A shorter version of this interview appeared as "David Hendrickson: We Need a 'New Internationlism': The Author and Professor in Conversation, by Patrick Lawrence, in The Nation, November 2, 2018. Below is the full interview, unabridged and unexpurgated.
Patrick Lawrence: A
wise friend called a few months ago to tell me of a book he was assigned to
review and thought I should read. When he told me the title, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the
Liberal Tradition, I ordered it immediately. Less than a chapter in, I knew
I wanted to include its author in this series of Q&A exchanges. When I
called David Hendrickson at Colorado College, where he professes, he asked a
few questions about ground rules and readily agreed.
Hendrickson
is a vigorous critic of U.S. foreign policy—our wars of adventure and
presumption of exceptionalist status, our indifference to international law,
the hollow invocations of American ideals, the hypocrisy and double standards.
What distinguishes Hendrickson’s thinking, and his new book, is the historical
ballast he brings to his argument. He gives full attention to the anti-imperial
tradition in U.S. history and traces the “liberal pluralism” (his term) he
favors as an alternative American stance back to Jefferson, Hamilton, and
others among the “founding fathers.” In our own best ideals do we find all we
need to alter course, he argues.
Andrew
Bacevich, the noted critic of American conduct abroad, first told me about
Hendrickson in a conversation some years ago. As the exchange with Hendrickson
proceeded I understood why: They both share a belief in the American past as
the key to a reconstructed future; they both evidence a conservative streak
open to “trans-partisan” collaborations to advance toward an alternative
foreign policy both view as urgently needed. If there is a better time to hear
from a writer from this perspective, I cannot think of when it might be.
Republic in Peril
completes a trilogy, the two previous volumes being Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (2003) and Union, Nation, or Empire: The American
Debate Over International Relations, 1789–1941. But in its critique of
contemporary events, the new book also marks a departure: He writes squarely in
the present tense this time, which makes this the liveliest of his books. Given
Hendrickson’s scholarly inclinations, he was refreshingly frank in his
assessments of the policies of recent presidents and hot-button questions such
as Ukraine, Syria, and the eastward advance of NATO.
We
spoke in a mid–Manhattan office lent to us for the occasion. As always, I thank
Michael Conway Garofalo for his careful work turning the audio recording into a
transcript.
Patrick Lawrence: One of the very instructive features
of the trilogy of books you’ve just finished is the taxonomy you provide—a
frame we can use to understand strands of American thinking on foreign policy.
The important three are internationalism, imperialism, and nationalism. Each
has a deep past, but let’s begin in the present tense.
Using your own nomenclature, how
would you describe the Trump administration’s foreign policy? Corollary
question: Do you distinguish between Trump and those around Trump? His foreign
policy minders, as I call them. I can’t place Trump.
David Hendrickson: He’s
an extreme nationalist tending towards imperialism, with a kind of
preternatural aversion to anything that smacks of internationalism. Trump’s
idea of internationalism is that it’s a sucker’s game. You’re always in danger
of getting played. Multilateralism, which is in most contexts synonymous with
internationalism, is a way by which the power impulse is moderated. It squints
toward principle rather than power, and hence Trump prefers negotiations that
occur in a bilateral setting, where the disparity in power is most likely to
redound to the advantage of the hegemon. He’s pretty clearly hostile to
traditional notions of internationalism.
As
to the distinction between Trump and his advisors, yes, one has to distinguish between
them because Trump is such an unusual character. It’s extremely disturbing that
he’s appointed characters like John Bolton [national security adviser] and Mike
Pompeo [secretary of state, formerly CIA director]. If there’s any figure in
national security policy that has been more dangerous in his recommendations than
John Bolton, I can’t think of him…. Uniformly in his choice of advisors, he’s
chosen people who are from the furthest reaches of the Republican Party in
terms of their national security thinking and are quite belligerent, quite
ready to use force….
As
I see the administration, you have a kind of big debate between Bolton and
Pompeo on the one hand and Mattis [James Mattis, defense secretary] on the
other, with Mattis representing the more cautious view with respect to the use
of force. “Mad Dog” Mattis is the last hope of the peaceniks. That’s our world.
PL: The liberal casting of Mattis as the
voice of reason does not sit well with me. All is relative.
DH: Military
leaders, typically, are somewhat conservative with regard to the initiation of
force. They are natively conservative and are conscious of the costs that war
may entail. Once engaged, I think as we’ve seen from both Afghanistan and Iraq,
they tend to be on the more hawkish side…. That said, I think it’s clearly been
the case that Mattis has stood behind the Iran agreement and has been a voice
of caution on North Korea.
PL: Fair enough.
DH: The
military also is kind of invested in this liturgy of threat inflation. We’re
not to look to any far-reaching changes in national strategy from Mattis….
PL: Where do you place Obama’s foreign
policy in the long story? I was interested to note, you don’t make much
distinction in the new book between Obama and the second Bush administration.
DH: I
begin the book with a long litany of the ways in which Obama represented
continuity with Bush. Certainly, it is striking that he was elected on an idea
that he would end the wars. I personally, and I think many others, were
impressed with the fact that he, practically alone among American politicians,
had been opposed to the Iraq War.
PL: They were impressed in Oslo, too. [Obama
won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.]
DH: Perhaps
a bit prematurely. [Laughs] Obama emerged as a kind of prisoner of the security
consensus—“The Blob” or “The Washington Playbook,” as he called it in his
interview with Jeffrey Goldberg [in The
Atlantic, April 2016]. Obama
typically was the more moderate voice in decisions on the use of force, but he,
too, appointed advisors who favored a more advanced stance, so he was
frequently alone in those deliberations and found himself trapped.
I
have a great regard for Obama. I think the contrast in character between him
and Trump is manifest and quite dispiriting. I think Obama was pacifically
inclined. But as I argue in the book, that a fellow so pacifically inclined
ended up using force as often as he did speaks to the entrenched character of
the Washington consensus. I was particularly disappointed about his decisions
in Libya, Syria, Ukraine. One would have thought, on the basis of his
opposition to the Iraq War that he would have opposed that strategy of
overthrow, but he fell right in with it.
PL: I sensed trouble the day [in December
2008] he announced that [Robert] Gates would remain as defense secretary. I
said, O. K., this isn’t going to be all that interesting.
