The Unmaking of a Company Man

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A
young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and
where he's headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining
heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All
that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does
education become a possibility.

My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I
can fix its start date with precision: for me, education began in
Berlin, on a winter's evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after
the Berlin Wall had fallen.

As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in
Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never had
occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered with
artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day of
exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months before,
been the communist East. It was late and we were hungry, but I insisted
on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from the River Spree to
the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the pavement glistened. The
buildings lining the avenue, dating from the era of Prussian kings,
were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people were about. It was hardly a
night for sightseeing.

For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been the
preeminent symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of contemporary
history. Yet by the time I made it to the once and future German
capital, history was already moving on. The Cold War had abruptly ended.
A divided city and a divided nation had reunited.

For
Americans who had known Berlin only from a distance, the city existed
primarily as a metaphor. Pick a date -- 1933, 1942, 1945, 1948, 1961,
1989 -- and Berlin becomes an instructive symbol of power, depravity,
tragedy, defiance, endurance, or vindication. For those inclined to view
the past as a chronicle of parables, the modern history of Berlin
offered an abundance of material. The greatest of those parables emerged
from the events of 1933 to 1945, an epic tale of evil ascendant,
belatedly confronted, then heroically overthrown. A second narrative,
woven from events during the intense period immediately following World
War II, saw hopes for peace dashed, yielding bitter antagonism but also
great resolve. The ensuing stand-off -- the "long twilight struggle," in
John Kennedy's memorable phrase -- formed the centerpiece of the third
parable, its central theme stubborn courage in the face of looming
peril. Finally came the exhilarating events of 1989, with freedom
ultimately prevailing, not only in Berlin, but throughout Eastern
Europe.

What exactly was I looking for at the Brandenburg Gate? Perhaps
confirmation that those parables, which I had absorbed and accepted as
true, were just that. Whatever I expected, what I actually found was a
cluster of shabby-looking young men, not German, hawking badges,
medallions, hats, bits of uniforms, and other artifacts of the mighty
Red Army. It was all junk, cheaply made and shoddy. For a handful of
deutsche marks, I bought a wristwatch emblazoned with the symbol of the
Soviet armored corps. Within days, it ceased to work.

Huddling among the scarred columns, those peddlers -- almost
certainly off-duty Russian soldiers awaiting redeployment home --
constituted a subversive presence. They were loose ends of a story that
was supposed to have ended neatly when the Berlin Wall came down. As we
hurried off to find warmth and a meal, this disconcerting encounter
stuck with me, and I began to entertain this possibility: that the
truths I had accumulated over the previous twenty years as a
professional soldier -- especially truths about the Cold War and U.S.
foreign policy -- might not be entirely true.

By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in
orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a
deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I
started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham.
I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any
version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents,
prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I
came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even
then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly
invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The
exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical
to candor.

I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. "Nothing
is so astonishing in education," the historian Henry Adams once wrote,
"as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating
and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I
began to realize that I had been a naif. And so, at age 41, I set out,
in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.

Twenty years later I've made only modest progress. What follows is an accounting of what I have learned thus far.

Visiting a Third-World Version of Germany

In October 1990, I'd gotten a preliminary hint that something might
be amiss in my prior education. On October 3rd, communist East Germany
-- formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR) -- ceased to exist and
German reunification was officially secured. That very week I
accompanied a group of American military officers to the city of Jena in
what had been the GDR. Our purpose was self-consciously educational --
to study the famous battle of Jena-Auerstadt in which Napoleon Bonaparte
and his marshals had inflicted an epic defeat on Prussian forces
commanded by the Duke of Brunswick. (The outcome of that 1806 battle
inspired the philosopher Hegel, then residing in Jena, to declare that
the "end of history" was at hand. The conclusion of the Cold War had
only recently elicited a similarly exuberant judgment from the American
scholar Francis Fukuyama.)

On this trip we did learn a lot about the conduct of that battle,
although mainly inert facts possessing little real educational value.
Inadvertently, we also gained insight into the reality of life on the
far side of what Americans had habitually called the Iron Curtain, known
in U.S. military vernacular as "the trace." In this regard, the trip
proved nothing less than revelatory. The educational content of this
excursion would -- for me -- be difficult to exaggerate.

As soon as our bus crossed the old Inner German Border, we entered a
time warp. For U.S. troops garrisoned throughout Bavaria and Hesse, West
Germany had for decades served as a sort of theme park -- a giant Epcot
filled with quaint villages, stunning scenery, and superb highways,
along with ample supplies of quite decent food, excellent beer, and
accommodating women. Now, we found ourselves face-to-face with an
altogether different Germany. Although commonly depicted as the most
advanced and successful component of the Soviet Empire, East Germany
more closely resembled part of the undeveloped world.

