With temerity I critique one of the clearest foreign policy analysts in America, Angelo Codevilla. We share some friends and common roots in the teachings learned at the knee of Robert Strausz-Hupe of laser focus on core US interests over distractions, especially those wasteful or unproductive. With timidity at facing Codevilla’s sharp pen and keyboard with which he punctures and flattens flabby or fatuous thinking, I face his latest essay, The Lost Decade. Codevilla disembowels the foreign and domestic policies of the US since 9/11, with many telling arguments. Yet, I stride forth to face his iconoclastic critique with iconoclastic critique. I agree in temper and some hindsight but disagree with some of Codevilla’s specifics that go too far or which share some common illusions with those Codevilla criticizes.
There are two core arguments in Codevilla’s almost 8,000 word essay, a self-serving, misfocused and exclusionary US elite that failed to identify or act against domestic and foreign threats. Instead, they enriched themselves and intruded into all Americans' freedoms with the overly expensive and expansive, ill-suited to US liberties, feeble Homeland Security, and got bogged down in self-limited wars of illusory nation-building that distracted funding from the major weapons systems necessary to US strategic superiority and failed to confront real enemies. Combined with irresponsible profligate domestic spending and programs that have led to our deep ongoing recession, our means and will to continue our foreign engagements or rebuild our needed future weaponry and military has deteriorated. No wonder most Americans distrust these elites and the federal government.
Although in 2001 many referred to the United States as "the world's only superpower," ten years later the near-universal perception of America is that of a nation declining, perhaps irreversibly. This decade convinced a majority of Americans that the future would be worse than the past and that there is nothing to be done about it.
Codevilla’s essay first sentence says, “America’s ruling class lost the war on terror.” Codevilla looks below tactical disagreements to say of this class of Democrat and Republican leadership, “It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually.” Democrat and Republican elites created a public-private industry that expanded their own powers over our lives while not focusing on the root of our adversaries’ antagonism toward our way of life, Moslem societies dysfunction and anti-Western propaganda, that was further encouraged by our feeble reactions. “But U.S. policy has made things worse because the liberal internationalists, realists, and neoconservatives who make up America's foreign policy Establishment have all assumed that Americans should undertake the impossible task of changing such basic facts, rather than confining themselves to the difficult but vital work of guarding U.S. interests against them.”
Here’s where I have reservations on Codevilla’s analysis and prescriptions.
Codevilla says we should have overthrown hostile regimes without getting mired in “nation building”, and imposed our will on other Middle Eastern states. For overthrow, Codevilla’s hindsight targets Iran, Syria and the PLO. For imposing demands to cease their state support for anti-Americanism, he targets most of the remaining Middle East satrapies, having the fear of our wrath at hand.
Post-9/11 and our overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, this course was both promising and showed concrete results. But, Codevilla avoids mentioning intervening realities that required the US to not stop there, even though the benefits either are not what we most expansively hoped or may be transitory. Next door to Iran’s subversive activities against the West was the more geopolitically important Iraq doing the same but deemed by the world’s intelligence services to already have WMDs of greater danger to the West and creating greater threats to friendlier allies in the Middle East. Next door to Afghanistan and its resurgent Taliban was the nuclear arms of the feeble, ethnically and culturally aligned Pakistan. Our measures there and elsewhere, even at their best, were seriously undermined at home by determined liberal Democrats and their allies in media and academia whose first priority was the destruction of George Bush rather than our enemies overseas. Then, as we've seen with the misnamed Arab Spring, the post-satrap order in Egypt shares the same and more hostility toward the West and has done less to restrain its proponents.
Codevilla argues that we should have paid more attention in the US to Moslem apologists for foreign antagonists or terrorists there and here, and less to TSA and the like. Yes. Yet, at home, a much more laser-like identification and attention to Muslim threats – although they have not gone unattended -- just wouldn’t have flown past our laws of innocent until proven guilty or culture of extending tolerance, and abroad faced the ostrich-like avoidance in Europe of confronting Moslems due to their large immigrant populations and profits from trade with Moslem states. Although some of our domestic protections have reached seeming absurdity, far less would have left us more open than we already are, almost irreducibly in a complex, free and technologic society.
In other words, Codevilla’s list of our misfortunes and mistakes takes us to the present but his retrospective prescriptions lack sufficient insight and full honesty. In historiography this might be called the “Cleopatra’s nose” fallacy: If Cleopatra wasn’t so beautiful, Caesar and Antony wouldn’t have fallen in love with her and the course of history better.