DH: And when he appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
PL: Yes. But anyway, how do you identify
Obama’s primary error? To me, it has to do with means and ends. Obama tinkered
with the means of foreign policy—more drones, fewer direct interventions, a
glossier diplomacy, cautious engagement with adversaries, a very attenuated
multipolarity—but he left the ends of policy unexamined. Method, not objective.
That was Obama’s real mistake. What are your thoughts?
DH: That’s a reasonable way of putting
it. Certainly, there wasn’t any great reconsideration of the ends. He has a
different rationale for intervention in Libya and Syria than the Bush
administration had in its invasion of Iraq, one focused on humanitarian
intervention. But both sorts of intervention have catastrophically failed to
consider the consequences of state overthrow and what it means for the people
in those countries where the state is no more. They had this vision that
something good or better would inevitably follow the overthrow of dictators,
and, as we’ve seen, it’s catastrophe that follows. That’s a very lamentable
failure to anticipate the obvious consequences of obliterating these states.
I
would add, parenthetically, that Obama’s record in Syria is so often portrayed
as “nonintervention,” but that is a total misreading of what the United States
did. We facilitated the funneling of a huge amount of arms to various jihadist
groups, and most of those arms ended up the hands of people that are in
ideological complexion not that far from al–Qaeda.
PL: I was very refreshed to see how
forthrightly you addressed questions like that, Ukraine being another one.
DH: Ukraine
is a bit different.
PL: Oh, very, in some ways.
DH: But
that also is a total scandal from the standpoint of what liberal
internationalism is supposed to stand for. People who advocated the overthrow
of Yanukovich, [Viktor Yanukovich was deposed as president in February 2014]
clearly stood in violation of democratic norms. He was democratically elected
in an election that was reasonably fair, so they transgressed the most
fundamental article of faith in democratic constitutionalism, which is that the
transfer of power has to take place with elections. And there is a reason for
that. If you allow a mob—a large number of people gathered in a public
square—to dictate a change in government, in effect you’ve handed over the
reins of power to the people who are most vehement, most extreme. And that of
course elicited a reaction in the east…. It flows almost inevitably in
virtually any polity that if you have a transfer of power without elections,
you risk that division into extremes.
Now,
there are some circumstances in which that doesn’t take place, and I think most
people had in their mind the model of what happened in 1989, in which you did
have a kind of national uprising against corrupt governments and they fell away.
But that wasn’t the case in Ukraine. Everyone knew that that was a divided
society. All the elections they’d had since independence had been very closely
contested and had been divided between west and east. So it was extremely
irresponsible for the United States to go there and, in effect, promise our
support for that method of political change.
PL: Even on the West’s own terms—the E.U.’s
and emphatically Washington’s —Yanukovich wanted that agreement [an agreement
of association with the European Union]. The E.U. made the conditions
impossible. This is all on the record. There was one excellent Reuters correspondent
named Elizabeth Piper. She’s now in the London bureau. She had all this. He
[Yanukovich] wanted to do this [deal with the E.U.] but couldn’t because the
conditions were totally unrealistic. Putin came in with a $15 billion rescue
package, and he had to take it.
DH: And
of course taking that didn’t mean that the negotiations with the E.U. were at
an end.
PL: Well, the E.U. said it was one of the
conditions: no more economic and trade relations with Russia….
In any event, let’s go back one more
presidential term here at home, and we can move on to other topics. George W.
Bush’s first term seems to me one of the most fateful in our lifetimes. What is
your analysis of his administration, particularly in the context of his
father’s? How does it fit in the historical frame you’ve constructed?
DH: Bush
I [George H.W. Bush] was monumentally significant. He set out the basic
parameters of U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy at the end of the Cold
War. The diplomacy they conducted under the leadership of [Secretary of State] James
Baker, I felt, was very statesmanlike in bringing the Cold War in Europe to an
end. They made a set of assurances that the United States subsequently
abrogated with respect to the expansion of NATO.
The
great thing that he did, though, which really did set the tone as well as
establish a set of new problems for the United States, was his conduct in the
first Gulf War. That was hugely significant in creating America’s terrorism
problem in its modern form. That was the motivation—revenge—that animated Osama
bin Laden in the attacks of 9/11. I remember at that time thinking that surely
there would be some kind of consequence for this overwhelming use of U.S. force
against an Arab country, which was something that we had never done before. The
footprint of American military power in the greater Middle East was actually
quite limited during the Cold War…. It was only in 1980, with the development
of the Rapid Deployment Force and the Carter Doctrine, that you first began to
get a substantial military footprint, but it was primarily offshore.
To
use force in so overwhelming a fashion was a catastrophe for Iraq’s civilian
population—the destruction of the infrastructure, the bombing of an Arab capital,
all of what attended it. I think al–Qaeda and bin Laden were a kind of logical
consequence of that.
PL: I never understood it that way.
That’s interesting.
DH: Well,
people don’t actually go back and read the statements. They always say, “Oh, it
was that the United States established military bases in Saudi Arabia, which
contains the two holiest sites in Islam, that most enraged bin Laden.” But he [bin
Laden] said very clearly that it was what the United States did with those bases, its use of force.
He dwelled quite frequently on the number of Arabs who were killed in consequence
of that war. While Americans were high-fiving about this glorious military
triumph, it in effect created a new situation in our relations with the Arab
world and also led to an expansion of commitments that is subsequently
elaborated upon and entrenched by subsequent administrations. It’s important to
remember that in considering the significance of H.W.’s son.
PL: And so to George W.
DH: Clearly,
W. was a more dangerous character than his old man, and I think had a view of
the use of force that was much more reckless…. In its strategic doctrine, the George
W. Bush administration is undoubtedly much more dangerous. For the first time,
we get a set of strategic doctrines that really do squint at domination of the
international system: For the first time, we get a set of strategic doctrines
that really do squint at domination of the international system: an emphatic
assertion of U.S. military supremacy that would be so great that no one would
even think of contesting it; doctrines of preventive war, baldly violating the
UN Charter; the imposition of democracy by force, in defiance of the
traditional American doctrine; unilateralism, or indifference to the opinion of
allies and of the larger world; and, finally, the vast expansion of the
universal panopticon and the surveillance state.
Those
five doctrines, to me, really are different from those of the outlook of both
Bush I and Clinton. They point toward a much more revolutionary approach of the
United States in the world, and were adopted in the furnace of resentment
created by 9/11, which in certain respects has been revived by the Trump
administration.