The roads -- even the main highways -- were narrow and visibly
crumbling. Traffic posed little problem. Apart from a few sluggish
Trabants and Wartburgs -- East German automobiles that tended to a retro
primitivism -- and an occasional exhaust-spewing truck, the way was
clear. The villages through which we passed were forlorn and the small
farms down at the heels. For lunch we stopped at a roadside stand. The
proprietor happily accepted our D-marks, offering us inedible sausages
in exchange. Although the signs assured us that we remained in a land of
German speakers, it was a country that had not yet recovered from World
War II.

Upon arrival in Jena, we checked into the Hotel Schwarzer Bar,
identified by our advance party as the best hostelry in town. It turned
out to be a rundown fleabag. As the senior officer present, I was
privileged to have a room in which the plumbing functioned. Others were
not so lucky.

Jena itself was a midsized university city, with its main academic
complex immediately opposite our hotel. A very large bust of Karl Marx,
mounted on a granite pedestal and badly in need of cleaning, stood on
the edge of the campus. Briquettes of soft coal used for home heating
made the air all but unbreathable and coated everything with soot. In
the German cities we knew, pastels predominated -- houses and apartment
blocks painted pale green, muted salmon, and soft yellow. Here
everything was brown and gray.

That evening we set out in search of dinner. The restaurants within
walking distance were few and unattractive. We chose badly, a drab
establishment in which fresh vegetables were unavailable and the wurst
inferior. The adequacy of the local beer provided the sole consolation.

The following morning, on the way to the battlefield, we noted a
significant Soviet military presence, mostly in the form of trucks
passing by -- to judge by their appearance, designs that dated from the
1950s. To our surprise, we discovered that the Soviets had established a
small training area adjacent to where Napoleon had vanquished the
Prussians. Although we had orders to avoid contact with any Russians,
the presence of their armored troops going through their paces riveted
us. Here was something of far greater immediacy than Bonaparte and the
Duke of Brunswick: "the other," about which we had for so long heard so
much but knew so little. Through binoculars, we watched a column of
Russian armored vehicles -- BMPs, in NATO parlance -- traversing what
appeared to be a drivers' training course. Suddenly, one of them began
spewing smoke. Soon thereafter, it burst into flames.

Here was education, although at the time I had only the vaguest sense of its significance.

An Ambitious Team Player Assailed by Doubts

These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality
radically at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and
unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness.
Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power
manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together
expressed and affirmed the nation's enduring devotion to its founding
ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together
in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength
from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That,
during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a
signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way
contradict America's aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to
expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness
of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States
had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number
of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with
our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats
to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an
arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

I
was not so naive as to believe that the American record had been
without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had
been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted
little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the
Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply
done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to
any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership,
thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our
own but also that of our friends and allies.

The choices seemed clear enough. On one side was the status quo: the
commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism,
implemented by the national security apparatus within which I functioned
as a small cog. On the other side was the prospect of appeasement,
isolationism, and catastrophe. The only responsible course was the one
to which every president since Harry Truman had adhered.

For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that
worldview. Given my age, upbringing, and professional background, it
could hardly have been otherwise. Although the great rivalry between the
United States and the Soviet Union had contained moments of
considerable anxiety -- I remember my father, during the Cuban Missile
Crisis, stocking our basement with water and canned goods -- it served
primarily to clarify, not to frighten. The Cold War provided a framework
that organized and made sense of contemporary history. It offered a
lineup and a scorecard. That there existed bad Germans and good Germans,
their Germans and our Germans, totalitarian Germans and Germans who,
like Americans, passionately loved freedom was, for example, a
proposition I accepted as dogma. Seeing the Cold War as a struggle
between good and evil answered many questions, consigned others to the
periphery, and rendered still others irrelevant.

Back in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, more than a few members of
my generation had rejected the conception of the Cold War as a
Manichean struggle. Here too, I was admittedly a slow learner. Yet
having kept the faith long after others had lost theirs, the doubts that
eventually assailed me were all the more disorienting.

Granted, occasional suspicions had appeared long before Jena and
Berlin. My own Vietnam experience had generated its share, which I had
done my best to suppress. I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in
the narrowest of terms, the military profession, in those days at
least, did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of
career success required curbing maverick tendencies. To get ahead, you
needed to be a team player. Later, when studying the history of U.S.
foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with challenges to
orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to education,
graduate school proved a complete waste of time -- a period of intense
study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted
myself to ensuring that they remained inert.

Now, however, my personal circumstances were changing. Shortly after
the passing of the Cold War, my military career ended. Education thereby
became not only a possibility, but also a necessity.

