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american exceptionalism
The Problem With Complicity
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot face the truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound.
Mar 04, 2024
There is a problem with accusing ordinary Americans with complicity in the consequences of their government’s foreign policy. The problem is not with the validity of the accusation. Although Americans have been repeatedly misled by the foreign policy establishment, their complicity in the immense suffering wrought by this establishment is indefeasible. First and foremost a moral accusation, aimed at rousing empathy and a sense of ethical obligation, the problem with complicity is that it is ineffective in catalyzing a critical mass of Americans to wake up and challenge the foreign policy status quo. The accusation has helped mobilize a moral minority, but it has not worked with the majority.
There are two principal reasons for this failure. First, in order to be motivated by charges of complicity we must feel empathy for those in whose suffering we are complicit. But these people (from Palestine to Iraq to Chile to East Timur) tend to live far away and often share little connection with ourselves. The capacity for empathy is here impeded by cultural distance. This is a universal impediment. But it is perhaps particularly acute in the United States, our immense power having long shielded us from the imperatives of cross-cultural empathy and understanding. There are many people who manage to overcome this impediment, their empathy towards the suffering of others driving them to incredible acts of protest and solidarity. Sadly, such people are in the minority.
The second reason that the charge of complicity is ineffective is that accepting complicity requires accepting the reality of what we are complicit in, viz., the enormity of suffering for which our country is, wholly or in part, responsible. Facing this responsibility can be incredibly painful. Trained from birth to believe in American exceptionalism and intrinsic goodness, most of us flee from the awful truth that the country we love has been, as often as not, a global chaos agent. When the reality of complicity becomes impossible to deny, the effect on the psyche can be truly catastrophic. To truly contemplate the extent of our complicity opens us to the tragic fate of airman Aaron Bushnell, whose final words before self-immolation were that he could ‘not remain complicit’ in America’s support for genocide.
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot bridge this cultural distance and cannot face this truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound—a truth whose enormity, if acknowledged, threatens us with mental breakdown and despair. At some level sensing this possibility, most cannot face the steamroller of apocalypse that is the American foreign policy establishment. This is the steamroller that has already destroyed much of the Middle East; that is facilitating a genocide in Palestine (while escalating tensions towards a regional war); that is barreling towards catastrophic conflict with China; that has rolled back protections against nuclear war; that is destroying the credibility of international institutions like the UN; that has welcomed the utter devastation of Ukraine for the sake of “containing” (i.e., destabilizing) Russia. If we do not stop the steamroller soon, if we do not stamp out the American death cult before it turns truly suicidal, we will lose our country to the plutocratic fascism that is already gripping the national throat.
If moral appeals are insufficient to rouse Americans to the extreme threat posed by the steamroller, what might rouse them instead? The answer is self-interest. The appeal to self-interest is morally inferior to the charge of complicity. But it is more efficacious. Even if people cannot bring themselves to feel what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others,” even if they cannot accept responsibility for their government’s role in precipitating this pain, they can still be stirred if they sense that these policies are also harming themselves and those for whom they feel more intuitive empathy.
The self-interest of ordinary Americans is rarely invoked in debates over US foreign policy, however, save in vague claims about protecting our “freedom” or saving us from terror or the revanchism of Vladimir Putin (a man who, we are led to believe, will soon march, shirtless and saddled on a bear, from the Donbas to Krakow to London to West Virginia). Rarer still are frank discussions about the economic and security risks posed to ordinary Americans by their government’s foreign policy—ordinary Americans whose stock portfolios do not wax with war, who are not employed by the lobbying groups and think tanks funded by the arms industry, and who are on the hook for the more than $13 trillion spent this century on the American war machine.
The reasons for the minimization of self-interest in debates over foreign policy are obvious. For decades, the animating ideology of US global power has been liberal humanitarianism. This ideology works only insofar as its promoters can claim that rabid interventionism and war profiteering are in fact expressions of a selfless, almost millenarian desire to bring the world, by the barrel of a gun if necessary, towards liberal democracy. Thus we are saving the world from authoritarianism or terrorism, or we are making it safe for democracy or freedom or free trade. We are, in short, always working towards the salvation of the world. Lest anyone think that our motives are insincere, lest anyone suggest that only a privileged elite benefits from US interventionism, or that what appears as humanitarianism is in actuality a crusader complex—lest any such accusations arise, the foreign policy establishment must be able to pretend that its raison d’être is, first and foremost, the peace and prosperity of all humankind.
By centering foreign policy debates around such lofty ideals, the foreign policy establishment can avoid acknowledging the truth: the truth that we are poorer, less respected, less influential, and less safe today than we were, not only on September 6, 2001, but on December 31, 1991. Far from improving the lot of ordinary Americans, the immense sums spent on national “defense” have done little but destroy the lives of millions abroad while squandering so many possibilities for national renewal at home. As genocidal extermination continues in Gaza, as we reach an inflection point in the war in Ukraine, and as we sleep walk towards catastrophe in Asia and the Middle East, it is incumbent upon us to break through the conspiracy of silence on the subject self-interest: the self-interest of “real America,” of “the 99%.”
How do we do this? We do it by developing ever more persuasive arguments that highlight the immense damage that our foreign policy establishment has done to our economic well-being and national security. We do it by asking each other whether we wish to live in a country where the annual budget for national “defense” has exceeded $850 billion, even as as many as 13% percent of the population is “food insecure” (i.e., hungry), real wages have been stagnant for fifty years, wealth inequality has skyrocketed, longevity and educational achievement has declined, and deaths of despair have soared—including among veterans, who are killing themselves at a rate of nearly 17 people per day.