Obama
was very reluctant to embrace those, but he was also reluctant to repudiate
them entirely. He was a kind of fellow traveler with regard to those doctrines….
In terms of the larger creed, there’s a lot of continuity there. This speaks to
your point about the failure of Obama to really give any kind of
reconsideration to the ends of foreign policy.
PL: Which I think is the most urgent way
to go at it….
Republic
in Peril concludes
a trilogy, but it seems apart from the other two at the same time. In the
first, you were a constitutional historian and a political scientist; in the
second, a historian writing with, as you put it, “a modicum of detachment.”
There’s a lot more of you in the new one, it seems to me, which I think is a
source of its exceptional power, its importance. If I have this right, what
prompted the shift?
DH: Those
two earlier books were written in more of an academic mode. In my dual role as
historian and political scientist, I’m kind of both and neither, in a sense. I
think the big thing that separates the two is that Republic in Peril is very much addressed to the present
predicaments of U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, all the central
arguments in my present work are drawn from those earlier works. There’s a lot
of anti-imperialism in them, but also a prolonged investigation of
internationalism, showing that it’s a fraud upon the word to identify that
peace-inducing philosophy with the Bush Doctrine.
In
those earlier books, particularly Union,
Nation or Empire, but also true of Peace
Pact as well, I was trying to diagnose the argument and help people
understand what it had been. I felt that there were a lot of aspects of that
traditional story that had been misunderstood or neglected, and it was
important to me to speak in an historical mode and often to give voice to
people with whom I might have disagreed but who stated one form of the great
argument I was trying to develop. I think it’s important for people to
understand past actors on their own terms, to try to recover what they thought
and open ourselves to the argument they had.
PL: Writing now, in Republic in Peril, you make frequent reference to a point of
departure 20 to 25 years ago. You’ve explained why you land there—it was the
H.W. administration. I want to put something to you about September 11, and why
I feel that was a decisive moment quite beyond the tragedy of it all.
It seemed to me afterward that the
true, deep injury that Americans suffered was psychological. We lost our
providential immunity that morning. We no longer stood outside history. We have
been, it seems to me, in a weakened position ever since. It awakened what
amounts now to an absolutely insatiable insistence on total security. In my
view, the American Century ended, with odd precision, at 9 o’clock that
morning. It lasted 103 years, taking my date from the Spanish-American War. I
think its ending was a deep psychological wound. What are your thoughts in
response to this framing?
DH: Well,
absolutely it was. It gave a huge boost to all of these mad doctrines of
domination and, as you put it, of absolute security. I’m not sure I would
accept the idea that it brought the American Century to a close. In a sense, it
introduces a set of doctrines and propensities that will almost certainly do
that, because it gave a great boost to these ideas of domination that can only
end badly, given the actual resources of the country.
So,
yes, it was a decisive moment. I remember being, as everyone was, in a state of
shock for many months thereafter, and mourning in particular the likely
consequence of it, which emerged very clearly with the strategic doctrine of
the Bush administration. Those things existed previously in the 1990s; there
was a group of people who wanted to overthrow Saddam, the Project for a New
American Century being the outstanding example. With the end of the Cold War,
Krauthammer [the late Charles Krauthammer] wrote this essay that ended saying,
If we’re looking for a new strategic doctrine, I suggest we go all the way and
aim at nothing short of universal dominion. [Laughs]
PL: Put that in print, did he?
DH: Yes,
he did. Those ambitions were announced the moment the Soviet Union withdrew
from Eastern Europe. This was before the Soviet Union had fallen apart. But
9/11 was the electric shock that gave those ideas a vivacity and power. The
great irony of the current moment with respect to this question of security is,
I think, almost invariably all of these projects put forward in the name of
ensuring the security of the United States do the opposite. That’s true with
respect not only to our military commitments, for reasons that I’d be happy to
get into, but I think most dramatically true with respect to these doctrines of
surveillance and cyber warfare.
The
United States, for several decades, basically took the view that if we could
penetrate the systems of other states and peoples, learn everything we could
about them, adopt a Stasi–like model for collecting intelligence, that we would
have a great leg up on other peoples. That was something that existed even
before the end of the Cold War. The security state always resisted efforts for
robust encryption because it would affect their ability to penetrate the
systems of others. So what we’ve had after all that is a realm in cyberspace
that’s extremely vulnerable, in which our attempt to penetrate others has
yielded an Internet infrastructure in which everyone is vulnerable, including
our basic infrastructure. That’s a perfect symbol for this larger phenomenon in
which the search for absolute security yields its opposite.
As
I say, I think that’s true with regard to our military commitments around the
world. That would be true even if we had defensive doctrines, because even
under those circumstances, if we position ourselves in the near-abroad of other
great powers and have a military doctrine resting on military supremacy, that
inevitably creates a stand-off in which one wrong, boneheaded move can lead to
disaster. I’ve been likening it recently to an investment strategy of selling
volatility—the basic point is that almost all the time that makes money, but
one day you get wiped out and the fund closes down. When you have a strategic
doctrine resting upon ideas of escalation dominance, you’re just a few steps
away from a serious disaster…. As you suggest, they’re driven by this notion
that it is possible to achieve absolute security. And it’s not, the big danger
being that absolute security for you means absolute insecurity for others.
That’s not a formula that I think can be successful over the long run.
PL: Let’s go back into the first two
volumes, as there’s so much rich, useful history in them. I was very taken with
your counter-conventional account of the founding. There was very little
national identity among the 13 states as late as the 1770s. Only the war drew
the states together, and afterward the threat of disunity was such that very
few on either side of the Atlantic gave the new nation much chance of survival.
This was so interesting to me. As you say in the book, it’s at odds with
conventional scholarship.
Hence the Constitution as a “peace
pact.” The implication is startling to consider: Do Americans need an enemy to
sustain unity? Can America exist without one? I’ve been asking this question
since the Cold War years and now discover the question is 250 years old. It’s
rather scary to contemplate that all along we’ve depended on enemies. Or am I
connecting dots that shouldn’t be there?
DH: Well,
I would be a bit skeptical about connecting those dots. To say that we need an
enemy today and that we’ve got a serious problem in the way in which we think
about our enemies is absolutely the case. We have a cultural tendency that,
partly arising from the manifold character of American power and its
munificence, has given us the luxury of indulging a cultural trait in which we
impute to these adversary states a set of characteristics that is really a
product of our perfervid imagination rather than something that arises from
careful consideration of what they’re about.
In
the present circumstance, the way Russia and Putin are spoken of is a classic
illustration of this. That has gone so far beyond the bounds of any reasoned
analysis, and in my view basically consists of the chattering classes reading
one another and inventing various speculative hypotheses that inevitably put
the adversary in the worst possible place, and then reinforcing one another
because that’s the only thing they even consider.
PL: I’m so glad you said that, David.
DH: I
just think that this is a very deleterious but quite manifest feature of our
contemporary situation.
It’s
also true, though, that states have security problems. Contrary to statements
often made that the United States didn’t have a security problem in the first
150 years of its existence, I try to argue that, in fact, it did. It wasn’t so
much from foreign states such as Great Britain, although that existed, but from
one another. The great security problem, as it’s framed in the Federalist
papers and which is ubiquitous in the writings of the period is this danger
that in the absence of establishing a union dedicated to peaceful methods for
resolving disputes, the states of the union—really, the two rival sections of
north and south, in particular—would find themselves in war.
I
came across this through an intensive study of the primary sources of the
period. You couldn’t read those sources without encountering that idea
repeatedly. It wasn’t a made-up view…. It was very real, and of course it did
ultimately end in the Civil War, the largest war of the 19th century
in Western civilization. Thinking about early American history in those terms
makes the federal union something much less than a nation. The nation is established
only with the outcome of the Civil War….
One
of the interesting features of this, therefore, is that because the United
States in effect was itself a kind of international system, a unique federative
system in world history, American thought about federalism has a kind of
quasi-international character.
PL: You’re going to my next question. The
“nation made of nations,” as you argue it is to be understood, considered it
had forged a new model in international relations. The balance of power among
individual states was to give way to the “unionist paradigm,” as you call it.
Nations were to act in concert. There was something larger than the
nation-state. The new United States was going to change Europe, which is to say
the world at that time.
Do we have to look back more than a
century before Wilson to find the root of America’s pretense to be the light of
the world?
DH: I
wouldn’t exaggerate the degree to which early thinkers believed that the United
States was going to be the agent of the world’s transformation. They did hold
out some expectation that the successful establishment of a federal union in
North America would provide a kind of template for others to do the same. It
was a very common idea in the 19th century that the successful
establishment of a federal union in North America had tremendous implications,
particularly for Europe. That’s what Europe needed. And that, in a sense, is
what Europe got. There was a lot of significance in the experience of the
United States for Europeans, which did dawn on them in the aftermath of the
Second World War and which provided a certain kind of model for this federative
system that has emerged in Europe over the last couple of generations.
PL: Think of Joschka Fisher’s phrase: the
United States of Europe. [Fischer spoke at Humboldt University in Berlin, May
2000.]
DH: Well,
yes. I think all Europeans who have thought carefully about this have
considered the American example. Now, I don’t say as a consequence of that, as
some people perhaps mistakenly did, that Europe’s solution consists of an exact
duplication of the institutional arrangements that were embodied in the federal
constitution. I don’t think that’s appropriate for Europe. The European Union
has to be considered on its own terms. It’s a very peculiar construction that
developed alongside the presence of the United States in the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. If you look at its distribution of powers and functions,
it’s quite the oddity in federal or international organization, because it has
a very attenuated development in the security function, that having been
performed largely by NATO. And it lacks the power to tax, which was fundamental
to the creation of the national government created by the U.S. Constitution.
But
in certain fundamental respects, it does resemble this early experiment in
federalism that was conducted in the United States. In particular, what
sustains it is a kind of fear of divorce or dissolution, and the memory that
Europe might go back to the system that produced 1914 or 1939. I share that
view. I think that’s an insight that the European peoples need to keep forever
in mind, and that they have to establish some basic bond of unity….
PL: I was struck by your forthright
observation that American foreign policy has always been a question of
aspiration rather than reality, and I hope you can reflect on that. It seems to
me that from the moment of formal independence, given we broke faith with the
French in the very act of settling up with the British, to be “policy as
aspiration.” Are there other examples of this in history? The ideals, the
principles we set as the fundament of our foreign policy were more to be
aspired to than they were realities.
DH: I
do say in Peace Pact that prior to
the formation of the Constitution, there was a set of objectives that had been
stated in theory but had not been realized in practice. But they were, in
principle, realizable; they weren’t utopian aspirations. If one considers the
overall record of early American foreign policy, there was a kind of realism
and moderation about a great many of those objectives that has been altogether
lacking today. They felt that the American experiment did hold lessons for
other people, and I continue to believe that, in the sense that if one
understands that experiment in terms of a set of ideas—that governments should
be representative, that they should respect individual rights, and so
forth—those are good pieces of advice.
At
the same time, one can only pursue those objectives within a context in which
it’s recognized that every people has to figure out those things for
themselves, that outsiders don’t have the right to impose them, certainly not by
force, on others. One conceives it more in terms of a sort of international
dialogue in which we kind of try to show that our system—or at least the ideals
underlying our system, not necessarily the reality of what it’s become—do hold
lessons for others, just as their experience may hold lessons for us. It does
follow that if we want to be a schoolmarm to the world we should also
occasionally listen to what our students have to say about things….
PL: If you could do a computer search of
the critical literature on our foreign policy, you would have a formidable
count of the word “betrayal.” We’ve betrayed our own allies; we’ve betrayed
ourselves. I wonder when you think that tendency first appeared. In Union, Nation or Empire, you explain
that imperialism was among the three possible ways to think of ourselves from
the beginning. But as you point out, “imperialism,” “nationalism,” and “internationalism”
weren’t actually used until sometime in the second half of the 19th century.
DH: Right,
all of those “–isms” are part of the development of thought, but the ideas
underlying them were there and go back much further.
PL: When do you date the first important
manifestation of the imperial impulse? Was it 1846, Polk’s war with Mexico?
Earlier, with the westward expansion? How should we think of this?
DH: The
American experience was always somewhat double-sided. While Americans were
deliberating on the formation of their union, from the first settlements there were
imperial aspects of that story in relation to the indigenous peoples. It’s also
true, and something forgotten in our retrospective constructions, that the
federal government was seen in many periods as a kind of moderating influence.
If one looks at the Indian policy of the national government from 1789 until
the 1830s, there were people in Washington reflecting the sensibilities of New
England that did want to elaborate a set of principles that would treat the
Indians of North America in a just fashion. Now, Jackson abrogated a lot of
those understandings with his Indian Removal Act.
