Most Americans see their nation as peace-loving, a reluctant warrior that fights only when fanatical enemies force it to. But measured by actions, the United States is a warrior nation more than any other major modern power.
Since 1898, it has entered 10 conflicts most people recognize as wars, but only twice–in World War II and the recent Afghanistan war–in response to major attacks on its people or forces.
In other cases, provocations preceded war, but the U.S. initiated full-scale action. Hundreds of other military actions have gone forward without the “war” moniker but often at great cost, as with the blast that killed 241 service personnel in Beirut in 1983 amid Lebanon’s civil war. The reluctant warrior has been busy.
Presidents often invoke that reluctance on the cusp of war. As intervention in Vietnam escalated, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that “we seek no wider war”–one presumably forced on him by the enemy. President Bush has insisted that it was up to Saddam Hussein whether war occurred this month–a disingenuous stance, some observers say, given Bush’s posture, America’s power, and the president’s claim that events are moved by “the hand of a just and faithful God,” in which case no one is in control.
But it makes sense: Only by seeing themselves as reluctant warriors can Americans enjoy war’s secret thrills and benefits.
All cultures are ambivalent about war, but each in its own way.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead once captured how ambivalence plays out for Americans. They see aggressive action on their part “as response rather than as primary behavior,” she explained. “The chip on the shoulder”–a phrase still heard in debates about war–“is the folk expression of this set of attitudes. In many parts of America small boys deliberately put chips on their shoulders and walk about daring anyone to knock the chips off.” This boyish folkway exemplifies “a special American form of aggressiveness,” one “so unsure of itself that it has to be proved.”
Mead wrote just after Pearl Harbor, explaining how Japan’s attack justified American entry–which she supported–into World War II. If she were alive today, she would see the chip on Bush’s shoulder–the no-fly zones, the air strikes on Iraqi installations, the insistence that Hussein makes the decisions, the blame laid on feckless allies, the search for the suitable provocation to American action.
Other measures underline America’s warrior status: its overwhelming military power, first developed in response not to enemy threats but to America’s imperial ambitions, and the treasure poured into maintaining it. Americans also devote enormous imaginative energy to war. War defines how most Americans see their history, regardless of how they may differ over any particular war.
Most look back on World War II as the nation’s finest hour.
They define the nation’s significance and greatness in terms of its wars–usually seen in positive terms, although less so with Korea and Vietnam. Many of our public spaces, memorials, and museums are defined by war or its offshoots, with Washington a virtual theme park of war. Whether visitors’ responses to those sites are celebratory, somber or merely curious, they uphold the sense that war has defined America.
Few Americans love war in some bloodthirsty way. Even–or perhaps especially–veterans of war offer somber or angry reflections on war, and few see a providential God at work–presidential God-talk is largely for home-front consumption. But Americans yearn for what war presumably brings if not for war itself–the power and pride it may yield, or what William James identified nearly a century ago as “the moral equivalent of war.” Americans seek to harness to other purposes the energy, resources or unity that war entails.
Our politics have reflected that yearning. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt, facing the Great Depression, promised “to wage a war against the emergency” with “the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Johnson declared wars on so many things–poverty, disease, crime, the communist Vietnamese–that it became hard to keep them straight. Richard Nixon declared wars on cancer, “smut” and many domestic “enemies,” and every president from Ronald Reagan on has declared “war on drugs.” Others have declared war on AIDS, breast cancer, abortion, smoking, illiteracy and other phenomena. When not actually at war–sometimes even when we are–we are usually at war metaphorically.
Often that means “war” with each other–those presumably responsible for a problem. The “war on drugs” became a war on “Everyone who uses drugs. Everyone who sells drugs. And everyone who looks the other way,” announced President George H.W. Bush in 1989. Foes of abortion liken it to the Holocaust and liken those who practice or perform abortion to war criminals. As the wars on drugs and crime intensified, their difference from real war faded. By 2000, 2 million people were behind bars in the U.S.–an incarceration rate greater than Russia’s and up to 10 times that of Western Europe–filling America’s prisoner of war camps in its wars with segments of its own population. Meanwhile, conflicts over gender, sexuality, race and other matters were dubbed “culture wars,” or as Pat Buchanan declared at the 1992 GOP convention, “war . . . for the soul of America.”
Our imaginative fascination with war has an insidious logic. If the “moral equivalent of war” is good, why settle for the equivalent? Why not the real thing, war that will unify Americans rather than pit them against each other? If war is the storehouse of American imagination and identity, should it not be restocked from time to time, lest we forget its treasures? To be sure, those treasures are rarely apparent at first, since war yields rancor and conflict at home, as even World War II did. But in time most Americans focus on the good, or at least the heroism, that war yields.
How have they reconciled their self-image as pacific with their embrace of so much that pertains to war? Success in avoiding war’s destruction has helped. War has occurred far from their shores through ever-advancing technologies of antiseptic cleanliness, at least for Americans, and recently with welcome brevity. Even in World War II, the death by accident, disease and combat of 400,000 American service personnel paled in comparison to what other major combatants experienced, and Roosevelt was intent on developing weapons like the atomic bomb that would minimize American losses. Resistance to such losses has been one way Americans express their reluctance to go to war–and their insistence that others bear its costs.
Did 9/11 change those attitudes and provide Bush the traction to go to war? Perhaps: Loss made many Americans want revenge and drastic measures to protect them. But resistance to loss in war is so ingrained in our history that no wholesale change should be assumed. Americans still want their wars quick, and for them, cheap.
