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The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy, by William Pfaff
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"For years," William Pfaff writes, "there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...has over decades turned into a vast project for ending tyranny in the world. We defend this position by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities. This is where the problem lies. It has become somewhat of a national heresy to suggest the U .S. does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not."
Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, Pfaff lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that animates our politics and foreign relations-and makes clear why it is flawed and must ultimately fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment, and in America's effective separation from the common history of the west during the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century, during which it failed to gain "the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy." We are, thus, hubristic and naïve in our adventurism, and blind to the truth of the threats we face. No mere critic, Pfaff offers insightful observations on how we can and must adapt to Muslim extremism, nuclear competition, and other challenges of our time.
- Sales Rank: #446337 in Books
- Published on: 2010-06-01
- Released on: 2010-05-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .75 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review
“In an age of charlatans and poseurs, William Pfaff has long stood for realism and sobriety. With its penetrating critique of the secular utopianism that perverts American statecraft, The Irony of Manifest Destiny affirms his standing as our wisest critic of U.S. foreign policy.” ―Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power and Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
“Eleanor Roosevelt once said that wishful thinking was America's ‘besetting sin.' In an era of seemingly permanent war, when the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the manifest destiny of the United States reigns virtually unchallenged in Washington, William Pfaff's lucid, dismayed commentary on the follies of such triumphalism has been an island of reason in the imperial sea. If his prescriptions, which hearken back to the America of foreign policy commonsense--that is, to George Kennan rather than George W. Bush, and, alas Barack Obama too--had been followed, the United States and the world would be in a far, far better situation. As things stand, though, Pfaff's clarity and rigor at least offer posterity a way of understanding what actually happened, and why, when national power and national blindness combined to lead the United States down the path of utopian nationalism and in the process become both a danger to the world and to itself.” ―David Rieff, author of At The Point of a Gun
“Anyone fortunate enough to have read the International Herald Tribune over the last several decades knows William Pfaff as the thoughtful and original American heir to George Kennan's sober Niebuhurian realism. Now, in his brilliant new essay on American foreign policy, Pfaff has applied his prudent realist vision to deconstructing the "tragedy" of America's global interventionism. In the name of what he calls "secular utopianism," Pfaff sees in America's increasingly imperialist foreign policy a residue of Enlightenment exceptionalism – America as a beacon of liberty and democracy's global "keeper." He shows persuasively why al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism are less perilous than we think, why our interventions in Iraq, Iran and Pakistan are successors to the futility of Vietnam, and why – despite his new spirit of multilateralism – President Obama is caught up in overseas policies likely to fail. This is a book by an American looking from the outside in that needs to be read by every political leader and thinker caught on the inside looking out – most of all by President Obama, who celebrates Niebuhr in theory but seems caught up in the insidious practices of Dick Cheney and George Bush, Jr.” ―Benjamin R. Barber, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos, author, Consumed and Jihad vs. McWorld
About the Author
William Pfaff is the author of 8 books on American foreign policy, international relations, and contemporary history. They include Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century, which was a finalist for the 1989 National Book Award, and which Ronald Steel called "a work of moral passion and striking insight by America's best foreign-affairs columnist." The late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said "William Pfaff is Walter Lippmann's authentic heir. Like Lippmann, he places the rush of events in historical and cultural perspective and writes about them with lucidity and grace." For 25 years, Pfaff wrote a column for the International Herald Tribune, and his essays and articles have appeared widely, in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Foreign Affairs. He lives in Paris.
