The myth of American Exceptionalism was made for people like me. I grew in a small town in the Midwest. My family were and are farmers who love the land they’ve worked for generations. I also grew up in the wake of the unprecedented prosperity the country felt during the Cold War, and I remember the feeling of winning when the Berlin Wall came down. Then, Desert Storm rolled over Iraq, and we fought in Bosnia. I was deep in the belief that the U.S. was pushing history in the right direction. 9/11 was a huge wakeup call for me, and the never ending wars that followed it opened my eyes. I saw the Vietnam conflict finally for the disaster and loss that it was. I read about how we bungled the Korean War. Then my eyes were opened to how the U.S. enacted regime change pretty much whenever it felt like it, and often those regime changes supported dictators instead of democracy. At the same time, friends and people I admire acted as if those things didn’t matter. Sure, we lost in Vietnam but Desert Storm and Bosnia had us right back as the world’s military leaders. As much as I would have preferred, I couldn’t go back to looking at the country as better than any other. Sure, the U.S. has done great things, but it has also done terrible things. As I learned more about U.S. history, I saw that American Exceptionalism is a myth. It’s what we tell ourselves to feel good about bombing civilians and enacting racist laws. But I could not explain to my friends why I viewed our country as simply a. That is until I read Andrew Bacevich’s After the Aftermath. In this book, Bacevich takes on the myth of American Exceptionalism. By exposing readers to the less altruistic parts of our national history, After the Aftermath shows us that American Exceptionalism is a narrative that requires ignoring parts of our national narrative that makes us uncomfortable.
TL;DR
After the Apocalypse takes on the myth of American Exceptionalism and doesn’t leave it standing. With historical incidents and a mostly clear eyed look at contemporary politics, Bacevich shows us that the U.S. hasn’t adapted to the changing world. A must read for national politicians, and recommended for political and historical aficionados.
From the Publisher
A bold and urgent perspective on how American foreign policy must change in response to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Limits of Power and The Age of Illusions.
The purpose of U.S. foreign policy has, at least theoretically, been to keep Americans safe. Yet as we confront a radically changed world, it has become indisputably clear that the terms of that policy have failed. Washington’s insistence that a market economy is compatible with the common good, its faith in the idea of the “West” and its “special relationships,” its conviction that global military primacy is the key to a stable and sustainable world order—these have brought endless wars and a succession of moral and material disasters.
In a bold reconception of America’s place in the world, informed by thinking from across the political spectrum, Andrew J. Bacevich—founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a bipartisan Washington think tank dedicated to foreign policy—lays down a new approach—one that is based on moral pragmatism, mutual coexistence, and war as a last resort. Confronting the threats of the future—accelerating climate change, a shift in the international balance of power, and the ascendance of information technology over brute weapons of war—his vision calls for nothing less than a profound overhaul of our understanding of national security.
Crucial and provocative, After the Apocalypse sets out new principles to guide the once-but-no-longer sole superpower as it navigates a transformed world.
Review: After the Apocalypse by Andrew Bacevich
Andrew Bacevich seeks to dispel the myth of American Exceptionalism in this short book. It reads fast but is packed with a lot of information and some good historical analysis. Bacevich begins the book discussing Marc Bloch and the book he wrote, L’étrange défaite or The Strange Defeat. Bloch’s purpose was to understand what happened to the legendary French army when the German Wehrmacht overwhelmed it. L’étrange défaite ultimately was about failure of leadership, and Bacevich seeks to do something similar in After the Aftermath. Mostly, he succeeds, but as he notes at the end of his letter to readers, this book is not for our time but for those who come after.
Bacevich interrogates the American notion that history is leading to a destination that looks similar to the U.S. To do this, he puts the slogans of American Exceptionalism against the realities of history. He accuses American’s of blindly accepting a ‘manufactured memory’ of American history. And he’s, of course, correct. Across party lines, the accepted vision of American history is rosy and childish because we continually ignore the sins of our past, the dangers of the present, and the changing future. One of the easiest examples to use of this is America and the Allied victory in World War 2. Then, the U.S. entered the Cold War and remained stuck in the moments after the Berlin Wall fell. In 1952, Harry S. Truman said, “Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” This is still the go-to Republican tactic because it’s effective and because we’re stuck in a myth where it’s us against the commies.