Finally, we need to ask our fellow Americans whether they wish to live in a world where their government is increasingly isolated on the world stage, is shredding the “rules based order” tenuously established after WWII, is increasing the threat of nuclear armageddon, and is flaunting the human and political rights of non-Americans (and sometimes of Americans themselves). We must ask these questions, and we must propose answers backed-up by reasoned argument and researched data. We must convince our fellow Americans, not of their (again, incontrovertible) complicity, but of the fact that an unchecked, unethical, and frankly psychopathic foreign policy establishment serves none of our own interests as Americans: our interests of living in a prosperous society, a respected nation, and a peaceful world.
One day, Americans will be forced to deal, en masse, with the tragic fact that, as Frederick Douglas once put it, “there is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States.” Until then, and if we wish to build a majoritarian movement that can put an end to these practices today, the appeal to self-interest is our best hope.
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A Truly 'Indispensable Nation' Would Bring the War on Gaza to an Immediate End
By providing immense quantities of ordnance to Israel, Biden ensures the war’s perpetuation and facilitates the continued slaughter of noncombatants.
Jan 04, 2024
Joe Biden is neither an original thinker nor a profound one. Granted, few if any figures laboring in the trenches of contemporary American politics can claim to be either. On that score, it would be unreasonable for us to hold Biden’s lack of depth and originality against him. He is, after all, just an Average Joe.
Somewhat more problematic is Biden’s penchant for appropriating the words of others without attribution. The habit has not enhanced his reputation. Yet to be fair, when the President recently described the United States as the “indispensable nation,” he did credit the origin of that phrase to his “friend” Madeleine Albright.
Such honesty is commendable. Even so, wary Americans might find Biden’s resurrection of Albright’s several decades-old phrase to be more than a little troubling.
The provenance of the expression is worth noting. Speaking on national television in 1998, then Secretary of State Albright had used the occasion to articulate an Albright Doctrine of sorts. “If we have to use force,” she declared with sublime confidence, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
In Albright’s defense, she issued this grandiose pronouncement at a moment when American elites were enjoying a prolonged post-Cold War victory lap. In political circles, chest-thumping triumphalism had become the lingua franca. Had not the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ostensibly brought history itself to its intended conclusion? A mere decade later, had not Operation Desert Storm definitively affirmed history’s verdict? By the 1990s, America was on a roll, destined, it seemed, to remain the world’s number one in perpetuity.
Soon enough, however, all of this came to seem like so much hot air. First came the terrorist attacks of 9/11, with the follies of the Global War on Terrorism following in short order. The epic failure of the Afghanistan War in tandem with costly and bungled efforts to “liberate” Iraq left America’s reputation for peering into the future in tatters. Sundry other missteps demolished claims that the United States possessed some special knack for anticipating what comes next. Then came the election of Donald Trump, unforeseen by those ostensibly in the know.
If remembered at all, the Albright Doctrine survived as a sort of punchline — the equivalent of “Mission Accomplished” or “We got him!”
Today the future to which Albright had confidently alluded in 1998 has become our own immediate past. Events since have brought us to where we are today. They provide a backdrop and frame of reference for the exercise of American power. That Biden has chosen our present moment to resuscitate the Albright Doctrine is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. It suggests someone badly out of touch with reality.
Albright had credited the United States with the ability to “see” and by implication to shape the future course of world history. Today, with the nation’s ability to sustain its own democracy beyond the upcoming presidential election up for debate, we may question the Biden administration’s ability to see beyond next Thursday.
Yet let us take Biden at his word, as a true believer in American indispensability, advised by a cadre of like minded civilian and military officials. Even today, their collective confidence in American global primacy is undiminished, as if events since 1998 either didn’t happen or don’t matter.
Today challenges to the nation’s erstwhile indispensability premier abound: the rise of China, a stalemated conflict in Ukraine, porous borders at home, the pressing existential threat posed by climate change. Yet none poses a more urgent test than the ongoing war in Gaza. Here, more than anywhere else, events summon the United States to affirm its claim to primacy. Right now, without delay.
Doing so would mean employing U.S. power and influence to bring this wretched war to an immediate end.
As measured by actions rather than rhetorical gestures, however, the Biden administration has done just the opposite. By providing immense quantities of ordnance to one side, it ensures the war’s perpetuation and facilitates the continued slaughter of noncombatants. By vetoing UN Security Council efforts to force a ceasefire, it stands virtually alone in defiance of world opinion. While American diplomats travel hither and yon, their efforts cannot be rated as other than ineffectual.
On a recent trip to the Middle East, national security adviser Jake Sullivan remarked, “We’re not here to tell anybody, ‘You must do X, you must do Y’.” How this accords with any meaningful conception of indispensability is not clear.
My guess is that Madeleine Albright would be embarrassed. Joe Biden should be as well.
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What’s So Exceptional About the US Military?
Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for—the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
Aug 08, 2023
In his message to the troops prior to the July 4 weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: We need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for—the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia—so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
There’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually.
In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.
Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits—five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer)—as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.
Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.
No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat—the land, sea, and air—but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!
Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?
Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.
And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks”—and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.
And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries—nine!—that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.
A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear
Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.
America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.
Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you.
Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”
Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power—and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.
Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.
Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.
Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.
I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
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