By SAMUEL MOYN and STEPHEN WERTHEIM
A Tomahawk missile launched from the U.S.S. Porter in the Mediterranean Sea.CreditFord Williams/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press
We now know how many cruise missiles it takes to turn you from pariah to respected member of the American foreign policy establishment: 59 — the number President Trump fired on a Syrian government airfield on Thursday. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria gushed.
And yet firing missiles at half-empty air bases does not make up for a lack of foreign policy acumen, let alone a strategy for dealing with a Middle East that has consumed American blood and treasure for at least 15 years. In fact, the good money says that Mr. Trump is, through plan or happenstance, likely to push us further into the fighting, whatever he promised on the campaign trail.
In the coming weeks, we’ll have a long debate over where America is headed in the Middle East. But the question that historians will ask, decades from now, is how those 15 years of flailing failed to teach us anything.
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” wrote the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. Americans understood Vietnam to be a grievous defeat that required fresh thinking. In the 1970s, they set out on a long reckoning with its consequences, pioneering the promotion of human rights and asserting congressional control over war powers.
No remotely comparable reckoning has followed the Iraq war — largely because President Barack Obama found a way to avoid it.
Mr. Obama, of course, opposed the war, a stance that propelled his rise to power. But like most critics, he laid blame for the war on George W. Bush’s administration and its supposedly abnormal arrogance. “I’m opposed to dumb wars,” Mr. Obama famously said.
So when Mr. Obama took office, he and most of his supporters acted as though the change at the top had put the problem to rest. If you were appalled by Mr. Bush’s rash decision making, Mr. Obama would think carefully. If Mr. Bush’s torture stained your conscience, you could rest assured that Mr. Obama would not torture (although he might send in a drone to kill instead).
The Obama years produced a paradox: Opposition to the Iraq war broadened, but it did not deepen. By 2014, a record low 18 percent of Americans judged it worth the costs, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. Yet no antiwar politics followed.
Politicians and intellectuals neglected to ask what would keep the United States from starting a war of aggression in the future — relying on the wisdom of the very people who had either endorsed or weakly opposed the war in the first place.
Which is why, in 2015, Mr. Trump could run a second antiwar campaign, tapping into the reservoir of confusion, anger and grief over Iraq. In Bush-friendly, pro-military South Carolina, Mr. Trump blasted the war as possibly the “worst decision” in American history. “We have destabilized the Middle East,” he said, and caused the rise of the Islamic State and conflicts in Libya and Syria. In every presidential debate, Mr. Trump reiterated that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start — proof that voters could trust him as commander in chief and ignore the chorus of national security experts who deemed him unfit.
The proof was faulty; Mr. Trump came out against the war only after it began. But in telling a falsehood, he seemed to convey a larger truth. While Hillary Clinton acknowledged her error in voting to authorize the war, she brushed off the subject, as if the lesson to be learned was never again to let George W. Bush invade Iraq in 2003. It fell to Mr. Trump to recognize the war as a disaster that warranted meaningful change. America’s great mistake was to confuse his political calculation with wisdom.
Now, having intensified American military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, Mr. Trump may wind up repeating his predecessor’s pattern of anti-Iraq-war campaigning and perpetual-war governing. Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon and Rex Tillerson hardly improve on the old foreign policy sages Mr. Trump has waved away. His unseemly embrace of torture, which enrages his liberal audience more than his flirtation with any other taboo, requires condemnation. But if Mr. Trump’s opponents fail to appreciate how he capitalized on their geopolitical mistakes and their abdication of responsibility, they will risk continued defeat.
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
After Vietnam, the American people recognized an American catastrophe. They embarked on a sustained period of self-reflection and policy evolution. Despite the tumult and excesses of that era, vocal disagreement at least reflected a determination to put things right. Mr. Trump’s victory indicates that when we lived through our own disaster, we failed to reckon with the past and paved the way for an even more terrifying future.
No comments:
Post a Comment