PL: Jackson was as key a figure as we
have him down for, then?
DH: Oh,
I think so, yes. Certainly in his attitude toward the Native Americans: He
wanted to tear up all of those treaties made by the founding generation. And
there was a kind of inexorable character to expansion that made dispossession
an inherent part of the story. At the same time, if one looks at some of the
principles elaborated by people like Washington, there were sincere
humanitarian sentiments associated with that encounter that ought not be
forgotten…. There was an attempt, as in the case of the Five Civilized Tribes,
to impart various means of cultivating the soil, for example, that looked
toward the establishment of self-governing communities that would have a right
to determine their own affairs—where the founders understood that it was not
our responsibility to change their ways of life, or at least to do so only with
their consent and as a consequence of their seeing that this was a good way to
increase their population and to establish their rights….
Thinking
about the broader scope of American history, yes, it’s undoubtedly the case
that the Mexican War represents a kind of foretaste, in a way, of the Bush
Doctrine. It’s trumped up, for one thing. “American blood has been shed on
American soil.” It had a lot of similar aspects to the things the United States
has done of late. Of course, then the Spanish–American War and especially the
occupation of the Philippines, which led to a very bloody war and which really
also features a kind of demonization or dehumanization of the adversary that
bears some real resemblance to contemporary times.
I
wrote those chapters dealing with the Spanish–American War with the Iraq War of
2003 as a backstage, as it were. So much of the argument over imperialism in
the context of the Philippine Insurrection really does resemble the 21st
century.
PL: Have you read [Stephen] Kinzer’s
book, The True Flag?
DH: I
actually haven’t. I’ve read a lot of Kinzer over the years and of course I
admire him greatly.
PL: One of the striking things about that
book is the language in which people discussed what was at issue—empire,
democracy, are we imperialists?—right on the Senate floor…. I treasure that
book just for the quotations alone. Plain, direct speaking.
DH: My
scholarship is dedicated in many respects to recovering that very rich
language. I love the old anti-imperialists. They saw certain things very
clearly, and also understood that the ideals of the Republic and ideals that we
would associate with liberalism are not simply, although they can be, a cover
for imperialism and exploitation; more important, and more accurately, they are
a means of self-correction and of renovation, in the sense of pointing a path
towards a better future. That is often in danger of being lost in
reconstructions of the American past….
PL: The language is magnificent.
DH: Yes,
absolutely.
PL: And we don’t have that language
anymore. We lost it.
A follow-on question that’s related
to this word I seem to have developed a preoccupation with: “betrayal.” It’s
just not clear to me any longer, and it hasn’t been for a while, whether America
is capable of the principled internationalism we talk about in any serious
meaning of the term. We seem to have lost our ability to act with detachment
for the greater good. “R2P” and humanitarian intervention—these are excellent
ideas if you read them on paper, but I don’t find us reliable or trustworthy to
act according to our own principles. Are we capable of a meaningful
internationalism at this point in our story?
DH: Well,
probably not, but I hope so. You can’t ever give up hope about bringing the
country back to a better sense of itself, but certainly it is true that the
present indications are not auspicious in this regard…. A key element in doing
that is recovering a sense of our own limitations. I don’t find that to be such
a wild idea. All of us should have that sense about ourselves—that we are not
all-seeing, all-knowing, all-virtuous, and such…. It’s a kind of national
myopia. This idea that the United States has some right to determine upon the
future of other lands about which, almost inevitably, the American public knows
little or nothing, and where our elites bring a set of prejudices that are very
deeply held—that’s a dangerous state of affairs…. We need some self-reflection
and a greater sense of modesty about the inherent limitations of our knowledge
and the distorting ways in which our cultural filters lead us to interpret
what’s going on elsewhere in the world.
PL: I don’t think there’s a rational
argument for what we’re doing now. It doesn’t hold up to any argument based on
proper principles. It just doesn’t. I tend toward psychological explanations. Not
to the exclusion of politics and history, but I do tend toward the
psychological dimension…. I take it as an unconscious response to the pressing
arrival of various 21st century realities that we are simply not
ready to accept. In other words, I think we’re a frightened people.
DH: And
that is so paradoxical. Because by virtue of American power, which, though
diminishing is still quite real, as compared with other nations; and by virtue
of our geographic position, we should be the most secure people on earth.
PL: I’d like to consider Wilsonianism in
this context. Did the Wilsonian ideal ever achieve its purported meaning? If
you read Wilson himself on, say, the Philippines, it was cloaked imperialism
from the outset, one might at least argue. Empire abroad, democracy at home—one
or the other, but not both: That’s my possibly simplistic equation.
DH: I
think there’s a real truth to your simple formulation, that there’s a choice
between the two of those. Wilson himself is a protean figure, and there are
some valuable things in Wilson that need also to be recalled in addition to the
deleterious things. Certainly the most deleterious thing in Wilson is this
crusading impulse. One of the perverse arguments in my book with regard to
Wilson is that he’s not really the wild democratist and forerunner of the Bush
doctrine that he’s often taken to be….
PL: This is a subtler reading of Wilson
than most of us are familiar with. Please continue.
DH: People
fail to understand that his idea of collective action was hitched to the
preservation of the society of states and to the national independence of
states. He wanted the states to renounce the right to invade their neighbors,
the right of outsiders to determine the form of government that the people
themselves in a given territory had to figure out. He said so in his great
speech in Pueblo, right before he collapsed in 1919.
The
problematic element of Wilson’s vision was how those principles were to be
enforced. The great question is the role the United States should play—whether
the United States should be the principal enforcer of those principles across
the world. I don’t think so. I think that’s dangerous for the world and
dangerous for the enforcer, to have one power, in its infinite wisdom, make all
of those determinations…. And this is true of Franklin Roosevelt as well. If
you look back at the kind of international order Wilson and Roosevelt tried to
bring into being, it’s very different from the sort of aspirations that emerged
in the post–Cold War period, in which our purpose was the expansion of
democracy everywhere, with a somewhat more moderate version of that being
offered by Clinton and a very bellicose version of it being offered by Bush II….
PL: I want to go right into your
discussions of the imperialism inherent in the anti-imperialist tradition. It’s
wonderful to read about it, but I would like you to dilate for the sake of the
readers of this interview. I think it would be useful to talk about
humanitarian interventionism and R2P in this context. Are these our versions of
“the imperialism of the anti-imperial tradition”?