But Bacevich points out that it’s not just Republicans stuck in this myth. Joe Biden published an article “Why America Must Lead Again.” The underlying assumption of the article is that the American way is the right way, and that what America wants is good for the rest of the world. This is the established dogma in American political leadership regardless of party. But it is helping America anymore?
The Sins of America
Bacevich list three grave sins that America has committed: imperialism, militarism, and intentional killing of noncombatants. But sadly the majority of the U.S. do not view these as sins; it sees these three topics as part of America’s might. These three sins have become part of the national character whether we like it or not. Our country stations military bases around the world, engages in regime change when we feel it’s necessary, and exploits countries for their resources. Peace is something that the U.S. does not do; we’ve been involved in some conflict or other all across the globe under the pretense of protecting Americans for the majority of my life. Bacevich correctly asks whether sending troops overseas actually protects this country. If the empire shrunk and we closed some of the military bases around the globe, would the country be less safe?
Militarism is a funny thing in the U.S. Support the troops is a must repeat rally cry for any politicians, but very few consider supporting the troops by not sending them to fight. (Also, raising taxes to pay for veteran healthcare is somehow not considered supporting the troops.) Politicians and pundits who have never served, like Fucker Carlson, have no problem sending the troops they supposedly support off to fight in foreign lands. They call this patriotism when they don’t have a personal stake in the game. And militarism is a game to most Americans. We spend money on the biggest guns, tanks, aircraft, ships, drones, satellites, blah, blah, blah. See also the right wing nut jobs who dress up like soldiers to protest and bully. Looking accurately at history won’t solve this.
But Bacevich, I think, misses a big part of why militarism is what it is today. The military in the U.S. is a fighting force secondarily. Primarily, it is a jobs program that employees a large number of Americans. And what’s more, it’s a socially acceptable use of government money to create jobs. The same idiots who think funding infrastructure will lead to Soviet style breadlines also thinks we don’t spend enough on the military. The U.S. has the largest military budget on the planet with no other country coming close, and that means a large part of our economy is sustained by military spending. I say this as someone who works for a defense contractor. Changing militarism will be difficult simply because there’s so much money involved, and the public likes its new shiny toys.
Special Relationships
After the Aftermath dedicates a chapter to the U.S.’s special relationships with the U.K. and Israel. Bacevich argues that it’s time to demote these to relationships similar to other allied nations, such as France or Germany. It’s an interesting chapter, and I had already thought we needed to stop funding Israel’s weapons. To be clear, Israel has and should have the right and opportunity to buy weapons from the U.S. like any other allied country. However, I don’t think the American taxpayer should subsidize Israel’s military now that their economy is healthy, stable, and surpasses many of their neighbors. But when it came to removing the special from our relationship with the U.K., I didn’t buy it. At first.
But I reread that chapter, and reflecting upon it, I think Bacevich is correct. Our shared histories are only recently convivial. By necessity for World War 1, we had to be friends. Prior to that, we’d fought wars against each other. But why should an island off Europe’s coast be so important to us? Do we have outsize trade deals with each other? Not to my knowledge? Mostly, we have a special relationship because the U.K. political elite supports us in whatever military action we take. Bacevich makes a compelling argument that a special relationship with the two countries that have geographical borders with the U.S. makes more sense than for some island on the other side of an ocean. But ultimately Brexit itself convinced me that it’s time to focus on other nations. The U.K. rethought – disastrously, I might add – its relationship to its neighbors. Maybe the U.S. should do the same. We could focus on countries that border us, countries that we trade with, etc. A shared history that only recently, in the context of time, became friends doesn’t seem like a good idea. Bacevich won me over.