Most helpful customer reviews
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
A MASTERWORK OF WESTERN HISTORY, AMERICAN NATIONALISM & FOREIGN POLICY
By RBSProds
Five EXCELLENT Stars! A great intellectual feat of foreign policy scholarship and profound historical insight. There have been many excellent books on US foreign policy and imperialism in recent times, but this book is by far one of the most insightful, comprehensive, and important. Because of its historical breadth, it may be an invaluable asset to historians far into the future as they sort through the tangled web of past and current US policies and actions. This essay is an engrossing look by author, historian, army officer, and international relations expert William Pfaff at the political, psychological, religious, and foreign affairs implications and transformations that have occurred in Western civilization from the time of the French Revolution and our fledgling American Republic to today's "experience of extreme ideological violence." When the author talks war, he has insight from the time he was an Infantry/Special Forces officer in the Korea War. When he talks tough and speaks frankly, we know he was dismissed from a decades-old news column job for his correct, unyielding assessment of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. What gives this book an extra dimension is author Pfaff's deep meditation on the shift from the overarching influence of religion on life and politics in earlier centuries to the birth of the Enlightenment's secular utopian approach, called a "terrible turn" of the two preceding centuries, which also changed the nature of warfare and the approach of governments & their citizens. This European shift has resonated forward in time across centuries, philosophical "isms", across nations, religions, to the United States of today: from its periods of isolation, wars, interventions, a 'bi-polar' cold war, and US emergence as the sole super-power in the wake of the USSR collapse (See Chapter VI on the influence of the Carter administration, preceding Reagan's own "tear down this wall" actions), endeavoring to spread democracy internationally. Aimed primarily at an American audience, Pfaff uses the term "manifest destiny" in a broader manner, far beyond USA westward continental expansionism and the shield of the Monroe Doctrine to a 21st Century meaning, as the United States continues its international power projection and unique imperialism to a point that has landed us in 2 simultaneous wars and a worldwide war against a new "elected enemy": jihad-based terrorism in general, and al-Qaeda specifically. These new conflicts have brought terror attacks to our very shores and to our highest profile institutions, as we fight and maintain hundreds of bases on distant fronts based on our unique national "myth" and presumed national purpose. The author excels at finding the root causes of actions and consequences that have confounded us both as a nation under various key presidential administrations and a member of the international community, time and time again. This is a book that should be read many times, especially the warning chapter at the very end. The footnotes alone are a treasury of facts and information. The words of Polybius, prefiguring George Santayana, reverberate across the landscape of this book: "The knowledge of past events is the sovereign corrective of human nature", indeed. My Highest Recommendation. Five EXCEPTIONAL Stars! (This review is based on a Kindle download in Mac, iPhone, and Kindle2 text-to-speech mode. William Pfaff is the author of The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia)
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Something's Missing
By Tidewater
I'm and admirer of William Pfaff's writing, especially "The Bullet's Song," and this work is cetainly up to the high standards he has set in the past. It is good to read in a foreign policy tome that the Enlightenment was at best a mixed blessing, and the deleterious effects it has had on the ideas of the western "elites," and that (oh heresy!) there was a better balance when church and state (specifically, the Roman Catholic Church) were both recognized as having roles in moderating politics and the cultures (hence wars) of the western countries. One can almost hear the dim echoes of G. K. Chesterton's thoughts in this book.
I give the book four stars because of its omission of the key developments in U.S. foreign policy in the late 19th century that were spurred mainly by Henry Cabot lodge, Senator from Massachusetts, and a close coterie of supportive elders such as Henry Adams and John Hay, along with young bucks like Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt. Sen. Lodge gave a series of three speeches on the Senate floor in 1895 which pretty much encapsulate everything that Pfaff bemoans about the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th and (so far) in the 21st centuries. A book I am now reading, "The Last Great Triumph," (Warren Zimmerman) details the lives of Lodge et al and their (hugely successful) efforts to reshape American foreign policy into an "expansionist" one. There's a wonderful photo of "The Great White Fleet" of U.S. battleships returning to Norfolk, VA, around 1910 after a round-the-world show of force, that says it all. (The Navy went to grey ships shortly thereafter.)
So while Pfaff spends a lot of time (too much in my opinion) on the perceived insidious effects of neo-conservatives on recent foreign adventures in the Middle East, IMHO his time would have been better spent dealing with the legacy of Lodge, Mahan, Roosevelt, et al, who actually turned the ship of state in an outward, aggressive direction that has been the nation's posture for the most part ever since. The Zimmerman book would make both a fine introduction and epilogue to Pfaff's work. The juxtaposition of the two make this reader feel that a national tragedy/comeuppance is the most likely outcome for this nation that's been on an evangelizing mission for well over 100 years.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Dense, but worth the effort
By Dienne
William Pfaff presents an erudite, albeit rather abstruse, account of how historical factors from the Enlightenment and the development of the American nation have coalesced into a pattern of American exceptionalism and imperialism which defines our worldview in matters related to foreign policy. According to Pfaff, such worldview has led to many misunderstandings and distortions of the threats faced by the modern American nation, from Communism during the Cold War to "Islamofascism" during the War on Terror.