DH: R2P
would be an instance of that, especially as it’s been interpreted by
unilateralists. If you look at that document the Canadian commission produced,
it has a whole series of provisos and restrictions with regard to the use of
force that in fact we have violated when we have conducted these interventions.
That’s really a more careful document than this idea that exists in the popular
imagination that if there’s a chemical attack somewhere based on somewhat
suspect evidence, then of course we have a right to send the cruise missiles flying.
That’s something that I think is quite opposite in spirit to some of the things
that were urged in the original R2P document. [The Responsibility to
Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, was published in Ottawa,
2001.]
Now,
with regard to the imperialism of anti-imperialism, I try to show that if you
want to understand the overall dynamics of the debate over American foreign
policy, opposition to imperialism plays a fundamental role always, on both
sides of the argument. That is, justifications for the use of force are
invariably accompanied by argumentation against an imperialist Other.
PL: Is that what we’re talking about in
Ukraine? Is that our template?
DH: Well,
certainly. The advocates of a forward American stance and those who justify
what happened in Ukraine are always going on about Russian imperialism, just as
they go on about Chinese imperialism and Iranian imperialism. So the argument
on behalf of the use of force—and I do see the foreign policy debate in its
core as revolving around justifications for and against the use of force—tend
to feature very strong anti-imperialist sentiments. Of course, those opposing
force, in which camp I place myself, also point to the obvious features in
which the use of force encourages domination and those things associated with
imperialism. But I do think that we don’t understand it properly if we see the
advocates of imperialism making arguments for U.S. domination…. It’s almost
always advanced in the context of
opposition to imperialist practices of other states.
PL: Internal dissolution, the dominance
of foreign powers—these have been our driving fears ever since our
Machiavellian moment when the American Republic as a timeless ideal took
earthly form. And here we are in 2018: enemies everywhere, even if we have to
invent them; fearful we are collapsing from within. Are these two types of fear
simply incurable within us? They seem to be in the water we drink.
DH: The
internal dissolution question, I think, has changed dramatically over the
course of 200 years and assumed very different shapes. In the early period,
from the Articles of Confederation up until the Civil War, it was
overwhelmingly focused on the sectional problem. After the Civil War, people in
the 1890s—among the propertied classes, at least—feared some kind of class
warfare. And of course that was prominent in the 1930s. Over the last
generation in the United States, I think the fear of dissolution centers on the
loss of faith and a kind of national creed that we can all share as Americans:
the prospect of a dissolution into sort of rival identity groups.
Those
are all very different things, and not necessarily connected with foreign
policy, although they can be. One would have to look at the particular
historical circumstances….
PL: I was very pleased to see the lengthy
concluding chapter in Republic in Peril,
which you gave to an alternative foreign policy. It’s good, detailed material.
Can you summarize the thesis, and especially identify what you would say is the
starting point for such a project? You’re calling it a New Internationalism.
DH: Yes,
a New Internationalism. I don’t think we can’t just withdraw from the world.
Although, frankly, I do think that we need a retrenchment in our military
posture and doctrines vis-á-vis the
rest of the world. That’s the source of a lot of our problems. At the same
time, there are a wide variety of issues of a global character that we as
Americans, with other nations, need to address. I take seriously the danger of
climate change, what is happening to the world’s oceans, the danger of
pandemics. A theme that I didn’t elaborate as extensively as I ought to have
done is that international rivalry with other powers—with Russia, with China,
with Iran—actually inhibits cooperation on a lot of these problems. If you go
back to 2014 and look at all of those series of projects that we had with
Russia that were thrown out, canceled, eliminated, you get a sense of the price
to be paid for having situations of confrontation with these other powers…. That’s especially relevant to the Russophobia
now ascendant among the Democratic Party. They don’t appreciate how dangerous
their rhetoric against Russia is—which I regard as just wildly exaggerated.
PL: I hold the same view.
DH: A
New Internationalism, in my reckoning, means a return to the older
internationalism. By the older internationalism I mean ideas of international
concert that one can find in figures such as Wilson and Roosevelt, the latter
particularly…. I also mean a return to a pluralistic conception of international
order, in which there is a recognition that diversity of regime types is in
fact a feature of the political world that’s going to exist forever.
If
you make the change of other regimes the central purpose of your foreign
policy, you’re acting in a way Kant described as characteristic of the unjust
enemy. That is, you’re setting forth a principle that makes peace impossible
among the nations of the world. We have a tendency to regard all of our
adversaries as unjust enemies. Taking the Kantian definition of that seriously,
I think the ideas of the universal expansion of democracy and human rights as
found, for example, in the Bush Doctrine, really fits that definition quite
precisely.
The
other thing to be said about that is how totally counterproductive it’s been.
PL: Yes. There’s nothing to show for it.
DH: Some
of the things Putin has done with regard to shutting down NGOs is purely a
consequence of the confrontation that we’ve had with him. These policies—going
to Moscow and denouncing Putin, as [Senator Marco] Rubio threatened to do
during his presidential campaign; going to Beijing, and so on—in practice, that
has the effect opposite to what the promoters of human rights and democracy
want….
PL: To me, two questions are raised by
your conception of a New Internationalism. One: Are we able to renovate not only
our methods, but also our intentions, our purpose? It’s techne, the how, and telos,
the what, the purpose. Addressing the latter could hardly be more fundamental
to our identity, our idea of ourselves, and indeed our ideology, and it is a
very formidable thing to think about how we might do that.
DH: Absolutely.
PL: It’s almost just too big a task.
DH: Yes,
I agree with you that a reconsideration of that is fundamental. But there are
resources in the American tradition that I try to recover that do point to a better
direction. There are conceptions of internationalism even among the people that
are touted as the forerunners of today’s conception of internationalism, like
Wilson and Roosevelt. Some of the heresies of the Bush Doctrine, in particular,
are manifestly in contradiction with the earlier statements of the American
purpose. So as a patriotic duty, one might say, it would behoove us to inquire
into those elements of the American tradition that might affect an alteration
of what our telos actually is.
I
noted that in your preface of your book [Time
No Longer: Americans After the American Century, 2013], you mention a kind
of founding-father adoration as one of sins besetting us. I think differently
in that regard. I think there are great sources of philosophical instruction in
those writings—not only of the founders but also of the generation to follow,
as I seek to illuminate in these various historical works. You just have to
understand them in a certain way.