In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect
antidote for excessive self-regard. After 23 years spent inside the U.S.
Army seemingly going somewhere, I now found myself on the outside going
nowhere in particular. In the self-contained and cloistered universe of
regimental life, I had briefly risen to the status of minor spear
carrier. The instant I took off my uniform, that status vanished. I soon
came to a proper appreciation of my own insignificance, a salutary
lesson that I ought to have absorbed many years earlier.

As I set out on what eventually became a crablike journey toward a
new calling as a teacher and writer -- a pilgrimage of sorts -- ambition
in the commonly accepted meaning of the term ebbed. This did not happen
all at once. Yet gradually, trying to grab one of life's shiny brass
rings ceased being a major preoccupation. Wealth, power, and celebrity
became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History --
especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered
answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles. Easily the most nagging
was this one: How could I have so profoundly misjudged the reality of
what lay on the far side of the Iron Curtain?

Had I been insufficiently attentive? Or was it possible that I had
been snookered all along? Contemplating such questions, while
simultaneously witnessing the unfolding of the "long 1990s" -- the
period bookended by two wars with Iraq when American vainglory reached
impressive new heights -- prompted the realization that I had grossly
misinterpreted the threat posed by America's adversaries. Yet that was
the lesser half of the problem. Far worse than misperceiving "them" was
the fact that I had misperceived "us." What I thought I knew best I
actually understood least. Here, the need for education appeared
especially acute.

George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003
pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary --
above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of
American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that
found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine
of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of
the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined
and open-ended "global war on terror" without the foggiest notion of
what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might
cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German
warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least
maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges
of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the
worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into
middle age dissolved completely.

Credo and Trinity

What should stand in the place of such discarded convictions? Simply
inverting the conventional wisdom, substituting a new Manichean paradigm
for the old discredited version -- the United States taking the place
of the Soviet Union as the source of the world's evil -- would not
suffice. Yet arriving at even an approximation of truth would entail
subjecting conventional wisdom, both present and past, to sustained and
searching scrutiny. Cautiously at first but with growing confidence,
this I vowed to do.

Doing so meant shedding habits of conformity acquired over decades.
All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the
extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting
independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been
socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the
preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a
period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it
all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes
for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes
to demonstrate one's trustworthiness -- the world of politics is flush
with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner
circle -- is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory
notes. It's not only demeaning but downright foolhardy.

Washington Rules aims to take stock of conventional wisdom
in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of
assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of
statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World
War II -- the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This
postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded
in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared
from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the
international order ought to work and charges the United States with
responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American credo.
In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United States -- and the
United States alone -- to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform
the world. In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he
termed "The American Century," Henry R. Luce made the case for this
spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine
in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens
to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full
impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such
means as we see fit." Luce thereby captured what remains even today the
credo's essence.

Luce's concept of an American Century, an age of unquestioned
American global primacy, resonated, especially in Washington. His
evocative phrase found a permanent place in the lexicon of national
politics. (Recall that the neoconservatives who, in the 1990s, lobbied
for more militant U.S. policies named their enterprise the Project for a
New American Century.) So, too, did Luce's expansive claim of
prerogatives to be exercised by the United States. Even today, whenever
public figures allude to America's responsibility to lead, they signal
their fidelity to this creed. Along with respectful allusions to God and
"the troops," adherence to Luce's credo has become a de facto
prerequisite for high office. Question its claims and your prospects of
being heard in the hubbub of national politics become nil.

Note, however, that the duty Luce ascribed to Americans has two
components. It is not only up to Americans, he wrote, to choose the
purposes for which they would bring their influence to bear, but to
choose the means as well. Here we confront the second component of the
postwar tradition of American statecraft.

With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over
example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled "negotiating
from a position of strength") over suasion. Above all, the exercise of
global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States
to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those
required for self-defense. Prior to World War II, Americans by and large
viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright
hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for
military might emerged as central to the American identity.

By
the midpoint of the twentieth century, "the Pentagon" had ceased to be
merely a gigantic five-sided building. Like "Wall Street" at the end of
the nineteenth century, it had become Leviathan, its actions veiled in
secrecy, its reach extending around the world. Yet while the
concentration of power in Wall Street had once evoked deep fear and
suspicion, Americans by and large saw the concentration of power in the
Pentagon as benign. Most found it reassuring.

A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty now
came to believe that the preservation of liberty required them to
lavish resources on the armed forces. During the Cold War, Americans
worried ceaselessly about falling behind the Russians, even though the
Pentagon consistently maintained a position of overall primacy. Once the
Soviet threat disappeared, mere primacy no longer sufficed. With barely
a whisper of national debate, unambiguous and perpetual global military
supremacy emerged as an essential predicate to global leadership.