Lastly, Codevilla’s view of our ruling class lacks precision. If one goes far enough from Earth, or deep enough into humans’ DNA, all seem alike. However, from our Founding Fathers Virginians dominating our presidency through the first administrations to today there are commonalities of interests and strength of arguments that tend to draw leaders together that need not call into question either conspiracies nor crass self-serving to the neglect of national interests. Sure, leading classes neglect or don't give enough weight to contending worthy arguments. But our more open systems of governance and free expression do tend to take them into account. The Bill of Rights tendered to the anti-Federalists. What about today, however? Codevilla, with much justification, says we have a ruling class that has common interests and exclude contenders. Codevilla expands on this in his brilliant 2010 essay America's Ruling Class.
Neither giant ships nor ships of state do fast 180-degree turns. Even a less sharp turn from our present economic diseases and foreign fecklessness is difficult, and requires top skills, experience and application of training at building the ship, atthe helm, in engineering and above decks. Yes, there is today a dominating -- and dangerous -- misdirection and lack of direction away from the rocks toward safer seas. However, among conservatives there is also a lack of unity on specific courses and even more a lack among Republicans generally. The failure of the ostensibly more conservative Republican presidential hopefuls to take control owes more to their lack of preparation, knowledge and abilities to convince than to all the liberal forces arrayed against them. That leaves the field to the better-than-nothing but still quite chancy Romney. We simply don’t have a Reagan on the field who despite failings and errors and not going for or achieving conservative nirvana at least convincingly raised consciousness and unity on the right course and considerably moved the compass.
Like many of us, Codevilla is something of a romantic, extolling the past and seeking present glories. In fairness, his analyses are harder headed than that and his course better planned and worthwhile. However, in the real world he and we must put aside wishful thinking in favor of the nitty gritty of dealing with facts.
Returning to Robert Strausz-Hupe, as cogent a national interests analyst as the US had during the Cold War, calling for loud exclamation of American values and potent use of threat and force to counter the Soviet Union, he too failed to accurately foresee the future in December 2001, shortly before his death at 98. His last essay, The New Protracted Conflict, drew its title from his most popular book The Protracted Conflict published in 1951.
I thought it was supremely important for Americans and their statesmen to understand that we were in for a “protracted conflict.” This ran against our national preference for quick solutions and our tendency to believe that goodwill and money would always turn an enemy into a friend. We would have to stay alert, dispense with illusions about the other side, and keep ourselves mobilized. It would indeed be a severe test of our democracy to prevail.
Looking forward from 2001, Strausz-Hupe concludes:
Still, we start with several advantages that the Cold War generation lacked. There is no serious domestic opposition to President Bush’s strategy, at least not yet, no agitation for detente and no arguments over arms control with our enemy. Furthermore, all the major powers are ranged on our side. That Vladimir Putin’s Russia has seen fit to ally itself with us is not an adverse development so long as we do not take it too far out of gratitude, for instance by extending Moscow a veto over NATO. As for the Atlantic alliance itself, this is another challenge to its role in a post-Cold War world and one that extends beyond welcome military solidarity to domestic affairs. Our European allies share with us issues of home security. One hopes also that this time at least, Turkey’s indispensable contributions— as a member of NATO and a Muslim state that seeks rather than rejects association with America and the West— will be recognized. These are all important assets that must be conserved.
My main point, however, is that this protracted conflict, like the last one, will end only when one side vanquishes the other. Either the United States, at the head of the international order— such as it is— will forfeit its leadership, or international terrorists and the states who use them will find violence against innocent civilians a tactic too dangerous to be used.
I have lived long enough to see good repeatedly win over evil, although at a much higher cost than need have been paid. This time we have already paid the price of victory. It remains for us to win it.
Obviously, we and our leadership could have done much better, as one can see from the failure of Strausz-Hupe’s hopes. And, still, one must recognize that even then we would face much the same unfortunate turns of events abroad as now. There are limits to American influence and power, and there are limits to our wealth, regardless of self-exertions. On the other hand, as critiques of the Obama administration make clear, his policies have largely expanded our own and others’ limitations upon our influence and power, and undermined those who would be our allies.
We’re not in the age or hands of Eisenhower with his experience and precise uses of power backed by our relative economic and military strength. We are in the age of our Founding Fathers, however, with faith in our way of life and freedoms and the natural economic resources of land and people. That stands against the continuing sway of dysfunctional Moslem societies and rulers, and the ongoing czarist policies of Russia and imperial ambitions of China, as well as the weak pretensions of liberals that the US should not be true to the course that grew and maintained our powers and freedoms. Even Strausz-Hupe would admit, I believe, that our foes have not fundamentally transformed. Codevilla, too, must admit that neither have our winning strengths in the ongoing protracted conflict, and not get lost in fantasies instead as our more benighted liberal class or those who lack resolve and understanding do.
Tracked: Oct 21, 09:12