PL: I’m not at all in disagreement.
DH: There’s
a certain irony there, in that most academics who look back to the founders do
so to inculcate lessons that are opposite to the ones that I would draw. I have
noted that over the years…. As I say, I regard people like Jefferson and
Hamilton and Franklin and Madison as being great sources of instruction. But
they can’t tell us how to act in the present; their circumstances were totally
different.
PL: Like the Originalists. Their
essential argument is: “No, we must not think for ourselves. We’re not up to
that.” It’s very diminishing. This is my objection.
DH: One
of the sources of philosophical instruction that you get from Jefferson is that
that’s a mistake. Every generation has to work these things out for itself.
PL: Are our institutions capable of
self-correction such that a renovation is possible to our polity as currently
constituted? My answer is bitter, but not entirely so. I say no, but I award us
the capacity to be the makers of our own history. The nation founded by way of
great change can change greatly. In other words, I’m saying restoration is out
of the question. We have to start again.
No one is raised to live through a
moment of significant history, especially in postwar, consumerist, suburban
America. I think psychologically we’re not ready for it, but this is our moment
and we need to recognize it, the sooner the better.
DH: Certainly
our political institutions have become very corrupt and dysfunctional. It’s so
difficult to see how they can reform themselves. The role of money in
elections, just to take one example, is illustrative…. You also have a series
of blockages in our political institutions that make it very difficult for a
change to occur. That 60–vote rule in the Senate is basically a guarantee that
nothing fundamental can change.
PL: And we can’t afford that is my point.
DH: ….
It is true that the institutions of the world’s oldest republic have become encrusted
in a way that makes any sort of change very difficult to conceive of, much less
implement. However, it’s the responsibility of intellectuals to think about
what those sorts of changes might be, to try to describe them, and to hope that
they can make a persuasive case that will have some resonance in the larger
public sphere. That’s about all that we can do, and we have to hang onto our
hope that people will pay attention.
PL: Fair enough. My point is that the
very act of thinking anew, the very process I urge, would be an emancipation of
our imaginations in and of itself. In other words, we have to step outside of
the familiar. You properly resisted any suggestion that your thinking is
nostalgic…. We have to do things we haven’t done before. If we look at the
founders, they were original thinkers if they were anything. Maybe that’s the
first thing we can draw from them.
DH: I
tend to be a conservative, in the sense of believing that most fundamental
predicaments have been thought about previously. In politics, there are few
things that are entirely new under the sun. Obviously, there are new challenges
that the contemporary world faces that are in many ways quite unprecedented
with regard to things like climate change that require new ways of thinking
about institutions and how to address that. But in terms of the larger questions
of foreign policy, there’s a set of philosophical issues that come around all
the time and for which reading what past thinkers have thought is a useful way
of considering things anew. I don’t think that those two things are really
inconsistent with one another….
PL: As things are now, we do not seem at
all ready to grasp a considerable range of 21st century realities.
We’re a powerful nation, in a distinction I make, but not a strong nation. Can
you address that point?
DH: …
If one compares the kind of outlook that existed in Washington for the last 50
years with that of today, in terms of willingness of people on both sides of
the aisle to deal constructively with future problems, it’s momentously
lacking. One would contrast, for example, the success of the Social Security Commission,
which gathered in the 1980s and made a series of changes that improved the
long-term viability of that program—that would be very difficult to imagine
occurring in today’s Washington. If one contrasts, for example, the kinds of plans
that the Chinese are capable of, thinking in terms of decades with regard to
their future development, that kind of thing is really absent in Washington,
with the exception of military procurement and our military-industrial complex.
PL: All of what you’ve said leads me back
to this point we discussed earlier. We must understand the distinction between
addressing the means of policy and the purpose of policy, and as long as we
leave the latter unconsidered, we’re not really going to get anywhere…. I don’t
think our institutions as they have evolved—or let’s say evolved downward or in
a poor direction—are capable of opening the national discourse to a fundamental
reconsideration of purpose. What are
we doing in the world? Never mind how
we’re doing it. Do you share my concern here?
DH: Oh,
absolutely. The dominant media, at least, display no attention to the kind of
longer-range questions that you raise, as well as to those questions of
purpose. There’s a tremendous amount of discussion of foreign policy, but
tremendously little discussion of the fundamentals of foreign policy as they’re
reflected in these basic ideas of what our purpose should be.
In
the course of the Cold War and post–Cold War epoch, a very subtle but manifest
change has taken place in that regard. With respect to questions of war and
peace, the generation that fought the Second World War did so with the slogan
“Never Again.” Of course, that had been Wilson’s slogan… But in the last 70
years we’ve become rather acclimated to war and to a certain way of considering
our adversaries in the world that has made it very easy to forget that the
purpose of all of this really was the preservation of peace. It made us forget
a lot of the lessons inculcated in previous generations as to means of
achieving peace. For example, if one were to go back and look at American
discourse on international relations in the late 19th century and
into the 20th century, there was a great emphasis on the idea of
arbitration and the willingness of the United States to submit itself to
arbitral tribunals….
PL: And at this point we won’t even enter
into those institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, even when we
call upon the authority of those institutions.
DH: Certainly,
our willingness to participate in that has been radically attenuated…. So many of the major powers effectively remove
themselves from any kind of effective jurisdiction, so therefore war crimes
committed by major powers are not going to get passed upon by the International
Criminal Court. That violates the fundamental principle of law, to have it
applied to one group of powers but not to others.
The
other difficulty with it is that most conflicts, I think, need to be settled
politically. That is, if you don’t intend to utterly defeat the adversary on
the field of battle and to subject that adversary to victor’s terms, you have
to be prepared to enter into a negotiation. One of the central elements of such
a negotiation would be to waive punishment for certain crimes in the name of
peace. If one looks at a number of conflicts that have been settled through
negotiation, some kind of amnesty, some kind of refusal to press onward to the
ultimate demands of justice, is required.
So
when you substitute the judicial process for a political process, in effect
there’s the danger that the hands of diplomats will be tied and they will not
be able to offer those kinds of incentives—for example, the sending a despot to
a remote village—that would be necessary to convince a warlord to step down
from power. That’s a question of how one goes about diplomatic settlement that
I think the ICC can inhibit rather than encourage.
PL: In other words, negotiation has more
promise than adjudication, because adjudication is automatically going to
produce and unhappy side, and the underlying conflicts, whatever they are, are
not going to be resolved by a court decision.
