I On the third week of America’s quarantine against the pandemic, a new think tank in Washington had a message for the Pentagon. “The national security state, created to keep us safe and guard our freedoms, has failed,” Andrew Bacevich, the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told viewers on a Skype video from home, interspersed with the sounds of sirens and images of emergency rooms. While microbes from China were mutating and coming to kill us, he preached, we were wasting our time hunting terrorists and projecting military power abroad. It was a sequitur in search of a point — as if America ever faces only one danger at a time. When the black plague struck Europe and Asia in the fourteenth century, it did not mean that Mongol hordes would no longer threaten their cities. Nor does the coronavirus mean that jihadists are not plotting terror or that Russia is not threatening its neighbors or that China is not devouring Hong Kong. His casuistry aside, Bacevich was playing to the resentments of Americans who sincerely believe that American foreign policy is driven by an addiction to war. For the first two decades of post-cold war politics, this argument was relegated to the hallucinations of the fringe. But no more. A new national consensus had started to form before the plague of 2020: that there are almost no legitimate uses for American military power abroad, that our wars have been “endless wars,” and that our “endless wars” must promptly be ended. On the subject of American interventionism, there is no polarization in this notoriously polarized country. There is a broad consensus, and it is that we should stay out and far away. The concept of “endless wars” has its roots in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1984, most famously, George Orwell depicted a totalitarian state that invents its own history to justify perpetual war between the superpowers to keep its citizens in a state of nationalist fervor. In American political discourse, the concept of a war without end was baked into the influential notion of “the manufacture of consent,” a notion manufactured by Noam Chomsky according to which the media teaches the American people to support or acquiesce in the nefarious activities of the military-industrial complex. But the “endless wars” that so many Americans wish to end today are not like the ones that Orwell imagined. Today Americans seek to end the war on terror, which in practice means beating back insurgencies and killing terrorist leaders in large swaths of the Islamic world. Orwell’s wars were endless because none of the world’s states possessed the power to win them. The war on terror, by contrast, endures because of a persistent threat to Western security and because weaker states would collapse if American forces left. The war on terror pits the American Gulliver against fanatical bands of Lilliputians. But the asymmetry of military power does not change the magnitude — or the reality — of the carnage that “stateless actors” can wreak. To get a feel for the new consensus on American quietism, consider some of the pre-pandemic politics surrounding the war in Afghanistan. In a debate during the presidential primaries, Elizabeth Warren insisted that “the problems in Afghanistan are not problems that can be solved by a military.” Her Democratic rivals on the stage agreed, including Joe Biden. This is also Donald Trump’s position. As Warren was proclaiming the futility of fighting for Afghanistan’s elected government, the Trump administration was negotiating that government’s betrayal with the Taliban. (And the Taliban was ramping up its violence while we were negotiating with it.) Before the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration was spending a lot of its political capital on trying to convince skeptical Republican hawks that the planned American withdrawal would not turn Afghanistan into a haven for terrorists again, which of course is nonsense. The emerging unanimity about an escape from Afghanistan reflects a wider strategic and historical exhaustion. Despite the many profound differences between Trump and Obama, both presidents have tried to pivot away from the Middle East to focus on competition with China. (Obama never quite made the pivot.) Both presidents have also mused publicly about how NATO allies are “free riders” on America’s strength. And both presidents have shown no patience with the use of American military force. In 2012, even as the world was once again becoming a ferociously Hobbesian place, the Obama administration’s national defense strategy dropped the longstanding post-cold war goal of being able to win two wars in different geographical regions at once. (The Obama Pentagon seemed to think that land wars are a thing of the past and that we can henceforth make do with drones and SEALs.) Trump’s first defense strategy in 2018 affirmed the Obama formulation. Moreover, a majority of Americans agreed with their political leaders. A Pew Research poll in 2019 found that around sixty percent of all Americans did not believe it was worth fighting in Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan. That percentage is even higher among military veterans. Indeed, Pew research polling since 2013 has found that more Americans than not believe that their country should stay out of world affairs. Hal Brands and Charles Edel, in their fine book The Lessons of Tragedy, point out that majorities of Americans still agreed in the late 2010s that America should possess the world’s most powerful military, and supported alliances, and favored free trade, but they conclude that many Americans are now resistant to the “sacrifices and trade-offs necessary to preserve the country’s post-war achievements.” All of that was before covid19 forced most of the country to “shelter in place.” In truth, sheltering-in-place has been the goal of our foreign and national security policy for most of a decade. And it will be much harder to justify a continued American presence in the Middle East, west Asia, Africa and even the Pacific after Congress borrowed trillions of necessary dollars for paycheck protection and emergency small business
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