\u201cIn watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.\u201d\u00a0 This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.<\/p>\n
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the \u201cend of history\u201d was at hand.\u00a0 \u201cThe triumph of the West, of the Western idea<\/em>,\u201d he wrote in 1989, \u201cis evident\u2026 in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.\u201d<\/p>\n Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant.\u00a0 Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts.\u00a0 Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.<\/p>\n For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. \u00a0When he wrote his famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.<\/p>\n Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition\u2019s course as much as ideology. \u00a0Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. \u00a0Military innovation assumed many forms.\u00a0 Most obviously, there were the weapons:\u00a0dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles,\u00a0poison gas, and atomic bombs — the list is a long one.\u00a0 In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors:\u00a0doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.<\/p>\n All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory.\u00a0 Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.<\/p>\n Grand Illusions<\/strong><\/p>\n That was theory.\u00a0 Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story.\u00a0 Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness.\u00a0 Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. \u00a0Pain vastly exceeded gain. \u00a0In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers.\u00a0 When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. \u00a0As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war\u2019s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode.\u00a0 As early as 1945, among several great powers — thanks to war, now great in name only — that faith disappeared altogether.<\/p>\n Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend.\u00a0 One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident.\u00a0 The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm.\u00a0 By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority.\u00a0 In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, \u201cpeace\u201d was a codeword.\u00a0 The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority.\u00a0 In this regard, the two nations — not yet intimate allies — stood apart from the rest of the Western world.<\/p>\n So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war.\u00a0 They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.<\/p>\n Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work.\u00a0 \u201cPeace through strength\u201d easily enough becomes \u201cpeace through war.\u201d\u00a0 Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967.\u00a0 For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point.\u00a0 Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath.\u00a0 Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.<\/p>\n A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up.\u00a0 In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush\u2019s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely.\u00a0 Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated — even eclipsed — the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin.\u00a0 Vietnam faded into irrelevance.<\/p>\n For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive.\u00a0 Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little.\u00a0 In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real.\u00a0 Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.<\/p>\n On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel — disregarding Washington\u2019s objections — set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized.\u00a0 Yet \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security.\u00a0 They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.<\/p>\n In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral.\u00a0 Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability.\u00a0 This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington.\u00a0 No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East.\u00a0 Hegemony became the aim.\u00a0 Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.<\/p>\n During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy.\u00a0 Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them.\u00a0 In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance.\u00a0 Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.<\/p>\n Stuck<\/strong><\/p>\n No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance.\u00a0 Throughout Israel\u2019s near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will.\u00a0 So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.<\/p>\n So what?\u00a0 Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. \u00a0Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. \u00a0No matter how badly battered and beaten, the \u201cterrorists\u201d (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren\u2019t intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.<\/p>\n Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon.\u00a0 U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West\u2019s gloriously titled foray into Somalia.\u00a0 Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all.\u00a0 Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.<\/p>\n And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come.\u00a0 By the 1980s, the IDF\u2019s glory days were past.\u00a0 Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars — unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. \u00a0The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat — a \u201cdemographic bomb,\u201d Benjamin Netanyahu called it. \u00a0Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress.\u00a0 Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.<\/p>\n Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF\u2019s experience.\u00a0 Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed.\u00a0 After 9\/11, Washington\u2019s efforts to transform (or \u201cliberate\u201d) the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear.\u00a0 In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush\u2019s Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with a speed and \u00e9lan that had once been an Israeli trademark.\u00a0 Thanks to \u201cshock and awe,\u201d Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad.\u00a0 As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:<\/p>\n \u201cWe are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace\u2026 Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority.\u201d<\/p>\n The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: \u201cdecision superiority.\u201d\u00a0 At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.<\/p>\n Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. \u00a0Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas<\/em>. \u00a0When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.<\/p>\n Winless<\/strong><\/p>\n If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it\u2019s this:\u00a0victory is a chimera.\u00a0 Counting on today\u2019s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel\u2019s \u201cdemographic bomb\u201d — a \u201cfiscal bomb.\u201d \u00a0Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun.\u00a0 Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.<\/p>\n By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war.\u00a0 First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted.\u00a0 High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning — at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term.\u00a0 They sought instead to not lose.\u00a0 In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.<\/p>\n As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to \u201cprotect the people,\u201d consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion.\u00a0 Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.<\/p>\n A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.\u00a0 For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, \u201cmilitary solutions\u201d do not exist.\u00a0 As Petraeus himself has emphasized, \u201cwe can\u2019t kill our way out of” the fix we\u2019re in.\u00a0 In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.<\/p>\n The Unasked Question<\/strong><\/p>\n What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?<\/p>\n In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony.\u00a0 Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.<\/p>\n With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies.\u00a0 Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility.\u00a0 Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good.\u00a0 Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world.\u00a0 To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.<\/p>\n It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms with the end of military history.\u00a0 Other nations have long since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. \u00a0That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness.\u00a0 China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm.\u00a0 Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance. \u00a0Meanwhile, the People\u2019s Liberation Army stays home.\u00a0 China has stolen a page from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of \u201cdollar diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited choices, none of them attractive.\u00a0 Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable.\u00a0 In a mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state.\u00a0 Why put all that at risk?\u00a0 Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the clock.\u00a0 If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame them?<\/p>\n In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel\u2019s demographic or geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of action.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads.\u00a0 For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. \u00a0For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect.\u00a0 For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. \u00a0For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.<\/p>\n And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad<\/em> and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of backsliding. \u00a0In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they deem heretical.\u00a0 As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a sham.\u00a0 Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General Petraeus\u2019s appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.<\/p>\n Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: \u201cWhat’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?\u201d\u00a0 Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What\u2019s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn\u2019t actually work?<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.\u00a0 His new book, <\/em>Washington Rules: America\u2019s Path to Permanent War<\/a>,\u00a0has just been published. Listen to the latest TomCast audio interview to hear him discuss the book by clicking here<\/a> or, to download to an iPod, here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n