America has now fought its sixth significant war since the battleship Maine blew up (by accident, it now seems) in Havana harbor in 1898. The war with Spain and two world wars and Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf War are only America’s largest combat experiences since the explosion in the Maine. That explosion showered sparks on the dry tinder of American nationalism and detonated the “splendid little war” that made a president of the Rough Rider of San Juan Hill. One of George Bush’s first gestures as president was to put TR’s portrait in the Cabinet Room, in the place where Bush’s predecessor had put a portrait of Coolidge. Coolidge said the business of America is business. TR had a more strenuous agenda.
Victory over Spain led to 14 years of counterinsurgency combat in the Philippines. There was intervention in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and Black Jack Pershing’s Mexican Expedition. In just the last 10 years American force has been used in Lebanon, Libya, Grenada, Panama. Some Americans have been involved in combat in about half of the 93 years since the Maine’s keel settled into Cuba’s mud.
It is not invidious to describe Desert Storm as an optional war. So was Korea. America was not attacked by Iraq and was not committed by treaty to the defense of Kuwait, which has never been defined as a vital American interest. Korea was a war of post-Munich deterrence, an attempt to discourage future aggression by being prompt and early with collective security. Desert Storm was similar, but was more. It was America’s first post-1989 act, its first act as the world’s only superpower. (One month into the crisis President Bush flew to Finland for a five-hour luncheon summit to stroke Gorbachev. In the last weeks of the crisis America’s dismissive response to Gorbachev’s mischievous diplomacy proved that the Soviet Union often can be as irrelevant as America wants it to be.) Desert Storm was a didactic war, waged to instruct potential aggressors in new rules for the game of nations.
If the teaching takes, the new world may be so orderly that America can allow its well-oiled combat arms to become rusty. If not, Americans, who have not been so happy since V-J Day (Aug. 15, 1945), probably will be willing, even eager, to lead other coalitions into combat. If so, one reason will be that a generation of younger Americans has been taught a quite false lesson by Desert Storm: that wars usually work out this way, short and one-sided and telegenic.
Another reason Americans are so happy, and so ready to do more great works abroad, is that things, especially things done by government, have not been working so well at home. Americans have found domestic problems intractable and foreign commercial competition daunting. The production of many things–cars, engineers, high SAT scores, low budget deficits, livable cities–has faltered. (During the 43 days of Desert Storm, violence in America killed many times more Americans than war did.) Americans are delighted to find a few things that work–weapons, the military generally. In recent years it has become a sardonic jest to say of something not done right, “Well, it’s close enough for government work.” But the armed forces are government work.
In one dreadful decade, 1965-74, government’s stature was radically reduced. Great Society initiatives coincided with extreme disorders among the intended beneficiaries of the initiatives. This stimulated skepticism about government’s competence. Then Vietnam and Watergate spread cynicism about government’s motives. Since then the American left has been caught in a contradiction, and conservatives have been producing a paradox.
The left wants strong government to engineer social change. But the left’s critical stance defeats its political program: by defining America as greedy, corrupt, racist, etc., the left undermines the consensus that is required for strong collective action. Furthermore, because of its hostility toward the military, the left has forfeited the fundamental game of American politics - capture the flag. The party that identifies with American nationalism wins.
For conservatives, today’s military success compounds a paradox. Ronald Reagan climbed to the pinnacle of government by teaching distrust of government. But by putting a smiling face on government, and by curbing inflation (government’s damage to the currency as a store of value), and by making the military conspicuous, competent and usable, he did much to rehabilitate government’s reputation. Reagan’s successor, by his deft diplomacy and his selection of superb colleagues, has consolidated the conservative party’s position as the party of executive government.
For 40 years most conservatives have had a bifurcated vision of government: It should be bold abroad but tentative at home. Conservatives believe government is a blunt instrument, not a precision tool–a hammer, not a scalpel. It is good at big, broad strokes–digging a canal across an isthmus, waging war–but clumsy at intervening in the organic processes of a complex society such as ours.
This principle, distilled from many historical judgments, is broadly right but not sufficient. Government is not irrelevant to or impotent against the biggest threats to American pre-eminence, which are here at home. They are inadequate schools, scandalous numbers of children in poverty (one in five), public choices that produce spending wildly in excess of revenues, and private choices that produce a destructive ratio of consumption to savings and investment. If America’s government is not smart enough to contribute to the correction of such strength-sapping defects, then America has a long-term problem of progressive anemia from which no weapons, however smart, can protect it.
Today George Bush stands at the sort of pinnacle few presidents have experienced. He has earned the nation’s trust and, almost as important, he has the nation’s attention. This is a perishable moment, and a propitious moment to say: As we welcome home the heroes from their sacrifices, let us make some symmetrical sacrifices to make this a land fit for heroes. The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of
