War and American Democracy | 2
Chapter 2War and American Democracy
Building on the general theories of international relations, this chapter is oriented on the American system. It begins with specific American traditions and political tendencies with respect to war and the use of force. It then presents a recent hawkish coalition of political factions followed by a discussion of apparent partisan instability. The chapter concludes with items for consideration.
Political forces can easily overpower presidential and congressional decision making and prevent strategic response. Some of these political forces are rooted in religion. Only a few years ago, it would have been considered impolitic to broach the subject of religion in a text on American government. Today, however, it would be irresponsible not to do so. The approach taken throughout the chapter is to present positions as articulated by thought leaders from the various factions.
Exceptionalism, Exemplarism, Vindicationism, and Exemptionalism
There are three ideas that run through classic American thinking—exceptionalism, exemplarism, and vindicationism—and they are as apparent today as they were in the nation’s early history, albeit with different emphasis.[1] A fourth ism has been recently added—exemptionalism.[2]
Exemplarism is the principle that the United States could best serve the spread of liberal democracy by being an enviable example to the world—the shining light on the hill, the beacon.[3] Being a good example requires strengthening the institutions that assure individual liberties, the rule of law, and the prosperity born of industry and commerce. Adherents to exemplarism would find themselves in agreement with Kant’s principle of noninterventionism into the affairs of other nations.
An opposing principle, vindicationism, asserts that America can best serve the world by spreading democracy, not merely by example, but by forceful action abroad. Adherents believe in universalism and that liberal democracy provides a universal set of rules. Vindicationists, then, reject territorial sovereignty and the principle of self-determination. More accurately, they believe that if the shackles of old world governments were removed, everyone would determine for themselves that liberal democracy is the preferred form of government. America’s crusading spirit springs from vindicationism. Jonathan Monten speculates that the Bush administration firmly believed that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, democracy would quickly blossom in Iraq because democracy is universal and that Iraqis would rush to embrace it.
Exemplarism and vindicationism are principles, not strategies or policies. They help guide and explain us behavior on the world scene. No period of history is driven purely by one or the other. People of principle strongly tend toward one or the other. As a nation, exemplarism dominated until the 1890s, and vindicationism has been on the rise since, reaching a peak with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Thucydides observed that states unchecked by external forces expand, and realist thinking includes the belief that a state’s interests would expand in proportion to its relative power. Realist thinking—because there is no universal set of rules that all nations will accept—tells us that attempts to impose universal monarchy will be opposed. States will resist individually and form alliances to balance against the imposing power. Recent evidence appears to support that prediction.
How, then, can the United States practice vindicationism and honestly not expect strong opposition? The answer, exceptionalism, is the third thread that runs through American thinking. Alexis de Tocqueville identified this belief in his 1835 observations.[4] America believed that it was the exception to the rule. Its heart is pure, and its intentions benign because it does not seek empire through territorial acquisition. Accordingly, American interventions abroad would be accepted, even welcomed.
There is considerable evidence to support that view. The United States has intervened abroad with positive results in both world wars. The reconstruction efforts after the Second World War were extraordinary, and the United States left Germany and Japan without claim on territory. In the Middle East, the United States was seen as a force for fairness as major powers competed for colonial empire. Interventions for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief today are well received abroad and supported at home. The invasion of Iraq is seen in stark contrast, as were the frequent earlier interventions in Latin America.
America is bounded east and west by protective oceans, and north and south by friendly and weak neighbors. Because of these facts, the United States did not need to maintain a standing army to defend itself. And that fact made America exceptional and made exemplarism a realistic option. Vindicationism, on the other hand, required the ability to project power far from the homeland.
And there lies the dilemma. The institutions to project power abroad have a strong tendency to concentrate power in central government and they threaten liberal institutions. Their costs tax the public and divert resources from domestic prosperity. And it is prosperity, liberty, and the rule of law that stem from liberal institutions. By improving domestic order, we improve our image abroad. Weakening the domestic order degrades the image abroad.
