January/February 2008 • Historically Speaking 23 ILLUSIONS OF MANAGING HISTORY: THE ENDURING RELEVANCE OF REINHOLD NIEBUHR* Andrew J. Bacevich einhold Niebuhr, a towering presence in ism that proved staggeringly successful, evidence not American intellectual life from the 1930s of superior virtue but of shrewdness punctuated with R through the 1960s, thought deeply about a considerable capacity for ruthlessness. the dilemmas confronting the United States as a con- In describing America’s rise to power Niebuhr sequence of its emergence as a global superpower. did not shrink from using words like “hegemony” and The truths he spoke are uncomfortable ones. They “imperialism.” His point was not to tag the United do not easily translate into sound bites suitable for the States with responsibility for all the world’s evils. Sunday morning talk shows. Nor do they offer mate- Rather, it was to suggest that we do not differ from rial from which to weave the sort of stump speech other great powers as much as we imagine. On pre- likely to boost the poll numbers of your favorite can- cisely this point he cited John Adams with consider- didate in Iowa or New Hampshire. Four of those able effect. “Power,” observed Adams, “always thinks truths merit particular attention at present. They are it has a great soul and vast views beyond the compre- the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism; the hension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s serv- indecipherability of history; the false allure of simple ice when it is violating all His laws.”6 solutions; and, finally, the imperative of appreciating Niebuhr had little patience for those who portray the limits of power. the United States as acting on God’s behalf. In that One persistent theme of Niebuhr’s writings on regard, the religiosity that seemingly forms such a foreign policy concerns the difficulty that Americans durable element of the American national identity has have in seeing themselves as they really are. “Perhaps a problematic dimension. “All men are naturally in- the most significant moral characteristic of a nation,” clined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in he declared in 1932, “is its hypocrisy.”1 Niebuhr did their political cause by investing it with religious sanc- not exempt his own nation from that judgment. The tity,” observed Niebuhr in an article appearing in the chief distinguishing feature of American hypocrisy Reinhold Niebuhr speaking at the Union Theological Semi- magazine Christianity and Crisis. “This is why religion nary, February 1, 1959. (Photo by Walter Sanders/Time Life lies in the conviction that America’s very founding Pictures/Getty Images). is more frequently a source of confusion than of light was a providential act, both an expression of divine in the political realm.” In the United States “[t]he ten- favor and a summons to serve as God’s chosen in- We see them in the way that President Bush, certain dency to equate our political with our Christian con- strument. The Anglo-American colonists settling of the purity of U.S. intentions in Iraq, shrugs off re- victions causes politics to generate idolatry.”7 The these shores, according to Niebuhr, saw it as Amer- sponsibility for the calamitous consequences ensuing emergence of evangelical conservatism as a force in ica’s purpose “to make a new beginning in a corrupt from his decision to invade that country. We see them American politics, which Niebuhr did not live to see, world.” They believed “that we had been called out also in the way that the administration insists that Abu has only reinforced this tendency. by God to create a new humanity.”2 They believed fur- Ghraib or Guantanamo or the policy of secret rendi- Niebuhr anticipated that the American venera- ther that this covenant with God marked America as tion that delivers suspected terrorists into the hands tion of liberty could itself degenerate into a form of a new Israel. of torturers in no way compromises U.S. claims of idolatry. In the midst of World War II, he went so far As a Chosen People possessing what Niebuhr re- support for human rights and the rule of law. as to describe the worship of democracy as “a less vi- ferred to as a “Messianic consciousness,” Americans It follows that only cynics or scoundrels would cious version of the Nazi creed.” He cautioned that came to see themselves as set apart, their motives ir- dare suggest that more sordid considerations might “no society, not even a democratic one, is great reproachable, their actions not to be judged by stan- have influenced the American choice for war or that enough or good enough to make itself the final end dards applied to others.” “Every nation has its own incidents like Abu Ghraib signify something other of