Pfaff argues that Americans view themselves and their nation as somehow exceptional in the history of the world. We are the "best" nation because the ideals of our democracy serve as a beacon of light to other nations and as the solution to the world's problems. Americans believe that democratic capitalism is the most superior form of government and the natural ultimate end of the progression of history.
This belief in American governmental, economic and moral superiority was initially behind the idea of "Manifest Destiny" in the 1800s, when it was virtually accepted as inevitable that the United States would stretch from coast to coast and control the North American continent.
Pfaff, however, uses the term "Manifest Destiny" in a more expansive sense to mean America's self-designated role as the world's policeman and peace-keeping force. This more expansive role initially developed during the First World War after America was forced from its isolationism. It was strengthened by America's successful intervention in World War II, and cemented when the U.S. emerged from the Cold War as the only global superpower.
The U.S.'s perception of its role has gradually shifted through each of these phases from isolationism to a rather passive peace-keeping model of intervention, to an active model of intervention in which the U.S. has forcefully tried to implement its vision of democratic capitalism on a world-wide scale in an attempt which Pfaff argues (and I agree) is not only futile, but foolish, as the very attempt to control sovereign nations and impose American ideals provokes the very threats to U.S. power and security which such attempts are intended to prevent.
In light of these unintended consequences, Pfaff makes a plea for scaling back U.S. foreign policy and intervention in order to focus more specifically on maintaining and protecting American interests, without further expanding them into nations and cultures where neither democracy nor capitalism may be appropriate or desired by the indigenous people.
Pfaff packs a great deal of history, economics and international relations into a very dense 200 pages. This book is not light reading. I found it necessary to re-read certain sections several times before I could follow the thread of his argument. In one particular respect, however, despite repeatedly re-reading relevant sections, I never did fully understand his argument: how Enlightenment secularism somehow led to the current U.S. worldview.
According to Pfaff, during the Roman Catholic rule of the Middle Ages, there was a natural separation of church and state. The Church crowned the king or emperor to rule over secular affairs. That which belonged to Caesar was given to Caesar; that which was God's was given to God. Redemption for humankind wasn't possible on earth, only in Heaven. Hence, solutions to earthly problems would be worked out by God in the afterlife.
With the advent of the Enlightenment, however, Pfaff argues that with God being "dead", solutions to earthly problems were now the province of human reason and "secular utopias" were not only possible, but desirable on earth. This push for "secular utopia", according to Pfaff, dramatically changed the world political situation, and even the methods of making war in ways that have led to the current American global domination. American exceptionalism and the push to force worldwide Western-style democracy is just another manifestation of the "secular utopia" envisioned by the Enlightenment.
His argument leaves me rather baffled. Is he saying that there was no religious imperialism and exceptionalism? Roman Catholicism dominated the Western world much like America dominates the world today. Catholicism was forced onto unwilling and inappropriate recipients just as democracy and capitalism are today. And is he saying that war under Roman Catholicism was somehow less brutal or dehumanizing? Sure, it was on a rather smaller scale, but that has more to do with technological advances rather than changes in ideology - it's simply easier to kill people on a mass scale today. And is he saying that the world would somehow be better off had the Enlightenment not occurred? If we were still under the domination of Roman Catholicism? I guess I don't see that believing that human leaders know the mind of God and that they are implementing "God's will" is any better than humans trying to make things better by the force of reason.
Furthermore, I don't see anything "secular" about American exceptionalism. The original concept of "Manifest Destiny" was religious - it was the idea that "Providence" (i.e., God) gave America to the settlers as their "Promised Land". To this day, many Americans believe that America enjoys special divine favor (which we are ever in danger of losing if we continue our "immoral" ways) and many of our leaders continue to believe (or at least claim to believe) that they act under divine inspiration and guidance. George W. Bush didn't invade Iraq because he was seeking some kind of "secular" utopia. He invaded because that's what God told him to do. Frankly, I'd welcome a bit of "secular utopia".
But aside from that confusion/disagreement, I enjoyed the book. It was worth the struggle as it gave me new perspectives and new thoughts to mull over. Recommended, but only if you can really focus on it as you're reading.
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