August 2005 Newsletter

Passport Roundtable Response
 

John Lewis Gaddis

Yale University

The response to Surprise, Security, and the American Experience has been, well, a surprising experience. Having dashed a draft off hastily during the summer of 2002 for a set of lectures commemorating the first anniversary of September 11 th, then revised it in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, and finally had it published early in 2004, I’d not expected all that much from this little book. But the initial reviews were laudatory; President Bush read it and inflicted it on his staff; and a follow-up lecture has been blogged throughout the known universe, most conspicuously by a swimsuit model who poses provocatively next to the commentary she runs with a view to distracting young men from acts of terrorism they might otherwise commit. We are all, I’m sure, safer as a result.

It did not surprise me, however, that the response from my diplomatic history colleagues would be less enthusiastic. Lecturers must lump if audiences are to be kept awake, but this usually irritates splitters. Essays derived from lectures that cram centuries into short chapters tend to alarm them. And any book that has anything positive to say about the current administration in Washington risks absolutely infuriating them.

Knowing this, I found the Passport critiques a bit watery. They fret nervously about this or that, but fail to evaluate the principal argument of the book, which is that surprise attacks, to a surprising degree, have shaped American grand strategy. They confuse exposition with advocacy, assuming that if I discuss preemption I must be in favor of it. They resort to reductionism, insisting that American expansion, because aggressively pursued, cannot have been motivated by insecurity. And they fall into what appears to be an occupational hazard these days among American academics: the underestimation of leaders who are, as Winnie-the-Pooh might have said, Not Like Us. Let me say more about each of these points.

First, confusing exposition with advocacy. This shows up right away in the Immerman-Gramer essay with their observation that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that [Gaddis’s] goal is something (or several things) other than persuading his reader.” They go on to say that part of what drives my arguments “is a streak of iconoclasm and a desire to offer the most triumphalist narrative of the American empire.” Presumably anyone who is an iconoclast or a triumphalist would be trying to persuade readers, so I am at a loss to discern my own hidden motives here – the “something (or several other things)” apart from persuasion that I am trying to accomplish.

Regarding persuasion itself, guilty as charged – although I know few historians who try to be unpersuasive. As for “triumphalism,” I’ve never been quite sure what the word means. I’m tempted to define it as a term of opprobrium those who’ve lost arguments like to hurl at those who’ve won them – but that would no doubt also be seen as triumphalist. So I am at a loss here too.

The more serious problem comes when Immerman and Gramer say that my narrative “suffers from . . . a quasi-mythical ideation that celebrates the mobilization of fear rather than reassesses it,” and that it “interprets empire-building as the only ‘civilized’ response to attacks by a hostile world.” Puzzled by this, I checked page 13 of Surprise, where these offenses are alleged to have occurred. I found there no celebration but rather a generalization: that “for the United States, safety comes from enlarging, rather than from contracting, its sphere of responsibilities.” Whether this qualifies as a “quasi-mythical ideation” I’ve no idea, but I do know that the observation was intended to be neutral, rather like acknowledging the ubiquity of gravity. It was not meant to imply that enlargement – or gravity – is, or is not, a good thing.

Throughout the rest of their commentary, Immerman and Gramer continue to assume that whenever I describe something, I approve of it – a path they themselves certainly do not follow. One of their claims is that I “applaud without qualification” the 2002 Bush administration National Security Strategy statement, and that I “[do] not even acknowledge the possible politicization of the intelligence [on Iraq], as if such allegations do not warrant consideration.”

Well, Surprise is a short book, so it seems strange that Immerman and Gramer appear not to have made it to pages 95-107, where there is a detailed critique of the NSS and the way in which the strategy it articulates was put into effect in Iraq. I cite an “obvious failure” to gain multilateral consent, a military buildup that “was creating its own problems,” “alarming [intelligence] assessments . . . [that] seemed strained at the time and have proven since to be wrong,” a “coalition of the willing” that turned out to be “more of a joke than a reality,” and the fact that “within little more than a year and a half, the United States exchanged its long-established reputation as the principal stabilizer of the international system for one as its chief destabilizer.” Plain English can hardly be plainer.

Heiss too seems to have missed these pages, finding that I have neglected the implications of the Bush administration’s “apparent crusaderism, a subject that other historians have addressed quite fruitfully.” Rotter, in contrast, acknowledges my criticisms, but notes that what lingers after finishing the book is its “unabashed paean to military service and patriotism” and my “apparent admiration for the ‘grandness’ of Bush’s strategy.”

I make no apologies whatever for praising military service and patriotism. As for “grandness,” I think we ought to be able to acknowledge that the Bush strategy is indeed “grand” – in the sense of being ambitious, comprehensive, and a dramatic departure from what immediately preceded it – while still reserving judgment about its ultimate results. A careful reading of Surprise will show that that is what it tries to do.

A second claim that shows up in these commentaries, most clearly again in Immerman and Gramer, is that American expansionism could not have been both aggressive and motivated by fear. I ignore, they say, the conclusion of critics “that what drove U.S. expansion was greed, glory, racism, or efforts to forestall revolution.” Instead I insist that the American empire “was built out of fear – fear of British imperialists and Native Americans at first, second- and third-world communists later, and now, terrorists and tyrants around the globe.” And, they add, I fail to follow “the narrative of popular imagination, drawing analogies between Native American attacks on unsuspecting white settlers out West, the hidden-hand warfare of the Vietcong, and the rescue of Jessica Lynch to evoke the so-called captivity narrative.”

Guilty for sure on that last point, and it’s a good thing too, because had I attempted this linkage between Native Americans, the Vietcong, and Jessica Lynch, my readers would have been as puzzled as I as to what Immerman and Gramer mean for it to accomplish. With respect to their more substantive point, why can’t empires be built on greed, glory, racism, attempts to suppress revolution – and perceptions of insecurity? Even a superficial reading in the history of empires would suggest the presence of all these attitudes. “Fear,” Thucydides has the Athenians tell the Spartans, “was our chief motive, though afterwards we thought, too, of our own honor and our own interest. . . . And we were not the first to act in this way.”

I made it a point to acknowledge, in Surprise (p. 33), that “[l]ike most nations, we got to where we are by means that we cannot today, in their entirety, comfortably condone.” But I also suggested that “before we too quickly condemn how our ancestors dealt with such problems,” we might ask ourselves: “What would we have done if we had been in their place then? And, even scarier, how comfortable will our descendants be with the choices we make today?” Both are important, though difficult, questions. I regret that none of the Passport reviewers attempted to answer them.

Although the September 11 th attacks provided the occasion for the lectures that became this book – and for the grand strategic revolution it attempts to describe – none of the commentaries devote more than cursory attention to the events of that day and their larger implications. Rotter even claims, erroneously, that the Bush administration responded with “preemptive strikes on Afghanistan” – a strange way to describe actions taken while the debris from attacks orchestrated in that country was still being cleared away in New York, Washington, and rural Pennsylvania. Anyone who lived through these horrors, or near them, or even witnessed them from afar, should have no difficulty understanding how citizens of the most powerful state in the world can, under certain circumstances, fear for their lives. To claim otherwise is to suffer from much shorter memories than historians are supposed to have.

Finally, a thread that runs through all of these commentaries is one that is all too prevalent in the academy these days: it is that we must never ever say anything good about George W. Bush. Either he is the puppet of his advisers, as Immerman and Gramer suggest, or he is following “an essentially unilateralist policy of preemption and world hegemony that many . . . find troubling in the extreme,” as Heiss insists, or before attempting to conduct foreign policy he must free the United States from “repression, race and gender discrimination, nagging inequality and poverty, and a policy of remanding terror suspects to regimes certain to torture them,” as Rotter concludes.

Leave aside that Rotter’s standard would abolish foreign policy altogether, thereby putting SHAFR out of business. The other two allegations are, for an American diplomatic historian of advancing years otherwise known as “Pop,” more than vaguely familiar. I can certainly recall hearing them made of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, both of whom historians now treat with much greater respect than when they were in office. One of the Passport commentators even contributed significantly to the Eisenhower reassessment. A lemming-like rush to judgment on President Bush, therefore, seems unwise. It is much too soon to say for sure how history – as opposed to today’s historians – will regard him.

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience was not meant to be the definitive word on that or any other subject: I called it (p. 5) a presumptuous but necessary speculation on recent history. I reserve the right to change my mind about what I’ve said, as I have in other books I’ve written. As Immerman and Gramer correctly point out (although I had not made the Bonnie Raitt connection), it’s meant to start a discussion, not to try to end one.

I do think, though, that in order to have such a conversation, we need to listen to one another more carefully – and also to our students, from among whom the historians will come who will write the definitive histories of our times. We’d need to remind ourselves that even with such exchanges, the SHAFR membership imperfectly mirrors the country whose foreign policy it studies. And we’d do well to be cautious, even open-minded, in evaluating national leaders, lest we find ourselves – again – surprised.

Finally I suppose all of us should admit, in all candor, that none of us really know what the hell John Quincy Adams would have made of all this.

http://www.gabriellereillyweekly.com/gabrielle_reilly/Professor_john_gaddis/John_lewis_gaddock.htm.

For an updated criticism of the Bush grand strategy, see John Lewis Gaddis, “Bush and the World: Grand Strategy in the Second Term,” Foreign Affairs, 84(January/February, 2005), 2-15.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1: 75-76.