The United States is Nothing if Not Resolute

Time and time again, the United States’ efforts in the Middle East have borne little fruit. Intervention after intervention, war after war.  

The United States is nothing if not resolute.

But what is the object of our resolution? Military historian Andrew Bacevich tells us that there is none. And its absence, he persuasively argues, deserves a long moment of reflection.

Bacevich’s delivery of Stanford’s 2015 Tanner Lecture on Human Values walks us through the history of U.S. intervention in the Greater Middle East to illustrate the incompetencies of our interventionist ideology. Beginning with President Carter’s capitulation, to our oil addiction, and ending with President Obama’s negotiations with Iran amidst the growing influence of ISIS, Bacevich shows us two things:

We don’t really know what we want.

We don’t really know how to get it.

At the outset, U.S. interests were, if not ethically unassailable, at least articulable. As Bacevich notes, America’s petroleum-pumping veins appeared to be running dry. Combined with a cultural attitude that reads like a gun-toting cowboy setting out to tame the Wild West (or rather, East), the U.S. needed no excuse to enter the Middle East.

What started as a conflict of national interest, though, soon lost coherence. Bacevich notes that through the administrations of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama, our intentions for the Middle East have been successively muddied and then reclarified. Oil, displays of political and military dominance, the global War on Terror, and the spread of American neoliberalism have each taken a turn as the face of American intervention. For each, Bacevich argues, the public’s quick-to-wear enthusiasm has revealed our justifications for continued involvement in the Middle East for what they are: shallow and flighty. What, then, has kept us in the region? In Bacevich’s view, the only thread running through the last thirty years of conflict is a dogmatic, almost habitual, resolve to prove our interventionist ideology correct, thereby vindicating our past mistakes and validating our sense of American infallibility, exceptionalism on an historically grand scale. We must save face.

Of course, Bacevich fires, we clearly don’t know how to do that very well, or at least any better than we know why we’re still in the region. It is far easier and (for now) more politically secure for those in positions of power to stay the course than to admit that our blood-laden investments have only paved the road ahead with new enemies. Yet if we make the easy choice to stay the course, our thirty-five years of failure tells us we’ll be in for yet another ten, twenty, or thirty.

Our greatest failure is not having failed to produce results commensurate with our fleeting expectations. Our greatest failure is our utter refusal to recognize, accept, and learn from that failure because that failure will only continue to reproduce the first. The self-appointed director of the Middle Eastern theater has written a bad play and isn’t willing to let down the curtain.

Where, then, does Bacevich think we go from here? In part, his answer is a cop-out. We simply accept that there’s nothing to be gained from our coercive intervention there, we reflect on what we want from the Greater Middle East, and we work at the margins toward those wants. He would personally have us get out, refocus, and sideline our work toward creating a “balance of powers” in the region between Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and others. It’s a proposition worth the investment of, at least, thought. But if we’ve spent thirty-five years refusing to acknowledge our mistakes, what reason is there to believe our behavior will change now?

Bacevich valuably calls for a reevaluation of our efforts. I hope that we will find it in ourselves to heed the call. I just fear the toll we’ll have to pay if we are to be more strongly incentivized to admit failure than to press on. 

The United States is nothing if not resolute.

More photographs from the event.

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Jacob Waggoner '16 is an Ethics in Society Honors student majoring in Computer Science.