Retracing Our Steps

Writing in Vanity Fair, David Halberstam calls the 9/11 attack “a turning point in American history” that will force Americans to review old assumptions about the world. He is right — but then he proceeds to repeat the same old assumptions that made us vulnerable to the attack.

Halberstam correctly notes, as others have, that we now face a new kind of enemy — one that is elusive, decentralized, hard to identify. He fails to see that the modern centralized superpower has bred its nemesis — not a single rival superpower that can destroy it, but an alliance of malignant Lilliputians who can harass and disrupt it indefinitely, making its life miserable.

According to Halberstam, 9/11 was, like Pearl Harbor, a salutary wake-up call for a country that had lapsed into indifference to its destined role as a global “colossus.” He thinks it was regrettable that the United States became so “isolationist” after World War I that it had to be shocked into entering World War II. After “bingeing for a decade,” as he puts it, we have now been roused to battle again. We are ready for another bout of heroic “internationalism.” (The lessons of war seem to depend on which war you choose to draw your lessons from. Halberstam was once a leading critic of the Vietnam war.)

The “isolationists” were Americans who saw the tragedy of U.S. involvement in World War I — which set the stage for Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and an even worse war — and didn’t want to send their sons abroad to die in another foreign conflict. The country was maneuvered into war anyway, with disastrous results: World War II ended with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union ruling Eastern Europe and capable of destroying the United States. The story is grippingly told in Thomas Fleming’s new book, The New Dealers’ War (Basic Books).

In a word, the outcome of American participation in World War II was even more terrible than the “isolationists” had foreseen or imagined. But it resulted naturally from a series of wrong turns in American history.

To liberals and some misguided conservatives, World War II remains the Holy War. But the rest of us should — no, must — be willing to retrace our steps and ask where we went wrong, before we make further terrible mistakes.

“Internationalism,” as embodied by Woodrow Wilson and his even more besotted disciple Franklin Roosevelt, meant the abandonment of limited government and the cautious foreign policy urged by George Washington; it meant precisely the network of “entangling alliances” that had brought on World War I and its tragic aftermath. It turned every local conflict on earth into a potential tripwire for wider war. And it converted the original American republic, shielded from Old World strife by two oceans, into a global empire.

This role inevitably caused anti-American hatred to grow among many nations around the world who, in the era of peaceful American neutrality (smeared as “isolationism”), had barely heard of this country. No matter what Wilsonian “ideals” were offered as justifications for this role, it came down to projecting military force and threats of destruction. These were not endearing.

But in time the American empire overcame all its major enemies and seemed to rule the world beyond challenge. The United States was fantastically rich and powerful, to a degree never even approached by any previous empire. It slept the night of September 10, 2001, seeming, and feeling, invulnerable.

The next morning America’s self-image suffered the most dramatic reversal in history. The cosmos seemed to have shaken. A few miserable fanatics had found this country’s weakness and struck it with all their might.

Not only did they wound us profoundly; they showed that an empire that antagonizes too many people can never be secure. Among those it offends there will always be ruthless zealots looking for ways to avenge themselves. Even if the current lot can be destroyed, there will be others, with new and ugly surprises. Conventional military dominance is useless against enemies who don’t seek conventional victory. Germ warfare is not only a tactic but an apt metaphor for a decentralized foe: you can’t bomb germs.

Our current condition is permanent — as long as this country remains an empire. The only way to escape it is to resume our original traditions. No Middle Eastern terrorists disturbed Millard Fillmore’s America.

Our only “ideals” should be the traditions we’ve abandoned. Or have those traditions become unthinkable?

Joseph Sobran