The End of the American Century
Long Live the American Century
“American exceptionalism is correct in its time. I think it won’t last forever. The idea that you hear now…that America was always great, it is still great and will always be great — as a political message, it may be helpful and useful.
But of course, as a philosophy of history, it’s bonkers.”
The Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia were signed in Ohio four months after I enrolled in Annapolis. 15 years later my Task Force in Al Anbar turned out the lights on Operation Iraqi Freedom with the conclusion of the second free elections since the U.S. invasion toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.
From a distance, it’s possible to view that progression as one arc; a continuation of what George Packer described as America’s post Cold War “high water mark.” No one really believes that though.
The invasion of Iraq is now near universally condemned. The war in Afghanistan, which is now on its fourth administration, is a punch line. America came as close to not having a peaceful transfer of power as it’s come since the Civil War. Blood and soil nationalism, “the drink of political losers” is alive and well in America in a way it’s never been in my lifetime. Our citizens stormed the Capitol in hopes that a revolution would follow.
The fall is upon us.
The fall, of course, is only as real as the notional pedestal anything so large and systemic as a country can be set upon. Which is to say not real at all. The narrative is worth a discussion though.
Let’s start with the zenith.
My earliest memory was my father telling me that the United States had just beaten the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. It was an anchor point in the narrative that we were winning an active contest with our great adversary.
A decade earlier we’d won the moon race. Four decades before we’d defeated fascism and won WWII. On and off for the previous 30 years we’d been fighting wars to contain the great beast of communism. By the 80’s, we’d gotten so used to living as a national counter to an ominous evil empire that it was no longer really about any regional strategy.
In our war movies we fought vague bad guys. It wasn’t Russians the Wolverines bested in Red Dawn. Or was it? It doesn’t really matter. What does is that Europe decided to “sit this one out.” Power’s Booth’s downed pilot told us so. Does anyone really know where those MiGs Maverick shot down were from? In Patriot Games, Jack Ryan fought…the IRA?
Like I said, who didn’t matter really. What mattered was American Awesomeness. Europe had long since resigned to an identity of never repeating fascism again, diving into the makings of a technocratic pristine liberal palace. If the winning was to be done, it was up to America. We hammer a Middle Eastern dictator in a war that lasts two weeks, the world lines up behind us. And the Russians quit.
We’d won. Without even fighting them. With our six trips to the moon, Jimmy Craig’s 39 saves and round six of Rocky v Drago, we’d won.
So much winning.
It’s also possible to think about this differently. And not so pessimistically as my lead in implies. America did win the Cold War. We had a global adversary. And they collapsed. And we didn’t. We’ll never know how much impact our past foreign policy of containment might have had on the Soviet Union. It’s a sort of religion to argue about it. Another perspective is simply that the U.S. model of liberal democracy open markets and free trade was simply more viable in a future of globalization and technologically advanced global supply chains.
The world was moving towards one of integrated competition. And a communist empire that could only integrate by annexing territory directly had no future. A liberal economic power that adapts to dominate global supply chains, that’s the one that had a chance. And that was us. Post 1978, it was also China. It’s possible to think of a counterfactual in which the Soviet Union took on the sorts of reforms China did four decades into their communist arc. Imagine a Soviet “opening” at the end of the Eisenhower administration. And imagine where the USSR would be now. We wouldn’t be friends. But it might have been a little more fun to play a game with an adversary where the stakes weren’t mutually assured destruction. We’ll never know though.
What we do know that is that history did not, in fact, end in the last decade of the 20th century. It went on. And somewhere between the time we were realizing that it wasn’t going to end and that the continuation of time would survive, U.S. foreign policy lumbered on…with my career as a naval officer in tow.
More Packer.
"Think of the late ’90s. Microsoft, Tomahawks, Titanic. Our economy, military, and culture were unchallenged, apparently unchallengeable. It hasn’t been like that before or since. Those years were, you could say, the high-water mark of the American century. But there was no Clinton doctrine. There was barely a Clinton foreign policy, other than the president’s boundless confidence in globalization. Everything seemed to be getting better on its own—and if people were killing one another in eastern Congo or the southern Balkans, what did it really have to do with America?”
Into the gap we stumbled. A gap that would be filled with wars against non-state actors, economic crisis and irrefutable truth that nation building by force was a losing strategy. And then the eventual reckoning that none of the American people would wake up to the belief that the government of the United States of America or its foreign or domestic policy weren’t capable of doing anything to forward the interests of Americans.
And then the Pandemic ended the gap.
The sleeping giant may have awakened again. Technologically enabled value chains saved the world. America affirmed it was a delusional place, incapable of absorbing any reality that could allow it to establish any sort of technocratic bureaucracy to adhere to a national pandemic response without lighting itself on fire. But it could still do that thing that it could always do; ship product. And we’re alive again.
Bruno Macaes History Has Begun feels prophetic.
The window has opened for a second surge of an American New Deal. The Reagan economic run is over. The political system of Johnson v Nixon is over. The American Century has ended.
Long live the American Century.
This topic needs some more attention. I’ll be hosting a conversation on this topic on April 20th. For info…click the button below.