human existence.”8 form of spiritual pride,” Niebuhr observed in The than simply misconduct by a handful of aberrant sol- For Niebuhr, the tendency to sanctify American Irony of American History. “Our version is that our na- diers. As Niebuhr wrote, when we swathe ourselves in political values, and by extension U. S. policy, was tion turned its back upon the vices of Europe and self-regard, it’s but a short step to concluding that anathema. Tossing aside what he called “the garnish made a new beginning.” Even after World War II, he “only malice could prompt criticism of any of our ac- of sentiment and idealism” or “the halo of moral wrote, the United States remained “an adolescent na- tions”—an insight that goes far to explain the out- sanctity,” he summons us today to disenthrall our- tion, with illusions of childlike innocency.”3 Indeed, rage expressed by senior U.S. officials back in 2003 selves from the self-aggrandizing parable to which the outcome of World War II, vaulting the United when “Old Europe” declined to endorse the war.4 President Bush refers when he alludes to America’s States to the apex of world power, seemed to affirm In Niebuhr’s view, America’s rise to power de- “great liberating tradition.”9 To purport that this tra- that the nation enjoyed God’s favor and was doing rived less from divine favor than from good fortune dition either explains or justifies the U.S. presence in God’s work. combined with a fierce determination to convert that Iraq is to engage in self-deception. Such illusions have proven remarkably durable. good fortune into wealth and power. The good for- Although politics may not be exclusively or en- tune—Niebuhr referred to it as “America, rocking in tirely a quest for power, considerations of power are the cradle of its continental security”—came in the never absent from politics. Niebuhr understood that. form of a vast landscape, rich in resources, ripe for ex- Borrowing a phrase from John Dewey, he reminds us * On October 9, 2007, Andrew J. Bacevich delivered Boston Univer- ploitation, and insulated from the bloody cockpit of that “entrenched predatory self-interest” shapes the sity’s 2007 University Lecture. We publish a substantial excerpt of the 10 lecture here; an expanded version of the lecture appeared in the Janu- power politics.5 The determination found expression behavior of states. Even if unwilling to acknowledge ary 2008 issue of World Affairs. in a strategy of commercial and territorial expansion- that this axiom applies in full to the United States, 24 Historically Speaking • January/February 2008 Americans might as a first step achieve what Niebuhr existence had become intolerable. The danger that he tial and universal values most convincingly, referred to as “the honesty of knowing that we are posed was growing day by day. A showdown had be- and claims immortality for its finite existence not honest.”11 come unavoidable. To delay further was to place at at the very moment when the decay which Why is this so important? Because self-awareness risk the nation’s very survival. Besides, as one Wash- leads to death has already begun.19 is an essential precondition to Americans acquiring a ington insider famously predicted, a war with Iraq was more mature appreciation of history generally. On sure to be a “cakewalk.”16 These were the arguments We Americans certainly live in a time when our polit- this point, Niebuhr was scathing and relentless. Those mustered in 2002 and 2003 to persuade Americans— ical leaders have made pretentious proclamations who pretend to understand history’s direction and ul- and the rest of the world—that preventive war had something of a specialty, despite mounting evidence timate destination are, in his view,charlatans or worse. become necessary, justifiable, and even inviting. of decay apparent everywhere from the national debt Unfortunately, the times in which we live provide a A half-century earlier Reinhold Niebuhr had en- (now approaching $9 trillion)20 to the trade imbalance plethora of opportunities for frauds and phonies to countered similar arguments. The frustrations of the (surpassing $800 billion last year)21 and the level of oil peddle such wares. early Cold War combined with the knowledge of U.S. imports (exceeding 60% of daily requirements).22 A In Niebuhr’s view, although history may be pur- nuclear superiority to produce calls for preventive war large gap is opening up between the professed aspi- poseful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the against the Soviet Union. In one fell swoop, advocates rations of our political class—still all but unani- story line and the dénouement remain hidden from of attacking Russia argued, the United States could mously committed to the United States asserting a view.