To the early Puritans arriving in New England, removing themselves from the problems of the Old World was virtuous. The New World is a place where humankind could possess the liberties that God intended. What later would be called isolationism was God’s will according to these early Americans.
One hundred and fifty years later, the Framers agreed on the goodness of spreading democracy. They disagreed, however, on the method. Exemplarism was strong with only weak expressions of vindicationism apparent. None other than George Washington doubted the idea of exceptionalism and said in a letter to Madison that no state, including the United States, could be “trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”[5] But even then vindicationism was not entirely silent.
Exemplarism dominated America’s international relations until the 1890s. Vindicationism found expression in westward expansion, and the idea of Manifest Destiny carried the country to the Pacific Coast. By the end of the nineteenth century, coastal artillery remained a prominent branch in the Army. The Army’s orientation was on domestic constabulary duties and defense of the homeland. Navalists, in contrast, were expansionist and looked across the oceans. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a tipping point in American history. Admiral Dewey defeated the Spanish Fleet in Manila Bay in short order, and the Army was caught unprepared. The resulting acquisitions in the Pacific and the Caribbean required an imperial army to police them. Rudyard Kipling called for America to “take up the white man’s burden,” the European version of vindicationism; Europeans had, through foreign empire, the sacred obligation to bring civilization to non-white nations.[6]
Coincident with a peak in the recurring cycle of Christian missionary zeal, vindicationism burst onto the scene. Woodrow Wilson would be satisfied by exemplarism until he could no longer resist entering the First World War. American military force would be used abroad to defend democracy. Vindicationism would dominate henceforth.
Exceptionalism, as a powerful and persistent component of American identity, can lead to exemptionalism. The United States has been successful in building international institutions and law through treaty and, on occasion, the United States has attempted to exempt itself from treaty provisions. Congress had been the strongest proponent of exemptionalism. To assure ratification of the un treaty, Southern Democratic senators insisted on language that would exempt Jim Crow laws. Post Cold War, the executive branch has claimed a special preordained us role in the world and has exempted itself from international norms. The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and made clear that the same fate awaited the Kyoto Protocol on the environment. President Clinton saw as fruitless the attempt to submit for ratification the statute on the International Criminal Court allowing international prosecution of individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes if the individuals’ state failed to act.
American choices today remain to promote democracy through example, encouragement, assistance, coercion, or compellence. Some writers argue that exemplarism was the logical choice of a weak nation in its early years and that vindicationism is the appropriate choice for the sole superpower. Many in the world, particularly the downtrodden, accepted exceptionalism and saw the United States as an actor for fair play. The perception of American exceptionalism has been eroding recently while exemptionalism appears to be on the rise.
American Traditions
Henry Kissinger offers a discriminating and uniquely American view of international relations based on the traditions of Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson.[7] Woodrow Wilson represents a fourth. These traditions explain and predict the aggressiveness of American foreign policy and the tendency toward or against military intervention.
At the birth of the nation, Alexander Hamilton preferred to distance nascent America from Old World struggles. Hamilton advocated engaging with Britain and France, managing the balance of power in accordance with America’s self-interest but without permanent commitment to either European power. Not surprisingly, Hamilton adopted Great Britain’s behavior—both the United States and England were separated from the continent by protective seas—and was entirely consistent with Hume’s prescriptions.
Andrew Jackson also preferred to distance America from European struggles. Jackson belonged to the era of American continental expansion to the west and general disinterest in Europe’s problems to the east across a protective ocean. Jacksonians are isolationist (with respect to Europe) until America’s direct interests are challenged and then are prone to a bellicose response. The idea that any war could potentially draw the United States into global war is not part of the Jacksonian tradition: peace is not indivisible. Nor is the use of military force in foreign affairs with America’s interests not directly challenged. But Jacksonians were vindicationists with respect to expanding American empire across the North American continent.