DH: Putting
the point more broadly, a judicial process cannot bring to bear the necessary
resources that would be part of what we think of as a durable political
settlement….
PL: In the books, it’s good to read the
history of debates on foreign policy choices. But put this history against
Washington today: There is no debate! The Times
boasts, ritualistically every year, of our great “foreign policy consensus,”
the one area where Americans are in agreement. I see nothing whatsoever virtuous
about such a consensus. I wonder, what is the story of our loss of serious
debate? I’d love to hear you think out loud about that.
DH: Of
course there is a big debate if you read widely enough. There’s a wide range of
journals, news outlets, internet sites, that prosecute the debate over American
foreign policy. The difficulty is that it seems not to reach the precincts of
New York and Washington, such that the major media, the Congress, all of the
major institutions in American life take that consensus that you speak of for
granted and really allow nothing in the way of challenges to it.
One
of the most recent examples of this is the brouhaha over the supposed chemical
attack in Douma by Assad and his forces. [The alleged attack occurred outside
Damascus in April.] I followed that very closely and read, for example, the
journalism of Robert Fisk [of The Independent]
and others, who made it into Douma shortly after the attack. I don’t think there
has been any recognition in the major media in the United States that that the
story propagated by the White Helmets is very dubious and has a lot of holes in
it. It doesn’t make sense and is inconsistent with the eyewitness accounts of
many of the people who were interviewed. That contrary take on what happened in
Douma is the correct one—that it wasn’t used by Assad and his forces and the
event was, in effect, staged by the White Helmets. And yet, was that reported
on CNN? Was that reported in the Times
or the Post? I don’t think so.
When
I talk about that with some of my students and other people, they can be quite
critical. They’ve never heard of this. It’s the first time that they’ve heard
that the story put out by the intelligence agencies has a lot of problems with
it. That’s an isolated but representative example. It doesn’t speak so much to
the point you were raising about the absence of a kind of wide-ranging debate
in Washington, but it’s indicative of the general tenor.
I
will say there are people in Washington who have tried to break apart the
consensus and who have contributed to the debate. I think of people like Dennis
Kucinich or Ron Paul or Rand Paul or Barbara Lee or Tulsi Gabbard. There are a
number of figures out there who have gone against the grain. But you don’t get
much coverage of them, and you simply don’t get it on the media most people see
and read. CNN thinks the only people qualified to comment on American foreign
policy are retired generals or retired spies….
PL: Newspaper and broadcast editors are
among the most pernicious gatekeepers in this society, in my view. It is, in
some considerable measure, they who make possible the very narrow range of
debate in Washington. There’s the
related question of public apathy, which I find astonishing at this point.
DH: That
is, of course, a very complicated thing. There’s something about living in the
land of milk and honey where it is possible to simply live your life
indifferent to matters of the public weal…. Questions of foreign policy seem
rather remote to most people. The all–American way of war, in which we can bomb
from afar and ostensibly escape the consequences, also contributes to that
absence of a great pushback.
Having
said this, I think that there’s very considerable anxiety about our foreign
entanglements and our ongoing wars. There’s the opportunity for some kind of
pushback in this regard that would challenge this massive consensus that exists
between the political parties on those questions.
How
to bring that about? I don’t know. I’ve been speculating with the idea that
people on the right and the left need to reach across the aisle and overcome
some of their differences to form a peace party that would stand against both
the Republicans and the Democrats with regard to the warfare state. I do think
the majority of the public would actually be attracted to that.
PL: I agree.
DH: That
is, there’s a difference between the court and the country in the way in which
they think about these things. However, it is also true that barring some kind
of catastrophe abroad, the dominant concerns of the public tend to be rather
remote from these foreign policy quarrels….
PL: You raise an interesting point. Somebody
else I interviewed for this series said that until we have a major crisis there
is little to no prospect of serious change in the direction of American foreign
policy. Do you subscribe?
DH: That’s
probably true. That’s how big things change in history—in reaction to big
events, major crises. Over the last 10 years, the Iraq War, though it elicited
very considerable opposition from the public at the time, nevertheless did not
dislodge the great consensus among the elites. It’s almost as if failure in
Iraq reaffirmed the consensus for
them. I find it to be quite astonishing that that should be the case. I don’t
think that is the case with regard to the public, but for the elites I think
that generalization does hold.
The
military-industrial complex and the national security state have been very adept
at disguising the costs. The costs are disguised through debt. The costs are
disguised through our way of war. So, yes, given that state of affairs it is
difficult to see how major change would take place. Even if a candidate were
elected and spoke for a different foreign policy, there would be hell to pay in
terms of pushback from the prominent media and all of the associated interests
supporting the war state.
PL: Despair is too strong a word, David.
It’s not a place anyone wants to go.
DH: Oh,
it depends on which day of the week you find me. [Laughs] I still have some
hope. I’ll keep on hoping as long as anyone will hope with me.
PL: Again, our institutions do not seem
to have the necessary dynamism, or maybe elasticity, to manage what you and I
are in agreement needs to get done. The project seems to be, as you were
saying, to distance the American public from the consequences of our behavior
abroad.
Reflect back to the Nixon decision to
terminate the draft. That was taken as a victory for the antiwar movement, and
indeed, it was. But think about the consequences tumbling down the decades. It now
seems to be a departure point in a long project to remove the American public
from the conduct of American foreign policy.
DH: I
agree, and I’m not sure what the answer is—the reinstitution of the draft or
some form of national service. I have such high regard for Andrew Bacevich, and
he’s written about the implications of the all-volunteer force. I don’t think
we actually need a military establishment anywhere near the size of the one
that we have…. I tend to favor education rather than infantry training as a way
of producing good citizens and allowing them their own creativity.
The
bigger challenge is finding opportunity for them. The society we’ve constructed
and the set of incentives that are out there are uniformly deleterious to young
people. Look at health care, education, the enormous increases in student debt—the
society that they enter is one in which investments in their future have been
kind of systematically slighted. The Greatest Generation and the Boomers have
done a great job looking after themselves. I see a tremendous amount of
generational inequity in the way in which we do things. A great instance of
that is solving every riddle by adding extravagantly to the national debt,
which only defers the necessary choices to a more onerous time. But the prime
instance is the gargantuan cost of the security complex, which really is a
threat to their general welfare.
A Mississippi River of good intention
and altruism drains away into loss every day in this country.
END
