THROUGHOUT OUR HISTORY, presidents have had to cajole the public to send troops overseas. Now with the Cold War over, what kind of foreign involvement is acceptable for the sole superpower?
Once again an American president has sent American soldiers in harm’s way despite a constant, historic reluctance of the American people to do so. Almost every president in this century has had to confront the obligations of upholding the idea of democracy around the globe for diplomatic, strategic, economic and even moral reasons.
And each time, in each decade, the president has been perplexed by the potential political hostility of a nation that only once in its history has universally accepted the gauntlet of warfare.
Whether it was Lincoln preserving the union, Wilson making the world safe for democracy, Roosevelt opposing fascism, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson struggling with the threat of creeping communism, Americans have had to be lobbied, persuaded and convinced that the defense of freedom around the world was in fact a defense of their freedom. The argument rarely prevailed. In Southeast Asia it failed totally. Truman and Johnson were denied re-election opportunities because of Korea and Vietnam.
Now that President Clinton has again sent an armed force, a peacekeeping force, to foreign soil, his likely opponent in the 1996 election is the spokesman for all those who see no reason for any American soldier to die in the former Yugoslavia. Sen. Bob Dole will not support Clinton’s decision, only the American servicemen and women who will execute it. Dole is less cynical than many of his colleagues whose collective statements can be summed up as: What’s in it for us?
In the face of this attitude, what kind of foreign involvement can be acceptable now that the Cold War is over, now that there is only one superpower with the ability to intervene for the sake of freedom or humanity?
The fact that the warriors in the American armed forces have been all volunteers since 1972, ostensibly willing to accept whatever risks they are assigned by their commander in chief seems to have not moved the American public an inch from its isolationist posture.
The volunteer Army, some say, is one reason for the resistance to foreign escapades by the military. If the draft still existed, the argument goes, any military experience would be a shared, common and acceptable experience. The fact that the draft was in force during the Vietnam War is rebutted by the argument that it was not egalitarian, that the wealthy, the educated and almost anyone in college avoided it and left the dying to the poor and, disproportionately, to the black. It is hard to assess any of the arguments regarding Vietnam without suspicion since hypocrisy was the national position from the White House to the campus. The only statement of clarity, and honesty in that era came from Muhammad Ali: “I got no quarrel with them Viet Congs.”
The Vietnam draft question should, in fact, make the volunteer Army’s involvement less problematical for American society. If, as in the case of Vietnam, ideology became a public apology for self-preservation, there is no need today to fret about serving in a war we can’t win or in a place where we shouldn’t be. There is no draft to threaten either the very rich or very poor. To suggest that every American would accept the risk of dangerous overseas forays as long as everyone shared the potential cost ignores the historic fragmentation of this country from its very beginning. Not everyone in America of the 1770s wanted to fight the English. The draft riots of 1863 weren’t exactly a mandate for Mr. Lincoln’s conscription laws.
The argument that the draft provided unified support for military excursions has no basis, yet the absence of universal military requirements oddly does not assuage the opposition to them. If it is truly a question of shedding American blood on behalf of Haitians, Somalians or Bosnians, perhaps the structure of the American military is not suitable for the task.
Perhaps the perception of the American armed forces, at least the one that has been conveyed in television recruiting commercials for the past 20 years, is that the Army, Navy and Air Force are places to learn about computers and earn college tuition credits. Only the Marines consistently brandish swords and implicitly guarantee combat in their television pitches.
But Marines are hardly suitable for carrying out a policeman’s job or serving as a peacekeeping force in places that weren’t ready for peace. That was tried disastrously in 1982 in Beirut.
On the surface it would seem that the American people wisely and gratefully abhor war more than other societies, nations, ethnic and religious groups. Or it may be that the unique blend of all those groups in a single country, isolated by two oceans and a pair of docile, friendly neighbors has never embraced any logic that demands sending Americans under arms to other parts of the world. It is doubtful that American parents have any more love for theirs sons and daughters than the Slavs of Europe, the Muslims of the Middle East or the various tribes of the newly conceived nations of Africa.
But Americans have not lived a thousand years with the constant crisscrossing of armies over their land or the perennial threats of a jihad or pogrom or demand for Lebensraum, ethnic cleansing or whatever else the massacre of people has been called throughout history.
Perhaps the very nature of the American peoples, who fled from all the anarchy and slaughter of their homelands, provided the basis for this reluctance, abhorrence of military involvement. And the same mix of nationalities often made it impossible to gain a political consensus since the American involvement on behalf of one nation inevitably was politically repugnant to the refugees of another. That was clearly the case in World War I where it seemed the only reason for sending doughboys to the trenches of France was our linguistic ties to England. Not only were the second and third generation German-Americans actively united against our involvement, there was another loud and angry segment of Americans who had no love of the British.
Those sentiments echoed through the early days of World War II preventing Franklin Roosevelt from going to the aid of Great Britain as early as he would have liked. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the American nation into a realization that whatever the cost it would have to go to war.
Despite this constant opposition to intervention there is another side to the America psyche that all presidents have considered as they plotted their foreign adventures: Once involved, Americans rally around the flag. Or, at least like Bob Dole, they rally around the troops. Or, at least, they do most of the time.
Vietnam was a cruel and painful exception, and Korean veterans remain bitter to this day about the absence of public adulation they saw their older brothers and fathers receive at the end of WWII.
But the recent adventure of flier Soctt O’Grady in Bosnia churned up the collective national pride without any Senate investigations as to why he was flying where he was flying. Despite an intense debate over the prospect of an all-out ground war in Iraq, America rallied around Desert Storm, and the relatively bloodless resolution even lent a temporary euphoria to George Bush’s White House.
American presidents have sent troops to a lot of places that the American public didn’t understand. Mexico, China, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Lebanon, Grenada, Haiti, Panama.
And there was always some strawman or specter of evil to justify the action. Usually, there was some way to delineate the evil as a threat to American freedom or sovereignty or oil.
The Kaiser, or Hitler, or Japan, or Mao, or the Soviet procession of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were all threats to the American way of life in the view of the Oval Office. There was always someone out there ready to take on and knock out democracy and its champion, the U.S.A.
Bill Clinton is the first president in history to govern an unchallenged superpower. There is no “evil empire” threatening the American way of life; he can’t very well unleash the Marines because of the trade deficit.
Proponents of the Bosnian expedition still argue the conflict could spread throughout Europe; that the American strategic interest is best served by ensuring a tranquil and prosperous Europe; that continuing disregard of the Bosnian conflict could give rise to new communist stirrings on the continent; and it is the right thing to do.
But opponents of this action cling to the old, but true axiom that failing to learn from history will force us to relive it, that nothing can be resolved by the use of American troops as peace enforcers on a limited basis, be it a year or three years. The presumed futility of the exercise, in light of Vietnam, Haiti and the Middle East may be more responsible for the continued opposition to foreign intervention than the risk of American life.
But it is certainly the pattern of world conflicts that can be expected in the next century, and the United States will be called on time after time to play the primary role in halting bloodshed in Asia, Africa, Europe and anywhere else nationalist or religious differences erupt.
Recent history indicates that America will never be able to impose a solution. That is discordant for a society that has prospered by insisting there is a solution to every problem and preferably a quick one.
That leaves American presidents with only one reasonable justification: it is the right thing to do. But it is not an argument that has ever been universally accepted. It is why American presidents in the past were forced to make these decisions unilaterally and sometimes pay the political price. It will very likely be that way in the future.