John Quincy Adams believed in the benefits of democracy and the desirability of spreading it to the rest of the world. Adams, leaning strongly toward isolationism, believed America could best serve the world by being a shining example of democracy’s benefits rather than by imposing its ways on others through aggressive foreign policy and the use of military force abroad.
Woodrow Wilson also believed in spreading democracy to the world but took a far more aggressive stance than Adams. Preceded by Teddy Roosevelt, a believer in cold balance of power calculation, Wilson’s original response to the burgeoning European conflict was isolationist. But on the eve of America’s entry to the First World War, Wilson rejected a new balance of power as the desired outcome. Instead, Wilson believed, “the only valid purpose for America’s entry into the war was to remake the world in its own image,” to make the world safe for democracy.[8] Wilson rejected realist principles in favor of those of idealists. Rather than pursuing selfish national interests (realism), doing what is right and just in the interest of mankind (idealism) would guide America’s foreign policy. Democratic principles, according to Wilson, are universal principles.
In times of relative peace, those with the isolationist tendencies of Adams and Jackson find political coincidence with Hamiltonian balancing at arm’s length. But when a direct challenge is made to American interests, Jacksonians are energized and find common cause with those harboring Wilsonian tendencies toward the use of force. During the Cold War, the common perception of an existential threat formed a powerful consensus across these communities. That threat and consensus no longer exists.
Adams and Hamilton belonged to the American meritocracy who had acquired position as landholders and as lawyers in contrast to the European aristocracy who held position by virtue of their ancestors’ military acumen. The Framers rejected the ancien régime.
The ruling philosophy of the generation that established the independence of the United States was the very quintessence of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the rights and perfectibility of man and his capacity for peaceful self-government once the artificial barriers to his freedom—monarchy, aristocracy and established church—had been destroyed.[9]
But members of the founding meritocracy were concentrated in the Northeast. And later, during the era of expansion, those in the South and in the West developed a warring culture more suited to “the violent conditions of a frontier society.” Jackson was the first president to come from this new base.
Jackson was populist and rural. He defied Congress and the Court throughout his administration. Anti-monarchist detractors in his own party referred to Jackson as King Andrew and split from the Democratic Party to establish the Whig Party that quickly split over slavery. Republicans formed in 1854 from the Whigs’ demise. In 1860, the remaining Democrats split between the abolitionist northern democrats and the proslavery southern democrats under the rubric of states’ rights. Although Andrew Jackson is commonly identified as the father of the modern Democratic Party, he is more accurately seen as the father of the vindicationist Southern Democratic Party currently exercising dominant influence in the Republican Party.
Christian Reconstructionism
Christian Reconstructionists reject both Enlightenment thinking and the notion that the Constitution is a product of Enlightenment thought.[10] Rousas Rushdoony offers a Reconstructionist worldview in opposition to the secular humanistic worldview of the Enlightenment. The Reconstructionist worldview requires what Rushdoony calls “Christian Revisionism.” It is a telling of history from the creation to the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Rather than intending to establish a liberal democracy based on Enlightenment thinking, the Framers intended to establish a Christian Nation. The prohibition of an established church was a prohibition on the federal government, not on state and local governments. The narrative continues with subversion of the Framers’ original intent by the Supreme Court and modernism.
Reconstructionists reject natural law in favor of biblical law. According to Greek philosophers, the Aquinas school of the Catholic Church,[11] and Enlightenment thinkers, there is a natural law that can be reasoned from direct observation of nature. Reconstructionists posit that the belief in natural law rests on a fatal fallacy. Human observation is of the world fallen from grace. It is based in original sin, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Distinguishing right from wrong himself put man in the position of God. The doctrine of total depravity asserts a pessimistic view of man rooted in original sin. For Reconstructionists, right and wrong is inerrantly expressed in the Bible, and is not a product of human reason.