The Contemporary Social View of History
The penultimate chapter of the book disappointed me. The analysis preceding it was clear and nuanced. In my ARC, this chapter is called “The History That Matters,” and Bacevich takes this to mean the dominant social view of history in contemporary society. This began as quite the interesting dissection of what matters to society at different times and how revisionist history challenges the dominant narrative. He rightly notes that revisionism got put on steroids as Trump rose in political significance. The man who tried to resurrect America first and brought white supremacy out of the shadows caused a backlash of historical revisionism.
Bacevich targets the New York Time’s 1619 Project as the culprit. While in other parts of the book he does some decent analysis, when it comes to the 1619 Project, the analysis feels less objective and more “you kids get off my lawn.” What I mean is that he portrays the 1619 Project as something outside of academia, that it was a shock to academic historians. Except this is only partially correct because academic historians contributed to the project itself. In addition, many academic historians support the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project continues to be debated amongst historians, and it clearly upsets Mr. Bacevich that the Project seeks to begin the U.S.’s relevant past at 1619, the moment the first slaves arrived in the colonies. But he – like all 1619 detractors – doesn’t offer a reason why black Americans shouldn’t view it that way. The revolutionary war only freed white people from the British Empire. Slavery life didn’t change with U.S. independence. Whether slave under British rule or slave under American democracy, these people were still slaves. So, 1776 is a remarkable moment for white Americans, but it didn’t birth a new nation for black Americans in anything other than name.
His section on statue toppling is interesting, but again it lacks nuance. He compares statue toppling with Stalinist show trials, and that takes it entirely too far. This section makes it seem like he believes that removing statues whose purpose was to reinforce lost cause mythology in the Jim Crow era South is equivalent to ‘Maoist coerced self-criticism.’ While reasonable people can debate each statue removal on a case by case basis, the majority that were removed were traitors to the U.S. in the first place and do not belong in public squares. History exists even if the statues do not. To solidify this, he cites the ludicrous and widely disputed “Harper’s Letter.” Seeing Bacevich cite this without any scrutiny of the opposition bummed me out. Not once did he propose evidence to show how anyone was being silenced or harmed. Not once did he consider that it was not intellectual conformity but rather an intellectual consensus. It leans too close to traditional conservative fear of higher education as a place of indoctrination, and it is exactly in line with conservative rhetoric about climate change. To decry it as simple intellectual conformity assumes, in bad faith, that people disagree with it but are just going along due to peer pressure. Bacevitch fails to consider that people might actually agree with those views. As Bacevich sees climate change as a threat, I would have expected him to have more nuanced and generous views of his opposition. Because I’m sure conservatives call him out for saying that climate change is real.
Maybe this was just his contrarian nature coming out, but reading it just made me think it was lazy reasoning. I don’t think he did enough research and consideration to write a chapter on this. It was especially disheartening because just a few chapters earlier Bacevich did an excellent analysis of racism versus America’s claim to being freedom’s champion on earth. In this chapter, Bacevich looks with nuance at the roles black Americans played in the military, and he notes that we view ourselves as liberators during World War 2 without any irony that our military was segregated. The complexity and nuance of the earlier chapters disappears in this chapter, and it drags the rest of the book down. When I reread this book, I’ll be searching for more thinking as lazy like appeared in the penultimate chapter.
Action
After the Aftermath ends the book with suggestions for moving the U.S. in the direction Bacevich would like it to go. I enjoyed the conclusion chapter because it gave definable steps toward a future. Too often books like this criticize fail to suggest solutions. Even if I disagree, solutions tell me that the author has thought beyond the criticism. Bacevich suggests solid steps to move the nation into a more stable future, and I think his proposals are innovative with a step in the right direction. Other than his approach to NATO and the 1619 Project, I agree with his proposals. They are positive steps that move the country forward into the 21st century. Unfortunately, the political will does not exist in our country to enact these sane proposals.
Conclusion
Andrew Bacevich’s After the Apocalypse destroys the myth of American Exceptionalism. This book mostly succeeds by analyzing U.S. history with an eye towards the mistakes and misfortunes. After the Apocalypse should be read by U.S. politicians to break from a past that didn’t exist in order to prepare for a future that will.
After the Apocalypse by Andrew Bacevich is available from Henry Holt & Co. on June 8th, 2021.
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