Every great military power has its distinctive signature. For Napoleonic France, it was the levee en masse
-- the people in arms animated by the ideals of the Revolution. For
Great Britain in the heyday of empire, it was command of the seas,
sustained by a dominant fleet and a network of far-flung outposts from
Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore and Hong Kong. Germany
from the 1860s to the 1940s (and Israel from 1948 to 1973) took another
approach, relying on a potent blend of tactical flexibility and
operational audacity to achieve battlefield superiority.

The abiding signature of American military power since World War II
has been of a different order altogether. The United States has not
specialized in any particular type of war. It has not adhered to a fixed
tactical style. No single service or weapon has enjoyed consistent
favor. At times, the armed forces have relied on citizen-soldiers to
fill their ranks; at other times, long-service professionals. Yet an
examination of the past 60 years of U.S. military policy and practice
does reveal important elements of continuity. Call them the sacred
trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of
international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.

Together, credo and trinity -- the one defining purpose, the other
practice -- constitute the essence of the way that Washington has
attempted to govern and police the American Century. The relationship
between the two is symbiotic. The trinity lends plausibility to the
credo's vast claims. For its part, the credo justifies the trinity's
vast requirements and exertions. Together they provide the basis for an
enduring consensus that imparts a consistency to U.S. policy regardless
of which political party may hold the upper hand or who may be occupying
the White House. From the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack
Obama, that consensus has remained intact. It defines the rules to which
Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington
rules.

As used here, Washington is less a geographic expression than a set
of interlocking institutions headed by people who, whether acting
officially or unofficially, are able to put a thumb on the helm of
state. Washington, in this sense, includes the upper echelons of the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government.
It encompasses the principal components of the national security state
-- the departments of Defense, State, and, more recently, Homeland
Security, along with various agencies comprising the intelligence and
federal law enforcement communities. Its ranks extend to select think
tanks and interest groups. Lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, former officials,
and retired military officers who still enjoy access are members in
good standing. Yet Washington also reaches beyond the Beltway to include
big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and
major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times,
even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. With rare exceptions, acceptance
of the Washington rules forms a prerequisite for entry into this world.

My purpose in writing Washiington Rules is fivefold: first,
to trace the origins and evolution of the Washington rules -- both the
credo that inspires consensus and the trinity in which it finds
expression; second, to subject the resulting consensus to critical
inspection, showing who wins and who loses and also who foots the bill;
third, to explain how the Washington rules are perpetuated, with certain
views privileged while others are declared disreputable; fourth, to
demonstrate that the rules themselves have lost what ever utility they
may once have possessed, with their implications increasingly pernicious
and their costs increasingly unaffordable; and finally, to argue for
readmitting disreputable (or "radical") views to our national security
debate, in effect legitimating alternatives to the status quo. In
effect, my aim is to invite readers to share in the process of education
on which I embarked two decades ago in Berlin.

The Washington rules were forged at a moment when American influence
and power were approaching their acme. That moment has now passed. The
United States has drawn down the stores of authority and goodwill it had
acquired by 1945. Words uttered in Washington command less respect than
once was the case. Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in
dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image. The
curtain is now falling on the American Century.

Similarly, the United States no longer possesses sufficient
wherewithal to sustain a national security strategy that relies on
global military presence and global power projection to underwrite a
policy of global interventionism. Touted as essential to peace,
adherence to that strategy has propelled the United States into a
condition approximating perpetual war, as the military misadventures of
the past decade have demonstrated.

To anyone with eyes to see, the shortcomings inherent in the
Washington rules have become plainly evident. Although those most deeply
invested in perpetuating its conventions will insist otherwise, the
tradition to which Washington remains devoted has begun to unravel.
Attempting to prolong its existence might serve Washington's interests,
but it will not serve the interests of the American people.

Devising an alternative to the reigning national security paradigm
will pose a daunting challenge -- especially if Americans look to
"Washington" for fresh thinking. Yet doing so has become essential.

In one sense, the national security policies to which Washington so
insistently adheres express what has long been the preferred American
approach to engaging the world beyond our borders. That approach plays
to America's presumed strong suit -- since World War II, and especially
since the end of the Cold War, thought to be military power. In another
sense, this reliance on military might creates excuses for the United
States to avoid serious engagement: confidence in American arms has made
it unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how
their aspirations might differ from our own. In this way, the Washington
rules reinforce American provincialism -- a national trait for which
the United States continues to pay dearly.

The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid
serious self-engagement. From this perspective, confidence that the
credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to
America's needs or desires -- whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or
cheap consumer goods -- has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore
problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan
ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting
to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any
obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose
to exercise freedom.

When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with
others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves,
then real education just might begin.