Left, Right, Left: Opinion

Left,Right,Left OPINION by AndrewJ. Bacevich XXs an enteringgraduate student in history at Princeton in the mid-1970s, I lacked both academicpreparation and intellectualself-conjidetice. Wl)en it came to divining the meaning ofthepast, everybody else—-faculty andfeUow students alike—evincedgreat certainty. For mypart, Ifelt overwhelmed as ifIhadbeen shoved towardan unfamiliarpitch, handedan odd-shaped ball, and told, you're in. " I didn't even know the rules. 5 s Z r. Only the fact that I was at the time also a serving militar)' officer saved me from complete disorientation. Despite all the evidence to the contrary that had heaped up over the previous decade—Saigon had fallen just two months before my arrival on campus—I approached history certain of one thing: in a Manichaean world, the United States walked on the side ofthe angels. When it came to my chosen field— U.S. diplomatic history—this conviction offered a useful compass. By the 1970s, the study of American foreign relations had become all but indistinguishable from the study of the Cold War, which was in turn largely viewed through the prism of Vietnam. As such, the field was stormy, contentious, highly politicized , and on occasion downright nasty. Knowing who the good guys were, and knowing that the likes ofMao, Ho, and Fidel weren't good guys, permitted me to navigate to a safe harbor—to wit, the familiar confines of liberal internationalist orthodoxy. Orthodoxy offered a multitude of benefits, not the least of which was that it obviated any requirement to examine pre-existing assumptions regarding the purpose and uses of American power. It enabled me, with Ernest May, to derive comfort from the belief that whereas "Some nations achieve greatness; tinUnited States had greatness thrust upon it." ' The ultimate explanation for (and justification of) American global preeminence lay in the realm of providence. In the grand historiographical scheme ofthings, orthodoxy also enabled me to situate myself in relation to two key figures, each in his way a nemesis of the liberal internationalist creed: William Appleman Williams, the godfather of Cold War revisionism, and Williams's renowned precursor, Charles A. Beard. At the time, one was au courant, the other passé. Everybody was reading Williams. His ideas did not inform seminar room debate; they permeated it. By contrast, no one read Beard. Ifwe had occasion to touch on his ideas, it was chiefly for the purpose of rejecting them out of hand. Ofthe two, Beard was by far the easier to reckon with, ifonly because he had long since become discredited. In the twilight of a fabulous career, this lifelong progressive had (so the story went) inexplicably soured, veered sharplv to the right, and on the defining question of the day—whether or not Hitler (and the system he represented) posed a threat to the United States—erred spectacularly . To the last, Beard had opposed U.S. entry into World War II. As soon as the war ended, he returned to his cause with something like perverse enthusiasm, launching a venomous attack on FDR for having been deceitful , prevaricating, and manipulative. In so doing, Beard put himself beyond the pale of respectability. Already in 1 944, Lewis Mumford was castigating Beard in print as "a passive—no, active abettor of tyranny, sadism, and human defilement." ' The bottom line was that Beard was a certifiable isolationist. In the liberal internationalist church there exists no greater sin. Knowing that, I knew all that I needed to about Charles Beard. Beard's intellectual heir, Williams proved far less easy to dismiss, ifonly because of his status as a reigning academic celebrity. In his writings, Williams echoed and amplified themes that Beard had first developed decades before—depicting U.S. foreign policy as an outgrowth ofdomestic imperatives , manifested in a persistent drive to secure an "open door" for American capitalism. Like Beard, Williams viewed the drive for openness abroad as an effort to deflect threats to cherished but deeply flawed political, economic, and social arrangements at home. Whatever ailed the country, the solution was to be found in growth, especially economic growth. In the eyes ofAmerican policy elites, therefore, the choice was as stark as it was inescapable: commercial expansion or...