The Icarus Syndrome

The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, by Peter Beinart, Harper RRP$27.99, 499 pages

Barack Obama’s favourite foreign-policy thinker, Reinhold Niebuhr, once said: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Neibuhr’s somewhat un-American sentiment could serve as a digest of what Peter Beinart recommends in his new book.

Picking three phases in the last century that illustrate the US tendency to overestimate its capacities (Woodrow Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles, the Vietnam war and the Iraq war), Beinart yearns for a realistic America that engages the world as it is, rather than as it thinks it ought to be.

In making his case, Beinart also chips away at US exceptionalism – the belief that America is the unique vector of liberty in human history. “Precisely because freedom and dignity are universal values, they are not ours alone to define,” he writes. “What non-Americans know – and Americans should admit – is that our national interests and prejudices will always taint our pursuit of universal ideals. We are not some deracinated global umpire, sitting in judgment over humankind; we are one of the players on the field.”

Beinart offers a blunter version of how President Obama has tried to frame the US’s diplomatic stance in these straitened times. Yet persuading America of it remains a highly ambitious task. Ask Bob Gates, Obama’s Republican defence secretary, or Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, both of whom recently suggested that the US should reappraise its defence budget at a time of rising national debt.

In spite of their credentials – both, after all, are leading US efforts to subdue the Hindu Kush – Gates and Mullen were largely ignored by Democrats and scorned by the few Republicans who thought their comments were worth a response. That America’s leaders might question whether the US needs 11 aircraft carrier groups when no other nation has more than one was taken as either defeatist or naïve.

Even at a time when nothing else, from policing to schooling, is considered sacrosanct, there is little juice for either party in arguing for defence cuts. For most elected Democrats – including Obama, who has exempted national security from his proposed three-year spending freeze – such talk risks accusations of spinelessness. For most elected Republicans, faith in America’s military is the truest measure of patriotism. The merest hint of doubt provokes talk of Munich 1938 and appeasement.

Yet, as someone remarked of the recent financial bubble before it burst: “Something that is unsustainable will not be sustained.” It is hard to believe that the US can sustain its extraordinary military predominance indefinitely – even were one to conclude that was the right objective. In the words of another commentator: “A debtor’s capacity to project military power hinges on the support of its creditors.” Or, as Admiral Mullen himself recently put it: “Our national debt is our biggest national security threat.”

But it is Beinart, whose writing is often evocative, who offers the best image: “We are like a high school that cheers lustily every Friday night for its champion football team, thus distracting itself from its overcrowded classrooms, mediocre test scores and dismal chess club.” Indeed (to further Beinart’s analogy) the habit is so ingrained that it continues even after the art teacher is elected school president. Even he, in spite of his bookishness, feels obliged to don the team uniform.

Which brings us back to Obama and the difficulty of following Beinart’s advice. Since taking office, Obama has won plaudits for dropping the phrase “global war on terror”. The president has also dismantled some of the legal apparatus that enabled the US to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely and subject them to “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Yet the shift is often more apparent than real. Under Obama, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open, there are more US soldiers in combat than at any time since 2003 and the number of unmanned Predator attacks in Pakistan has soared, along with the inevitable civilian casualties.

Conscious that hawkish critics, such as former vice-president Dick Cheney, have been steadily compiling an “I told you so” case to quote back at him whenever the next attack occurs on US soil, Obama is ensnared in the electoral logic of the “war on terror”, even if he avoids that wording. That same logic has propelled him into an improbable war in Afghanistan that he hopes optimistically to wrap up within the next 12 to 18 months.

On the campaign trail Obama concluded, with good reason, that his opposition to the Iraq war required him to emphasise his support for a “war of necessity” in Afghanistan. Before even moving into head office, the art teacher felt compelled to put a whistle in his mouth. “In our political culture, publicly acknowledging that something is beyond America’s power is perilous,” says Beinart. “He [the candidate] will be accused of betraying Americanism itself, of having desecrated the church of optimism.”

Professional historians will doubtless find fault with parts of Beinart’s book – one or two already have. But its value lies not so much in the history, which is sometimes tailored a little too neatly to Beinart’s contemporary argument, as in its vision for America.

As the author concedes, his case for a more self-knowing America, one that better understands its limitations, is itself open to the charge of utopianism. In Beinart’s America, people would reach office chanting: “No, we can’t.” In practice, it is the bond markets, rather than Obama, that are likelier to change the conversation.

Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief