In a famous 1941 essay heralding a new “American Century,” Life Magazine publisher Henry Luce denounced the “virus” of isolationism which he believed “subverted America’s destiny as a beacon of democratic idealism and freedom under law.” The United States in his vision needed to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
This prescription sounded very much like that of other imperial powers who also saw it as their duty to shape the world order in a manner conducive to their interest.
MIT historian John Dower in his new book The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II (Haymarket Books, 2017) argues that if Luce were around today, he would probably be enthusiastic about the specter of flourishing consumer societies around the world and collapse of the Soviet Union, and approve of the missionary rhetoric of government leaders.
However, as an opponent of intrusive government, Luce might also lament the country’s transformation into a national security and surveillance state, and question the gargantuan military budgets as a betrayal of George Washington’s ideals.
The American Century, Dower notes, will be remembered by future historians above all else for the tremendous violence and global instability it has helped engender.
Between 1946 and the end of the 20th century, the United States invaded over a dozen countries and used its own armed forces in hundreds of military conflicts. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out at least 81 covert operations that left well over a million dead, securing the overthrow of at least 24 Latin American governments.
The United States furthermore engaged in illicit drug testing on unsuspecting victims, allied with the mafia and sponsored state terror campaigns as in the Operation Condor in South America and Phoenix in Vietnam that left at least 20,000 dead.
The American government meanwhile evolved into the world’s leading arms merchant and created a nuclear stockpile of over 22,000 warheads at the peak of the Cold War, prompting an arms race with the Soviets that made the world far less safe.
Fitting a long tradition of imperial apologetics, a recent vogue of scholarship claims the world is more peaceful than ever, casting U.S. global leadership as a stabilizing factor. Yale historian John L. Gaddis termed the Cold War an “era of long peace,” ignoring the record of large-scale proxy wars and state violence that destabilized whole regions and fueled the rise of Islamic terrorism.
Dower’s book rightly restores emphasis on the violent underside of the American Century in which “mass murders would occur with appalling frequency.” In Korea and Indochina alone, the U.S. military killed millions of civilians through systemic bombing and napalm attacks and also poisoned the landscape by dropping millions of gallons of Agent Orange.
After the Vietnam War, the American military focused on developing new precision weapons as part of the so called revolution in military affairs, whose aim was to reduce collateral damage and enable the waging of cleaner wars that would not devolve into quagmires.
Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, author of the much touted book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined buys into the military’s logic and places the precision revolution at the heart of his declining violence thesis.
In reality, however, the United States continues to facilitate new arms races with the Russians and Chinese, deploys ferocious firepower in wars like Afghanistan and Iraq (evident in the recent dropping of the MOAB) and kills many civilians directly or by proxy in long drawn out conflicts that have generated more refugees than at any-time since World War II.
Seventy five years ago, an alternative to Luce’s vision of the American Century was offered by Vice President Henry A. Wallace (1940-1944) who proposed a “Century of the Common Man,” in which “no nation will have the god given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the nineteenth century will not work in the people’s century which is now about to begin.”
Unfortunately it was Luce’s vision that prevailed over that of Wallace.
The “American Dreamer” was removed from the vice presidency by Democratic Party powerbrokers and fired by President Harry Truman as Commerce Secretary after giving a rousing speech at Madison Square Garden where he suggested that we “who look on this war-with-Russia talk as criminal foolishness must carry our message direct to the people – even though we may be called communists because we dare to speak out.”
Given the destructiveness of the American century, those of us with the foresight must follow Wallace’s lead. We too should bring a message of peace to the people even though we may face personal backlash because we dare speak out.
Jeremy Kuzmarov teaches currently at the University of Tulsa and is author of Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts, 2012) among other works. His current book project is called Technological Rampage: American Military Intervention and Political Miscalculation from the Korean War to the War on Terror.