What Should the US Do about Military Conflicts Abroad?
Let's ask Alexander Hamilton and John Adams!
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In our founding moment, the United States government found itself called upon, by violently opposed forces within the U.S. citizenry, to do the right thing in a conflict between two violently opposed forces abroad. Those forces were France and Britain and the radically differing civilizational impulses and models for the future that they seemed to represent. Revolutionary France had a motto proclaiming liberty and equality, influenced by our Declaration of Independence; it also had a program of bloodthirsty, indiscriminate, kangaroo-court murder in reaction to oppressions carried out for generations by the ruling classes of Europe. Britain proclaimed an orderly, balanced constitutionalism, which had inspired the U.S. Constitution, even as it operated a police state that branded any and all dissent sedition and engaged in a violent crackdown on speech and protest.
Pro-French Americans, who made up a rising opposition party, sometimes waved away and sometimes fetishized the Terror while insisting on the world-changing capabilities of the liberty-and-equality aspect of the French Revolution. Pro-British Americans, represented by the first and second presidents’ majority party, branded their opponents anarchists and demagogues, emphasized the orderly nature of British constitutional monarchism and, far from waving away British crackdown, followed it: President Washington called for shutting down opposition groups; President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
This conflict over foreign identifications within a fiercely divided American electorate was driven on both sides by the kind of world-historical moral imperatives that not only justify assertive public action but require it. Riots, burnings in effigy, and beatings were part and parcel of actions taken by citizens on all sides. With outright war between England and France, Washington declared U.S. neutrality, which the pro-France Americans viewed, with reason, as a pro-British move. Peace efforts had some effect on that outbreak, but by the late 1790’s, England and France were spoiling for the even bigger war that would start in earnest in the next decade, and the Adams administration was taking any criticism of its negative posture toward France as foreign-influenced treason. Crackdowns on protestors and newspaper editors were part and parcel of U.S. government reaction to unrest.
An overwhelming difference between that time and this, of course, is that back then the American national government had no history of relations with countries overseas, beyond issues left over from the American Revolution, which had been fought when no national government existed. The national government had engaged and would continue to engage, militarily and diplomatically, with a multitude of nations when conquering territory it considered within its borders, but precisely because it considered that territory within its borders, it didn’t count relationships with Native people as foreign or international.
Nowadays, it can seem that we have nothing but a history of relations with countries overseas. A bad history, some will say, and fair enough: its origins lie in our blatant expansionism in the early 20th Century. The long story is complicated morally by “making the world safe for democracy,” by the all-importance of U.S. involvement in World War II, by the Cold War and Vietnam and the War on Terror, etc., etc.
. . .
But forget that long and complicated story—if only for a moment. As I leap from the first days of our national government’s overseas engagement, back when we hadn’t had any such engagement before, to now, when we’ve had so much of it that there’s no question that along with having done some good, we’ve committed enough crimes and atrocities to fill a lot of books, what I’m interested in is the American citizenry’s tendency toward stark division, on grounds of moral absolutism, via a strong emotional and philosophical identification with one foreign combatant or another—a division over what America’s foreign role ought to be, or really what it must be, if the higher goods are to be served, the goods that America, as epitome and leader of what used to be called the West, essentially exists in this line of thinking to serve.
Today, the perennial demand that the U.S. do, at long last, the right thing seems to be driven, at least in part, by a sense that the U.S. needs to atone for a long history of violence against millions of people around the world. There’s no doubt, for horrible example, that a combination of flagrant antisemitism, cultural and intellectual sympathies with Germany, and our own bents toward fascism led to U.S. refusal in the 1930’s and ‘40’s to accept the Jews of Europe into this country. The U.S. thereby directly enabled the staggering scope of the mass murder that was the Holocaust.
The U.S. then became the first government to formally recognize the state of Israel. All qualifications duly noted, that act has justly been framed as a stab at participation, indeed leadership, in some degree of compensatory justice, but it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make Israel see the U.S. as a benefactor to be heeded. The attitude of Israel’s current government is to regret following U.S. advice regarding efforts at peace in the Mideast and to resist, with umbrage, any caution or restraint the U.S. might be hoping to place on its support for Israel’s military decisions.
Many American supporters of Israel view the situation similarly. Given the thousands-year history of the persecution of the Jews, the U.S. has—not an immediate interest in—but an exceptional moral obligation to give complete and unwavering support to Israel under virtually any circumstances. Where U.S pro-Palestinian protestors arraign the U.S. for supporting Israel, many Israel supporters take the position that U.S. support is all too precarious, all too limited, mealy-mouthed, hesitant; also that Americans who disagree with current levels of support pose an immediate danger to American Jews and to our country’s values.
The issue is thus framed as a last battle between civilization itself and the terrorists who would destroy it. In that framing, if the U.S qualifies its support for Israel in any way, the U.S. renounces the fundamental obligations to history inherent in being the U.S.
A demand for American national atonement also drives much of the pro-Palestinian protest. In this view, having become the first country to recognize Israel amounts to a benchmark atrocity, which can be added to a long list of white-supremacist, imperialist, anti-indigenous crimes that have always defined the United States’ existence at home and around the world. Because that impression might be pretty well borne out in the role of racism and regional contest in U.S. support not only for establishing but also for perpetuating, over many years, a Jewish state in Palestine—to say nothing of the Christian right’s excessive influence on that policy, based on what’s taken to be a mission from God—the only legitimate role the U.S. can play, in this view, is to aid in enabling freedom for all of the Palestinian people and, in renouncing support for Israel, helo put an end to the generations of oppression now taken to a new climax in Israel’s killing and destruction in Gaza.
At this point, you might think I’m trying to sort out the rights and wrongs of Israel and Palestine. That’s how everything looks now, amid a grisly humanitarian crisis in Gaza brought about by Israel in response to the grisly massacre of Israelis by Hamas. And feel free to yell at me—from both sides—for both-sides-ing and to fill me in on “the historical context.” That’s the last thing I’ll ever worry about. It seems to me that historical context shows that for thousands of years, everywhere in the world, both sides have been both-sides-ing everything quite effectively without any help from me. When historical context is put to the use of philosophizing disgrace, it's something other than historical context.
I’m writing about my country.
Which is also, for many of you, your country. About the fact that as early as our first presidential administrations—long before we had any string of failures and outrages that some citizens might have thought we needed to atone for; long before we even had any power to affect global outcomes—Americans went into a crisis of division over U.S. policy abroad, a crisis framed not as a disagreement over which policy would better serve U.S. interests but over which foreign entity, and which model for the future of the world, our supposedly essential nature supposedly requires us to identify with.
And I think we’re weird like that.
And that the weirdness might have been and might be part of the problem, not the solution.
That’s all.
(. . . I know I never got to Adams and Hamilton and how the pro-Brit-vs.-pro-French conflict of the 1790’s came to an end. I will another time! Because unlike this post, it’s funny.)
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Further Reading
On the first war the U.S. national government ever actually fought, see my book Autumn of the Black Snake.
On the U.S. and the fate of the European Jews, see the documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust.”
In 1984, The Washington Post reported on the Christian right and Israel (paywalled, sorry).
It occurs to me that what you're saying about American belief in a divinely ordained nature doesn't reflect well on Herman Husband either.