a "Vietnam syndrome," an illness, and other explanations were brought forward. The lessons of Vietnam were not so much forgotten as vigorously suppressed, in the name of restoring the reputation of America's military power. Ronald Reagan said of the Vietnam military, "They came home without a victory not because they were defeated but because they were denied a chance to win." After the first Gulf War, President Bush crowed, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" The country was getting ready for the second Iraq War, which violated every tenet of the Powell doctrine.

A parallel evolution was occurring in the constitutional domain. The lesson most of the country learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong. (In general, our imperial-minded Presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.) Dick Cheney, who had served as Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, drew an opposite lesson--that the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it, "Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority...the President needs to be effective, especially in the national security area." Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale, he sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an old theme back in new guise--that American weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion--this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition--is the country's problem.

Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq War and the failed vision it embodies should, with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the opposite--to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start saying and doing something new.

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